Deedee reclining (20 min) 11/14/09Well hello there.

Yes it has been a while.   I know I said I was going out to get the paper and I didn’t return  …but well that was a test and you passed… hurray!

I have been bothering enough people over at my Twitter account (http://twitter.com/VincentPerea)  with my current exploits So I have ignored this avenue for a spell.  Also I have been working on The Misadventures of PB Winterbottomfor the past year or so in addition to working for Midnight Oil Creative…So I been busy.  I will write a whole long blog about my last year at some point, but for now there is little I can say about the work I have done until the game comes out.

Now that I only have one job, I am starting to get a little restless.  To fill the void    Last week  I attended an event hosted by  Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School .

The lovely ladies Deedee and Click of the Dr. Sketchy Roadshow

The LA Branch ( Run by the kids of Baby Tattoo fame) was at the tail end of their great experiment: the California Dr. Sketchy Roadshow (.  I was lucky enough to attend the last two events at  some  of my favorite arty places Gallery Nucleus and Wax Poetic.

It was a really great time, the show is a mix of flirty burlesque and traditional figure drawing.  The conceit was that it was a show and not a drawing session.   Something about this made it more fun and relaxed than your normal figure drawing session. Also  when you spend an entire year drawing poignant narratives or concepts about a fat man who loves pie, drawing some sassy ladies is not a bad change of pace.

Below  is a selection of some of the drawings I completed there. I am going to try an experiment.  I am going to offer some of these drawings for sale on my Etsy account.   These pieces are very loose and done in one sitting so I am going to offer them up as is for a cheap rate.

Deedee seated recline (20 min)  11/13/09

Reading Deedee (10 Min) 11/13/09

Sassy Pirate Deedee (10 min) 11/13/09

Deedee Hand on Hip #2 (10 min)  11/14/09

Deedee Hand on Hip #1 (10 min)  11/14/09

Thoughtful Deedee (10 Min) 11/14/09

Click with Parasol #1 (20 min) 11/13/09

Click with Parasol #2 (20 min) 11/14/09

Till next time ,

Vincent

On Sunday I went to the Drawing Club’s once a month Sunday long pose session.   I have been going to their Thursday night gatherings on and off for a little while now.  Bob Kato , who hosts the thing, does a really nice job of setting a good mood, as each session has a specific theme.  The model shows up in full costume sits in a crazy backdrop and you draw to Bob’s playlist.  Not a bad way to spend a Sunday.

This week’s theme was the Howard Pyle Pirate.   Here is my offering:

The pose was for a full 3 hours, and I was really happy with the results.  I have done a good amount of figure drawing since I was a teenager, but not a lot of figure painting.  Especially since I work with watercolor, and my method with the   medium isn’t condusive to painting spontaneusly.

However I love the quick decision making process that a time limited pose forces upon me.  Water color and ink are so fluid mediums it is nice to work fast with them becuase the  drawing feels more playful as a result.

Til next time,

Vincent

In case you hadn’t noticed I have a new main page image.  The last image I had posted there of myself, although dear to me, was done more years ago than I care to divulge.   So I thought I would make a painting specifically for my own website, which I have never really done before.   In the coming weeks I hope to tart up the site a bit…but that is another story.

Here is the prelim sketch for such a whimsical display of rage.

I came up with the new painting after doing a rather weird job.  Actually it wasn’t weird it was like a dream come true.  I met this guy named Mike on the  interwebs.  He was looking to get a HUGE tattoo of a T-rex on his side panel( left ribs).  I enthusiastically agreed, loving all things dinosaur, T-rex especially.

I thought I would have fun with him and maybe draw a giant Marc Bolan face as a first submittable.

” What you don’t like riding white swans?”

However when he sent me pictures of his side panel, I noticed that he was ripped!  He had full blown abs, and defined intercostal muscles. No lie, he could have been a stand in for one of those guys in “300″. He also had already mailed me the money, so I decided that i didn’t know him well enough to joke around and risk a severe beating.

Anyway below are the various sketches I sent.

(Round One: Pump it up!)

(Round Two: Where did I leave my car keys?)

( Round Three: Bark at the moon!)

I liked this one the best so I co-opted it for my main page painting.  In regards to the actual concept, I have been feeling the same as our young costumed screamer since becoming a freelancer.  A little fish screaming in a big damn pond.   I have to be very loud to get noticed, since there is so much good work out there by some very talented artists.  Yet it is hard to feel like a big bad illustrator when you still crash your Mama’s house for food (but dammit I can’t help it her enchiladas are ridiculous!)

(Final Round: One bad mammajamma!)

