Quest for Originality

For the next series of paintings, I was on the quest to find originality. What I found was that, originality was elusive. The more I chased after it, the more I was painting the same way, making the same marks that I have always done, painting the same subjects again and again. When I searched for originality and creativity purposefully with intention, I peered over the edge and it seemed that my brain was completely empty.

When I stopped searching, when I decided "not to care," originality came to me. Maybe, originality can only be present if it is unplanned and spontaneous, when parts of your critical attention is turned off. It seemed like such a simple concept so I decided to try it. What I found is that although you cannot force originality, you can do certain things in your everyday life to encourage more moments of spontaneity and clarity. You can create a space and simulate processes that will give you a higher percentage of finding originality.

The formula for originality

Decide not to care. I'm not talking about not caring about your art of your painting, but not caring about how it will turn out, or how it will be received, how you should be painting. If we went to a formal art school, there were certain ways in which we were taught how to paint or approach the canvas. Or even if we were self-taught, there was a pattern which worked for you and you kept doing. I'm telling you to forget the rules.

1. Feed your artist spirit with new experiences - when we are focused on our craft, making a painting, or writing a novel, we are reaching into the countless of brain connections we have made in the past. We reach towards that one color we saw on the cover of national geographic, or the phrasing we've read by our favorite authors, etc. We have these bus routes/train tracks in our brains and if we're limited on how many images we filed away, we'll make the same connections again and again. We'll paint the same kind of tree again and again, because that's the one we know. That's the one that becomes comfortable. But what if you added an 3-inch thick encyclopedia of different types of trees, from the tropics of Indonesia to the Black Forest in Europe? You'll now have built a more interesting array to pull images from. And what if, on top of that, you decided to add an encyclopedia of insects? You now can paint insect-like trees. When feeding your inner artists, make sure to pull from both categories of things that interest you, that you are comfortable with, as well as subjects you know nothing about and what terrifies you.


2. Distract your brain - if our brains are making the same connections again and again. Painting and writing the same things, you need to turn off that part of your brain. Listen to music and paint to the harmony. Write you dialogue script as if it were a baking recipe. Doodle without intention - just let the pen drift in all sorts of direction without reigning them in. Find activities in which you tune out. I get some of my best ideas when I am having tea break, when I'm jogging, or in the shower. Because during those activities, I am not completely focused on art, I am just living.

3. The opposite to the above, pay attention ,very close attention to the minute and mundane - eavesdrop on that boring conversation on the bus, trace the cracks on the sidewalk with your footsteps, notice that speckled texture on your ice cream, or the swirly pattern in your coffee cup. These all can be part of some new alien landscape.

Japanese architecture can become a mechanical jellyfish.

4. Changing your muscle memory - our brains are connected to our hands, even when we doodle, we tend to create the same shapes and patterns without knowing. We've ingrained them to our muscle memory. To change it, or train your muscles to do things differently, you've got to give it a handicap. Doodle with the opposite hand. If you're a right hander, draw with your left. Tie your fingers together so you can only use two. Use a brush the size of your broom. You'll definitely make marks you've never done before.

I was able to "find" this robot by making random marks with my left hand on paper first.

Now, when you look down at what you've drawn, you'll probably find marks that makes little sense or shapes that look "childish or foreign" because you've never drawn this way before. To make sense of it all. To finally rope in originality, we've got to turn your usual brain back on. We'll need that pattern-finding, sensible, methodical you to make sense of all this randomness. You've got to find the pattern within the chaos.

Originality can't always be summoned by our will. It is often "process-depedent," so in order to find it you'll have to keep reinventing your creative process.

Process: Painting "Alone in the Dark"

Monkey here today, for a quick run-down of my process while painting a very recent piece, which I call "Alone in the Dark." In the photo above, the weird blue light coming diagonally across the upper left is just a lens flare.

So for a figurative piece where I want to really convey a specific emotion, I shoot reference. While others might be masters of expressions without reference, I am not, so I got our digital camera, a little work lamp, a sheet of blue acetate, some masking tape, a black cloth, and asked for the assistance of an awesome model, Seal.

If you don't have someone else you can ask to model, you can always do it yourself. I must admit, it is much easier to work with someone else. If you can't afford to pay someone, ask other artists if they might need a model of their own, and do a trade-sie.


