Marilyn Monroe

I know, the world needs another Marilyn Monroe caricature like I need another hole in my head. But at least I used a reference shot of her that's more Norma Jean Baker than Marilyn. This was painted in Photoshop. I have to say, I'm particularly proud of that umbrella. :)

Christian Bale

Christian Bale did something pretty classy yesterday when he visited the victims of the Aurora, Colorado shooter. Here's a painting I did of him. I even managed to squeeze in a couple of hidden Bat logos.

Audrey Tatou

Here's my entry for this week's Caricaturama 3000 challenge on Facebook. This is French actress Audrey Tatou in her signature role from the movie Amelie.

Jack White Sketch

Today's warm-up sketch was of Jack White, formerly of the White Stripes and now carrying on one heck of a great solo career.

Bruce Campbell

Here's a painting I did of one of personal favorites, the great Bruce Campbell. If you haven't seen the Evil Dead films, especially Army of Darkness, then you really need to sign up for Netflix and get watching now. The reference for this illustration, incidentally, comes from Evil Dead 2, to be precise. Above is the final color version. Below I thought you'd like to see the black and white painting that lies beneath. I don't always work with this method, but sometimes you can create some great effects by painting entirely in grayscale first, then use a series of color, overlay and multiply layers in Photoshop to create some very cool effects. I thought the overall caricature ended up having a bit of a Graham Ingels Tales from the Crypt look. The wacky color scheme above shows the heavy influence of the great Basil Gogos, who painted most of the Famous Monsters of Filmland covers when I was growing up.

George Lucas Sketch

Sketching George Lucas. About 90 minutes in Photoshop.

Mitt Romney

Just finished a painting of Mitt Romney I've been working on an off on for a couple of weeks now. Painted in Photoshop.

NY Observer Cover

My newest NY Observer cover is on newsstands today. The article is about the new style of racism in the world, in which public figures (such as John Galliano, Taki Theodoracopoulus and Ashton Kutcher, seen here) say and do things that range from the racially insensitive to the morally reprehensible. This was another fun assignment. Thanks as always to Lauren Draper.

George Takei

This is a very last minute painting I did for an art fundraiser I just found out about in honor of George Takei's 75th birthday called Takei Back the Night. I knew I wanted to paint Sulu and I thought, why not let my geek hang all the way out and paint the Mirror Universe version, scar and all.

Christina Hendricks

Here's a painting I did of actress Christina Hendricks from AMC's Mad Men. There's something about the show that keeps me tuning in. I can't quite put my finger on what it is though. ;)

My Process

I've had more the one person ask me recently to describe my process when I paint, so here are some of the steps I put into my painting of Rooney Mara from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

I started with a sketch, based on the reference you can see here. I did this sketch in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, but I've gone ahead and drawn straight in Photoshop as well plenty of times. BTW, I'm using Photoshop CS4. I work large, so I set my canvas size to 3000 pixels wide by 3700 pixels tall at 300 dpi. With the sketch on its own layer, I set that layer to multiply, then added another layer below that which I flooded with color. I very rarely paint over a pure white background. It makes it a lot easier to create a uniform tone throughout the painting, plus staring at all that harsh white would be murder on my eyes after a while. You'll also notice I created one more layer above all the others where I've started creating my palette. I'll add to the palette as I go along, but for now what you see here will be my base colors.

 As for my brushes, I've collected a pretty large library of brushes from various sources, along with some I've created on my own, but the two main brushes I used here are a simple hard round brush with the settings you see above, and one of the standard Photoshop rough-edged brushes that I've clicked on the same settings as the hard round.

 Now, I add another layer below the sketch layer, but above the background color layer. On this layer I block in my base colors with the hard round brush. I always paint with the brush opacity set to 90% and the flow to 100%. Don't worry about being too neat here, you've got a long way to go and you'll be covering most of this up as you go along.