Unfortunately he never sent me photos of his side panel again.  I know he got it done and they kept all the sketchy lines, so I am really anxious to have recorded proof. However he flaked on getting me photos, so this could all be a myth or lie or fable i have just written for your eye pleasure.  I also know that he surfs, so if anyone down in Long Beach sees a pair of sculpted abs rise out of the water with this Prehistoric jaws smiling at you, please do me a solid and grab a cell phone photo of it.

Man I wish you could catch a case of the full blown abs.

- Vincent

So the last few months have been thankfully very busy for me.  I have been working on various odds and ends.   However for this post I wanted to show off some color samples I whipped up for a potential project.

I in a bit of a lurch and was looking for more consistent work. So I thought I would put a portfolio together to try and get comic book coloring work.   The specific opportunity I was trying to chase fell through, and eventually more work came my way and kept me busy.  But I had a lot of fun in during this time by just working on my chops.

During the middle of the summer I didn’t have a lot of projects going on so I focused on my own paintings( which I have been updating when finished to the main site).  It is nice to have to freedom to just play around sometimes, and as I am freelancing it becomes important to stay fresh and practiced.   Also a lot of my coloring recently has a warm nostalgic storybook quality palette.  So it was a good opportunity to try and color outside of my comfort zones.

This first image however is well within my comfort zone.

( A cheap excuse to draw a girl in her underwear)

I painted this on this crazy material called Aquaboard.  It is a hard Masonite board with a gesso type surface on it that can absorb Watercolor.   I saw it in the art store and wanted to experiment with it.  So I pulled out an old ink drawing I did almost two years ago and used that as the starting off point.  It is interesting stuff to work with. The line quality suffers a little, but I was surprised how close this felt to painting on paper. plus it accepts stain effects nicely.

(The Previous drawing used for the recent color test)

It is interesting working on a drawing I did a few years back.  I have grown as an artist since then. So much so that I felt I had to completely redraw certain parts of this, like the face and hands.   The whole time I kept thinking “why did I draw her face that way”.  But back then I thought this was one of the best drawings i had made to date, or at least one of the sexiest.  To make this stand on it’s own I also added other fun bits like the mask which I left out in the original.

Below is a splash page from a comic my Brother Dave and I have been kicking around for a few years.   He got another artist involved to pencil the thing, because I have always been too busy to devote time to it.   But I designed all the characters and since I was setting up stuff for potential comic work i decided to color up on of the pages.

The pencil’s were done by fellow artist Brad Lacke.  I inked this splash page and colored it.  After trying desperately to be poignant throughout the summer it is really cool working on a drawing where a nija tries to skewer a dinosaur.

Finally I have this western themed color piece.   Done just for the hell of it.

I never draw dead guys, or girls in their underwear.   That should really change…I think I am missing a prime demographic with all my whimsical trees and monsters stuff.

My next series is going to be all dead guys next to cute girls in their underpants.   I will make a million dollars and retire on my own island.

I will post some more color sample in the next few posts, as this blog is getting a little big.

Till then,

Vincent

Here is the sketch for the recently added painting: The Claw

As the title suggests I am trying to play with the different displays of emotion . I really wanted to convey the horror in the monster’s face and the unbridled joy in the girls. I am having a lot of fun with this new series of paintings and am trying to push myself to show much more dynamic reactions from characters.

A good friend of mine is obsessed with these machines. I am sure in the secret underground world of stuffed animals she is viewed as some kind of menace. Snatching poor souls from their plexi-glass support center, like the Passover ghost. I swear I once saw a machine with a red x painted on it’s mantle and she quietly muttered “ Not this one….”

Speaking about the process as an artist seems like it might come off as horribly self-indulgent. Of course I think it is interesting… but does anyone else? It’s a good thing my apprehension is smaller than my ego I suppose. So here goes:

I used to have a painstaking process for composing a picture. I would work out thumbnails, than draw a fully finished sketch. This drawing was worked out on various sheets of tracing paper, where I painstakingly refined the drawing up from loose sketchy line work. Than I would produce a final polished drawing on one solid tracing sheet. After the drawing was done I would transferred it to water color paper (involving a whole other agonizing process) then Ink the drawing before coloring. I would have ground the paper into pulp myself and harvested the trees from the soil of mother earth herself too, if only I had the chance…

Suffice it to say, this process was really dumb.

The result was I ended up redrawing the same image at least three times, which made it very hard to not make the final look stiff and forced. It also took forever and was totally unnecessary. I have since streamlined my process. I still like to start a drawing really rough and then refine the drawing over multiple sheets but now I use animation paper

That stuff is so great! It not only has a good tooth but it is also translucent. When I get a drawing to this point where I can start nailing things down I use a light box to transfer the image to my final working surface. I used to work on the thickest water color paper possible, 300lb ! This stuff was tough, and you had to use a diamond tipped ban saw to cut it. It would never curl from the paint, but the transfer process was so ridiculous I had to abandon using it for “planned-out” illustrations. Now that I am better at managing the paint I can work on 140lb sheets with out it wrinkling and I can light box the drawing through it’s thickness.