So the above photo is primarily the one I worked off of. I like the hand positions in this photo, but I wasn't completely sold on her head position. I skimmed through some other photos I had snapped in our little 10-minute photo shoot, and after doing some Photoshop work, adjusting the levels, adding a very transparent gradient of aqua, I ended up with this:

With this as my reference, I started to paint. I paint with acrylics, and I like using Liquitex Heavy Body acrylics. For this painting, I used my usual palette set-up, which consists of:

titanium white, unbleached titanium (lazy painter's warm white), mars black, yellow oxide, cadmium yellow light hue, burnt umber, cadmium red medium hue, alizarin crimson hue permanent, cerulean blue, ultramarine blue (green shade), veridian hue permanent, and dioxazine purple. I will sometimes add extra colors to the palette if I need a large quantity of a certain color that I don't want to mix (I also keep a tube of magenta and an aqua handy), but usually I just stick with these colors and mix everything.

I also got a tube of ivory black to warm up the black since I was doing a cool light, but you can just as well mix some alizarin into your black to warm it up a bit if you stick with mars black.

I did a direct drawing onto the canvas using watered-down burnt umber. I mainly went for general proportions and gesture at this point. So you can see, I didn't quite hit that target on my first go, but since acrylics dry fast and you can paint over stuff, I decided to fix it later and just start painting.

I laid in a dark black for the shadowy background and mixed up a nice green to really push the creepy atmosphere and emphasize the unearthly lighting situation (which is also coming from below, which you don't see very often and adds to the creep-factor).

I also laid in a green underpainting where the flesh would be. Why? Because I like the effect of laying down a blue-green in my portraits and then layering fleshtones on top, especially if you're putting them in green light.

I then blocked in the lights and darks of the shirt, using a thin black wash to fill in the shirt, as I didn't want to lose the form of the shirt too early, while I was still figuring out the folds and construction and form. If I was a crazier painter, I could probably have gone with some opaque black, but I didn't want to push it, so I took it easy. I hit the light parts with green, since that's the color of the light.

The next step was to paint over the green with some unbleached titanium mixed with a bit of cad red light and yellow oxide. I also added the shadows on the skin, and took a bit of time to carve out the shape of the hand.


So the above photo is taken after about 3 hours of work. I paint fairly fast, thanks to a Quick Studies class I took at Academy, but I had to slow down a bit since I hadn't attempted to do anything even remotely realistic in a while, and sort of forgot what I had learned.

Tthis next photo was taken after about another 3 hours of work. What did I do in these three hours to go from weird chalk-lady to a decent approximation of a scared Eve?


Well, I spent a good two hours or so really studying the folds and buttons on her shirt. For some reason, I get a kick out of painting collared shirts on people, so I ended up devoting a bit too much time to the clothing, but it turned out pretty swell.

I also slowly painted, and repainted, and repainted again Eve's face, working to smoothly blend and capture all the subtle colors that are in her face in the reference photo. I also had a bunch of facial proportions all wrong, so I repainted her nose about three times. The first time it was too small, then it was too low and big, and then it was too high, and then I figured it wasn't worth it to go for a perfect likeness and decided that the nose looked proportional and real to the painting and that was that.

I also took time to start painting the hands. I then realized, while painting, that something seemed funny, and somehow during the painting process I stopped using the photo reference, and fudged the hands quite a bit. After carving a bit away, repositioning some fingers, and generally undoing a lot of the preliminary mistakes I had made, I repainted the fingers.

And after another hour or two, I decided I was finished. During those last few hours, I pulled out some highlights on her hair, softened a lot of the cast shadows on her face, sculpted the eyes a bit more, rendered the lips, added a bit of detail to the hands, and repainted her neck so that the anatomy worked a bit better.



Ta-da! So after about 50 minutes of reference shooting and prep work, and about 9-11 hours of painting, the finished product is here. I saw the painting starting to take a pulp-horror paperback book look early on, and decided that I would try to keep it in that vein as opposed to going for ultra-realism (which I find I just don't have the patience for).

Oh yeah! By the way, I also use Golden brand Acrylic Glazing Liquid (Satin) to thin my paints if I want to sort of glaze over dried paint to smooth transitions or tint parts certain colors. I used a lot of medium while painting the hands and face, due to the high concentration of blood vessels close to the surface of the skin. Due to the green light literally going through the skin, hitting the red blood, and bouncing back, you get this weird mixture of cool pinks and warm greens, with strange transitions in-between.