Once you have your base colors and lighting established below the sketch layer, then you're ready to move onto the heavy duty painting. I create one more layer above the sketch layer (I label mine "Paint", but call it whatever you want). I stay zoomed out so that I can see the entire portrait while I paint. The work will go a lot faster and you won't get tied up focusing on tiny details that will get lost anyway by working this way. I've started working now switching between the hard round and the rough edged brush. The rough edged brush gives a more a painterly look. I like to see the brush strokes in my paintings. I work dark to light, or in other words, I paint in my darkest darks first, working my way through the midtones and eventually to the brightest highlights. The overall tone of the reference is pretty dark, so you'll notice I haven't used any white at all up til now. Only after I'm satisfied with how things are going, do I start to zoom in and tighten up details such as the eyes and mouth.

I drew a Chinese dragon on paper with my favorite brush pen, the Pentel Pocket Brush, and scanned it in. I copied and pasted this drawing onto a new channel in my painting.

I used that channel to create a selection on a new layer behind my main painting. I filled that selection with white, then I used the motion blur filter to give it a sense of movement. I've also dragged in a couple more scans of some actual paint splashes and played around with the layer styles and opacity until I came up with a somewhat natural looking mix. I've also started roughing in some some additional texture to the background with a couple of custom texture brushes I have in my collection. The last detail is to draw in a rough white outline around the figure to help tie the foreground into the background line art.

Rooney Mara

Since I did a painting recently of Daniel Craig, I thought it might be fun to paint his co-star, and the title character from, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Here's Rooney Mara in all her gothy glory.

Final Helena Bonham Carter

I'm calling this one done. I wasn't digging the original color scheme, but I think it all came together when I decided to use green as my focal color. The hair was particularly fun to paint, and probably took nearly as long as the entire rest of the image. Her hair is actually more brown, but I darkened it here in order to blend in better with the background.

NEW! I just heard a very cool development. This caricature won the weekly MYFX challenge over on the forums for one of my very favorite magazines ImagineFX. There were a bunch of great entries so I'm flattered that I won the most votes. Thanks to everyone who voted for me.

Helena Bonham Carter - WIP

This is the very early stage of a painting I'm doing of Helena Bonham Carter in full Bellatrix Lestrange garb. This is the block-in stage, and I'll be the first to admit it looks pretty ugly right now. For those interested in such things, what I've done thus far in Photoshop is do my sketch on a separate layer, then on another layer below and one above the sketch layer, I've begun laying in rough color with a basic hard round Photoshop brush I've made a few tweaks to. From here I'll continue tightening up details and moving on to using a couple of other custom brushes as well.

Daniel Craig

I decided to try a caricature of Daniel Craig. The trick here with him is he has so many caricaturable features you really have to pick and choose what you're going to exaggerate. I decided I'd focus primarily on his jutting ears and especially his huge, neanderthal brow. As usual, this was painted in Photoshop.

Bruce Lee

Quickie caricature of Bruce Lee for this week's Caricaturama challenge on Facebook.

Ricky Gervais

Here's my entry into this week's Caricaturama challenge on Facebook. This week's victim is Ricky Gervais.

Frankenstein

I liked how my Bela Lugosi painting came out, so I decided to move onto the next logical choice. Here's my take on Boris Karloff in his most famous role. Once again, I was trying to emulate the look and feel of the Famous Monsters of Filmland covers I like so much.

NY Observer cover

Here's my latest New York Observer cover. This one was a little difficult illustrating because it was more of an abstract concept than usual. The story has to do with the ultra-elite Manhattan private school for girls The Spence School (Gwyneth Paltrow, among others, went there). The school is building an ultra modern glass breezeway connecting two of the buildings on their campus and the local residents are up in arms because it doesn't mesh with the local architecture (jeez, this is seriously the biggest thing these people have to complain about?). Here's the idea I came up with: several of the locals pressed up against a glass wall with a snooty, oblivious schoolgirl in the foreground.

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.