To continue the Nightmare Before Christmas Batman villain theme, I give you Sally as Poison Ivy. Sally has a premonition from a flower and is stuffed with leaves, so it makes sense that she would be Poison Ivy for Halloween.
I was thinking of names to call this series… I think I’ll call it The Wrong Halloween. This stems from the Batman graphic novel, The Long Halloween, and in spirit of who these characters are and where they come from, I think it fits.
In my first day back into the chop shop, I bring you Jack Skellington, as the Joker.
After watching Nightmare before Christmas when it came on to Netflix, I started thinking about who these characters could “dress-up” as for Halloween. I found that quite a bit of them go well with Batman’s rogues gallery. I thought of Marvel versions too, but maybe those will be future sketches.
So while I was at PC, some illustrator friends and I started a daily blog, where we picked pop culture topics out of a jar and drew the given characters for that week. After a couple months of doing it consistently, we named it “Character Chop Shop.” So, I’d like to start doing character drawings again, but I’d like to give myself a little more freedom. This is meant to explore, be free, and experiment with different forms and styles. It is going to be a little more random for me rather than a new topic each week. Character Chop Shop will be just be a category/theme on my blog. I’ve got a few ideas brewing around so I’ll get started at the start of the new year.
Check out what the chop shop used to be at one point and take a look at the other artists and their sites as well. They’re talented people, so do it!
So, there used to be a picture of an artichoke hanging in Portfolio Center a few months before I graduated. The moment I saw it, this painting is what I saw. I wish I knew which student photographed it, so I could show them. I wanted to add in a little bit of Spider-man into the piece, so I painted the spider dangling in the eye of the mask like Spider-man would hang upside down.
Scroll through for the sketch and the artichoke that inspired it all.
The show will be on Wednesday, October 24th.
I’m throwing this one up on the blog because I don’t really consider this one done yet.
I wanted to show some process on a piece that I worked on recently related to the Holiday. I thought about various holidays and “important” things or potential hot topics for the rest of the year and how to combine them. I was thinking about what might be happening in December when I remembered that the world is supposed to end on the 21st, just a few days before Christmas. Despite the fact that nobody really believes in these “end of the world” things, I figured it would get brought up again when the date is closer. So I wanted Santa to take part in the fun of moving past this ridiculous event. In the original idea, Santa was going to be standing over a man passed out on the sidewalk with a sign that read “The End is Nigh.” However, Santa will have painted over “The End” with “Christmas” instead as he giggles to himself and tells the viewer to keep it a secret. As this idea continued to develop, I removed Santa and replaced him with a shadow.(img1) It was at this point that the image started to take on a different kind of feeling than I wasnted, so I scraped those ideas to draw up a new Santa. (img2) So after this new sketch I thought this version looked like he could be tagging the wall behind him. I removed the man with the sign and pushed forward with that.(img3 &4)
I consider this image incomplete because I’ve been playing with a number of different tags that Santa could be spray painting. I have been diving into a number of conversations ranging from topics on security issues to Occupy and so on. This current version is meant to get a little less heavy and make it more playful by having him paint a snowflake, but it just so happens to start looking like the Star of David. So like I said, I’m still playing…
Welcome to my blog! Stop back again for project updates and process work.