I hope you learned something from this process post, and feel free to ask any specific questions in the comments. While this isn't the style I'm currently working in, it is nice to bust out a creepy painting that flexes some of my classical realism training that I got in school, and also balances my work so it's also more fun to bust out and do my regular sweaty monsters. Woo!

AAU Print exchange

Monkey is taking part in the Academy of Art University's 2010 Print Exchange! He is very excited to receive prints from 29 other artists in exchange for his humble 3-color serigraph that he's made. To honor the fact that we completely forgot to do a process post yesterday, Monkey wanted to share a bit about the way that the prints tend to change from concept to actual execution. He's pretty sure that's not what's "supposed" to happen, but he doesn't care and likes that bit of uncertainty anyway. Take it away, Monkey!

So here's the original illustration, done by scanning in the background paper, and using photoshop to do the coloring:
And here's the final print (although the top green tape needs to be trimmed off):
As you can see, a lot can happen between the master sketch to the actual print. One thing I realized is that because I was printing on lokta paper, the pink vegetable dye actually seeped into my white paint, thus the stripes still show through. This gives it a sorta ghostly effect, which at first I wasn't into, but I think it reinforces the concept of being jailed by the expectations and fantasies via pornography (which is why I chose the striped paper in the first place...pink jail bars anyone?).

Also, I added a lot of line work, as when I was making the screens, I ended up wanting to sculpt the form of the woman's face a bit more. The pale blue made a good shadow, but I still wasn't happy, and after sketching out a new version with the linework, I decided it should stay for the actual print.

Finally, when I started printing, I wasn't 100% sure that I knew what I wanted the woman to be thinking. After talking it over with Eve and Carrie-Ann (who also was working on her print exchange print), I decided to go with the "*yawn*" as it makes the print more open-ended than I originally I was thinking of making it, and it also makes it funnier.

I hate it when people say "the new caption was better than what I thought originally" but never tell you what they were thinking, so here are the other possible captions:

-"I'm faking it for all my fans out there"
-"I'm faking it all for you, baby"
-"I wonder what's on tv"
-"to all my fans: I'm actually faking it"

If you disagree and would have rather seen a different caption: too bad!

Saturday Process: The monster lady

Today's process post is by Monkey, who will take you through a coloring of a illustration of some monster lady (who is holding a fish).

Hi everyone! So today I decided to work a bit more details than I usually do in terms of my pencils/linework. I started out in my sketchbook with a HB pencil, and roughed out this drawing. I then had Eve add something, and she chose to just add a little fish. Honestly, I was hoping she would do an environment for the character (since she's amazing and I'm not as experienced as she is), but I got a cute fish, so I'll take it.
After scanning the pencil drawing in, I then proceeded to multiple the drawing layer, and create a new painting layer underneath. I then started in blocking in color, not worrying too much about light and darks (as I took care of the basic lighting via pencil), and more about overall color harmony. Everything is a bit pastel-like at this stage, as I don't want to get too saturated yet, and since I'm dealing with a triad (yellow hair, blue jeans, pinky (ie red) skin and lips), I have to be careful not to make it clash too much.
Next, I throw in a gray gradient to give it a sense of a light source, which has to match with the light source that I first indicated by the shading of the character. I also decide to give her green eyes and blood-soaked red lips.

I want to give the illustration a bit of a mood, so I decide that the values are all waaaay too high key (ie. all the values are really light) and thus I play around with contrast, brightness, and levels to bring it down quite a bit. I add some blood splatters to her shirt, fish, and teeth.



Next, unfortunately, comes the "and then you suddenly have a cake" part, as I got a bit carried away fixing things and I forgot to take more intermediate steps of the painting. At this point, I realized that with the way I lighted the monster's body, her shadow should have been going behind her, not in front of her. Thus, I had to correct that, make a lot of the values darker, I threw in some wood textures behind her for a background, created a plane change where the wall hits the ground, added an overhead lamppost (outside of the picture plane), and hid more of her body in shadow.


