Tattoo You

This has to be one of the cooler tributes to my work that I can imagine. Tattoo artist Rich Pineda was asked to recreate my Bela Lugosi painting in
Ink. He did a fantastic job, and I'm really flattered.

Bela Lugosi color

I went in and added color to my Lugosi painting. I took my visual cues here from the work of the great illustrator Basil Gogos, who gained fame in the 60's and 70's for painting many amazing covers for Forry Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland. One of the things I loved most about those covers were the artist's remarkable color palettes he used. They were all ultra bright and shouldn't have made any sense, but somehow they did.

Bela Lugosi Black and White

Every year around Halloween I try to do at least one monster painting. This year is the great Bela Lugosi. I think I'm going to try colorizing this and seeing how it goes.

Vamp

Not a lot to say about this one. I was just sort of playing around. It started out as a straight portrait and over time it just sort of morphed into a vampire. This all Photoshop from start to finish.

Kristin Stewart Sketch

One thing I need to do all the time in order to keep up the artistic muscles is sketch. Either pencil on paper, or in this case, all done on my Mac in Sketchbook Pro and Photoshop. If I don't sketch constantly I grow rusty really fast and it makes it that much harder to get going when I have a client with a job. I keep a folder full of celebrity photos on my computer for whenever I have some down time between projects where I'll grab some reference pretty much at random and practice. This time it was "Twilight" actress Kristin Stewart (or "K-Stew" as the tabloids seem to be referring to her). She's got a great face for caricature because of her really prominent forehead and chin, which is what I chose to exaggerate here. This is after about two hours of work. I'm at that stage where I could turn it into a finished piece with a couple more hours of polishing and smoothing, but I think I'm going to leave it where it's at. It was just practice, after all, and I really like the roughness of it.

Nosferatu - Final

I tweaked a few more details, sharpened up some lines and added a few color tweaks. Here's the final. I'm pretty happy with how this turned out. I think I might try another monster or two in this style.

Nosferatu WIP

I wanted to do at least one monster before Halloween. I'm still working on it, but here's still one of the coolest makeup jobs in film history, Nosferatu.