I had a largely unproductive week last week as far as getting things done, despite having things in the queue that needed doing. I have been able to make up for it quite a bit this week, below are the newest portraits I’ve done. There is one portrait that I feel needs more work. My friend who commissioned it said it was great, and I am sure she believes that, but with these more recent pieces, I feel like I have found a style I want to stick to, and I really want to do my friends up right on this, so it’s back to the drawing board for me. I should also have a video up tonight or tomorrow to join the rest of my training progress vids.

More donations in! This one made me earn it, big time. I knew before I started this process that it would be common for commissions to come in that didn’t fit the cookie cutter $35 and $50 portraits. For more specific requests, I will work out with the person wanting the custom job, a custom price that fits. In this case, friend, editor and the writer of “Cora’s Dress” the story I drew for the Postcards: True Stories that Never Happened, wanted his and his wife’s heads on the bodies of an image from a John Carter of Mars novel. This was a huge challenge, and the fact that it took almost five hours to complete is a testament to that. I was pleasantly surprised with how it turned out. With my digital drawing process, it can be really challenging to predict what the final image will look like. Below is a detail of the faces along with the full piece.

And now the videos! (warning: NSFW Language in audio and somewhat in images.)

Part 1 is a monster 3 hours. My hand was stiff by the end, and I had to stop. I don’t know when the last time I went three hours of completely uninterrupted drawing. My eyes were incredibly bloodshot and I was in a panic that I was making a horrible mess of the thing. Click here if you are unable to view video 1.

Part 2, minutes-ish. Click here if you are unable to view video 2.

Well my schedule was light earlier this week, but is about to pick up. In the meantime, I found what I thought was a really decent picture of Robert Pattinson and drew up Edward Cullen.

UPDATE! I was able to make this a time lapse, that is generally much easier to watch than the entire process that you can also watch further down the post.

The whole thing took about 45-50 minutes to complete. I’m actually thrilled with the way the drawing session ended. I had iTunes on random, and the last song of the session was the absolute perfect way to cap off any session like this. I wish I could make that happen every time. If you want to see the entire process minus the bg color tweaks and me adding the URL, I have included it. Click here if you are unable to see the video.

WARNING: Some of the audio, comedy/music has NSFW language. Like, right from the beginning of the vid…

Last week I kicked things off extremely well, with two great donations, requiring one portrait be done. Probably not mind blowing by better known internet personalities I suppose, but considering I relaunched my site from scratch to kick off this project (This site had been a pretty useless pseudo-portfolio/blog for years now) I consider the project kicked off well. The day the portrait donation was made, I set to work that very night and cranked out a portrait of the donator’s parents, a gift for their upcoming anniversary. Get a load of this attractive couple:

With the lace and fabric folds, this one was a pretty big first challenge. I put in a little over two hours on this piece, here’s what I came up with:

The family is headed to Italy soon, so I put them in front of the Leaning Tower of Piza. The commissioner, a co-worker of mine, was extremely happy with it, which of course makes me extremely happy as well.

Sadly, the Ustream video of my progress cut out without my realizing it after 90 minutes, but if you care to sit through most of the process, click the video below to watch (WARNING: I had my iTunes playing during this broadcast, there is definitely some NSFW language in there.)

Click here if you are unable to see the video

If you (understandably) don’t care to sit through 90 minutes of real time digital drawing, here’s an über-simplified idea of how this process more or less looks:

As part of raising money and running the Tough Guy Race in January, I’m offering my artistic services for anyone who donates over $35.

- 35$ or more gets you one head and shoulders portrait, with a simple background.

- 50$ or more gets you two head and shoulder portraits, OR one full body portrait, again, with a simple background.

If you’ve ever wanted your own avatar for facebook or just wanted a cool illustration that you can print out and frame, this is a really great way to help a cause and have a trained artist do some work on the cheap.

I went to school for animation, and I can can handle lots of different visual styles. If you want a black and white line drawing like the New Yorker, I can do it.  If you want me to draw you as a Disney character, easy.  If you want a straight interpretation of a photo, no problem.  Basically if you can think of it, I can do it.  (I knew this art degree would be good for something).

Here are some variations on portraits I’ve done for family and friends in the past.  Also, it doesn’t have to be for you… a personal illustration makes a great gift (especially for people with kids).  And because the art is done as vector art, it can be resized as big as you want without losing quality (you could literally print a six foot tall poster).

Above: Self portrait based on a photo. As you can see I have a smaller version of this on the first page, but I was able to blow this up for this post.  There are no size restrictions if you wanted to go even bigger.

Above: Black and white based on a photo.

Above: Based on a photo, with specific theme requested by the purchaser.

Above: Group of friends based on several pictures. This would fall under the $50 category.  They wanted South Park, and that’s what they got.  With a little twist.

If you’d like to get a portrait commissioned, there are two options:

- 35$ or more gets you one head and shoulders portrait, with a simple background.

- 50$ or more gets you two head and shoulder portraits, OR one full body portrait, again, with a simple background.