So there you are, from pencil sketch to sort of a finish. In reality, I need to either move the light source over (to justify why so much of her face is lit up), or make more of her face and body darker. Also, the value change from light to shadow on her feet, leg, and arms could be made more apparent in order to really put the rest of her body in the shadows. Well, an artist's job is never really done - generally you just run out of time, motivation, energy, inspiration, or money, and that's when you call it a day.

Hope this was helpful and interesting, and thanks for reading!

Process: commecial printing

Hi ho, everyone! Today on our process post, Monkey will do a brief explanation of how you can request printing quotes from commercial printers. When doing invitation design for Little Yeti, Monkey has to check around at some of his favorite printers to see who's going to have what stock, who can print in what timeframe, and who's going to be the most affordable for any particular job. Yay!

The HP Indigo 5000

Hi everyone! So today I'll do a quick overview of what you need to ask about when requesting printing quotes from commercial printers. I've found that generally the more knowledgeable you are about what they (the printers) do, the better relationships (and potentially better rates) a designer/illustrator can build with print shops.

To be perfectly honest, unless you're doing big business (whether a high number of orders of simply incredibly large print runs), you realistically aren't going to be getting huge discounts on print jobs. But, a) it doesn't hurt to ask, and b)knowing what you're talking about will help you be able to accurately compare different printers and their services.

So basic terminology:
Bleed - your printed image has a bleed if anything printed (text, design, background color, whatever) runs to the edge of the card. Instead of slowing everything down and trying to print right to an edge, what printers do is they print larger than the final size, then cut the card down to the final, or trim, size.

4/0, 1/1, etc., etc. Any number over another number (in x/y form) refers to the numbers of colors of ink on the front of the card, then the number of colors on the back of the card. If you wanted a two color image printed on the front of the card, and your logo in black and white on the back, you would request a quote for 2/1.

Full color (like a color photo) will usually be printed in CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and key aka black). So even though your illustration might have yellows and purples and reds and greens, and everything in between, when you request a quote for a single-sided poster, you're asking for a 4/0 print job.

If there's an option for scoring, or the process of making a crease or foldline, you don't need it unless you're doing something with folds.

Perhaps you've heard the words "offset" and "digital" printing thrown around. Offset printing is a printing method that offers more consistent printing, highly accurate color matching, and is great for high volume runs. Digital printing on a commercial scale is really just a really awesome inkjet printer. While it might not sound as awesome, it is usually way more affordable for smaller (~100-200) jobs. The quality of digital printing has also improved dramatically over the past couple of years, and the quality difference that I've personally seen is pretty slim, but to be perfectly honest I don't get a lot of things offset printed besides business cards.

PMS stands for the Pantone Matching System. This is the industry-standard of color and color matching. Pantone produces books of swatches that any commercial printer worth doing business with will have. If you are getting an offset run done of just a few colors, you can specify which PMS colors you want them printed in, and since the presses use pantone colors, you'll get exactly what you're looking for. With digital printing, they'll combine CMYK the best they can to get the color you want, but really bright, saturated colors usually come out more muted than expected.


You'll also want to specify your paper weight (if you have a preference) and/or paper brand, etc. Ask about PCW (or post-consumer recycled waste) if you're interested in finding out how much recycled content is in your paper choices as well.

So, with all that in mind, the quote I requested for some wedding invitations I recently designed went something along these lines:

Hello! I would like a quote for 100 5"x7" invitations printed 4/0 with a full bleed on 130 lb. Mohawk Options iTone stock without envelopes. Additionally, I also need 100 4"x6" RSVP postcards printed 4/4 full bleed on the same stock without envelopes. Also, what size bleed do you need? Thanks a lot!

I asked for a specific stock because a)I sent this to a printer I've worked with before, b)I wanted a 100% PCW paper and Mohawk Options is one of the few papers I know about that has pure white, heavy cardstock that's 100% PCW, and c)I know they print on HP Indigo printers, and the iTone stock is designed specifically for the Indigo.

Anyhoo, I know that's probably a lot of information, and it's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of getting things printed (I didn't even mention screenprinting, letterpress, or engraving), but hopefully that'll get you on your way to learning more about paper, and printing. If you have any questions about commercial printing, please feel free to ask and I'll do my best to help you out!

PS - Happy Birthday Monkey's Dad!

Process: Locking transparent pixels

This week Monkey shares how to lock transparent pixels in Photoshop to make coloring things easier.