When transferring I solidify the last revisions and forms on the watercolor paper, rather than just painting by the numbers like I did before. I also don’t plot colors out anymore. I will just jump right into laying color down. This makes the process feel more like painting, rather than just going through the motions. Since doing this my finals have been much more confidant and much more fun to paint (which I think shows in the work.) It also makes trying to show emotion easier as it feels fresh and less labored.

I am really happy with how the colors came out in this one, and in general I feel great about my new work. With the free time I get from a streamlined process I liberate stuffed animals and extradite them back home to claw machines…but that is a different story.

That’s all for now,
Vincent

New Painting Added in the 2008 section!

In a lot of ways I am starting over with my work. I spent Almost 2 years working for Disney Interactive and in that time I produced very little personal work. I still drew everyday, but a lot of what I did was wrapped up in my job. There were some great little things I did while employed with “the mouse” which due to contract restraints I couldn’t show anyone (and sadly still can’t)

That was really tough for me. I am such a blabber mouth that when I finish something I want everyone to know about it. So for that time although I am proud of the work I did for Disney, I felt mute and couldn’t really perform well on my own work.

However, I thought of a ton of ideas in that moment, but due to time, fatigue or expended creative juices I couldn’t work on them. So now that I am freelancing I am making up for lost time. Right from the start my goal was to develop a whole new collection of paintings. These would be to show off my current skills, for future exhibition and really just because I could.

I am happy with my older work, but after a while it becomes just that, and it’s unfair to expect anyone to give a damn about the same set of paintings they have already seen. Plus I had gotten better since my old standards, and the direction I want my work to go in has become clearer.

My current goal is to complete a full set of ten or more paintings in the whimsical storybook style I have used for the Piñata and Tree paintings. Than I will exhibit them somewhere or collect them in some fashion I’m sure, however I am not worried about the end result for the time being.

Each painting will use the children’s book cliché of having a character discover a world they have never known. However each painting will try and deal with more mature themes, like violence in the piñata piece or unfamiliarity in the tree piece.
Attached above is the built out sketch for the recently added tree painting. I had the idea a while ago, but sometimes I like to let an idea bake in my head for a bit before doing it. However when the idea originally came to me I did a mini painting of it that was posted on the old blog. Here it is again:

It is funny because I started building this sketch out as a whole painting matching the composition almost exactly. However it just wasn’t working so half way finished with it I started over. The dark colored tone wasn’t right, plus this tree seemed so lonely being the only one to witness such an event. It also lacked the monotone to color relationship that happens in the final.

I hope you like it too, and really… thanks for listening.

Vincent

New Painting Added in the 2008 section!

Celebrities have always fascinated me. When I was first getting out of school I had done a few illustrations of famous people. This tapered off, as I wanted to find my own voice or whatever. But every now and again while reading a gossip column I get an urge to put pen to paper in tribute to my will power crushing under the weight of my guilty pleasure.

I like Amy Winehouse, she is a strange figure in the tragedy that is gossip news. Sure being a female artist locked in a downward spiral of booze, drugs and police attention that pales her artistic accomplishments isn’t exactly a rare mineral these days.

But she seems to not care about her imminent destruction in a way that is downright depraved and echoes the insane behavior of Rock Stars, not pop tarts. She doesn’t get drunk at some hot new Hollywood club with an obnoxious name, than run over the foot of a paparazzi with her fancy car. No she gets into a bar fight, then she shoves McDonalds in her face.

I would tussle with Lohan, but no way in hell would I mess with Winehouse. She is like the Kurgan from the film “Highlander”. You would make an off color comment on her beehive hair and before you know it she’d take you down while screaming ” It’s better to burn in HELL than fade away!”.

We need more pop stars like her, true raw primal insanity with heavy eyeliner. At least then they would be famous for something, like rage, instead of the fluffy overproduced music they call their art.

I have often been confused for belonging to an ethnicity besides my own. Mexican American is what I am, but something about the structure of my face seems to trick people’s eyes. I have been mistaken for everything from Middle Eastern to Italian, but mainly I am confused for an Indian (from India.) Usually this is expressed by people giving me the wink and the nod, as if to say “Hey…one of us!” This is compounded by the fact that I speak almost no Spanish.

Shameful, I know…especially being from a Mexican Mecca like Los Angeles and all. However I have come to some terms with it. Occasionally though a friend will be searching for a phrase in Espanol and then give me the “Help me out buddy…” kind of a look. To which I usually reply much like our wiggly-armed pal here. It is an awkward situation topped off with shrugged shoulders and usually my apology (to my people).

…and yes that is the Super Mario 3 frog suit he is line drying. why was frog suit so worthless in that game?