Okay, so recently I found out about locking transparent pixels, a feature in photoshop that allows you to change the color of your linework very easily.

So the screencap below is some calligraphy-ish type lettering I did for my friends' wedding invitations that I'm working on. However, they're not too keen on just black lettering, as it doesn't go with the rest of the color scheme, so I needed to change the color. Rather than go and repaint the lettering with a new color (and what if the color wasn't right?), I decided to try out this new (at least to me, PS noob) feature.

So as you can see (if you click on the image to see a larger version), I've circled the toggle button for the "lock transparent pixels" feature. Basically, what you are doing is that for whatever layer you are editing, you are making it so you can only edit the pixels that already have information in them. You can now no longer paint where it's transparent (until you unlock the transparent pixels). This lets you freely color in the pixels that have information (ie. your line work).

You can see in the above screencap that I'm now just using the brush tool to quickly swipe in color..I'm replacing the black with red.

Other applications for this would be when you are digitally painting and you are working in many layers. Say you are painting someone's face on a single layer. You've got the proportions down and you want to quickly replace some color on the edge of the face. Instead of carefully filling in color over your painting, if the background is transparent then you can lock the transparent pixels and then just paint away!

Anyhoo, I hope this helps a bit (it's really useful for logos!) and feel free to leave questions/comments/clarifications in the comments! Thanks for stopping by!

Process/Review: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Seal is currently reading this book that she borrowed from a friend. Whether as a painter, a writer, or any kind of artist, we are constantly trying to communicate our vision. This book gives easy-to-read insight into why some ideas "stick" better than others and how we can use it to help us be more effective in our art. The two brothers Chip and Dan Heath, authors of the book, have spent many years researching . . . why is it that we remember the latest fashion trend, or the workplace gossip . . . and urban legends, myths, and conspiracy theories spread faster than our memory of an important healthcare bill. This book is for anybody: an artist trying to appeal to a gallery, a parent trying to pass on an anecdote, a nonprofit trying to secure a grant. . .

You can find the book at any bookstore. I recommend used bookstores like Green Apple on Clement & 6th in SF.

Monkey + Seal know that successful branding is one of the most crucial elements of any successful business, so every little hint and trick helps. Especially as a collaborative creative team, Monkey and Seal have been struggling with our brand identity. While we each have our own distinct style (see below), we do try to keep our colors consistent for our promotional stuff, and we stamp our heads on everything and use the same font. However, in the next few months we are going to be developing more collaborative work - so keep your eyes peeled and good luck making things stick!

Process: Designing and Finding Inspiration Everywhere

This is Monkey here, and today I'll be talking about the design of my personal business cards which led to a new diptych of paintings.

So first off, for whatever reason, whether it be the creepiness or the iconography or just weirdness, I've always associated myself with skulls. My old logo was something like this:
So it was natural that when I was designing ties, I came up with this:
So, I ended up designing the front of my business card to look like this:
Using a scan of the original tie design, I changed up the crossbones to be paintbrushes, added a splatter texture that I created a while back by soaking a brush in ink and just going at a large sheet of paper. After scanning and saving it, I now have a really awesome, natural-looking texture that I can whip out whenever I need that grunge look.

So then, I realized that I probably should put a photo of my painting on my business card, since a)that's what most artists do, and b)it makes sense to show off your work. However, I was torn as I really liked the pink and black design with the skulls and the "create or die" underneath it (a motto I plan to live by). Then, inspiration hit. Duh, why don't I just do a painting of the "create or die" dealy? (slaps forehead). Duh.

In my paintings (most of which are not up on my website yet -_- ) I deal with the exploration of the hierarchy between text and image, realism and graphic representation, order of words altering meanings, and the nuances of language. So, it came to me that by having the order of the words be "create" then "die," it gives the reader the idea that I'm advocating the creation over the dying. I thought it would be then interesting to use almost the same image but switching the words around. I also wanted to keep the numbers of letters the same in the first and second word, so then I did another painting that says "death or art."

Believe it or not, these are the same color..stupid weird lighting in my apartment..

The top photo is longer cuz I formatted it for business cards and had to get clever with the stamp tool in photoshop to extend the canvas border.

I then decided to use a contrasting color (well, not a perfect contrast, but you get the point) on the back. I brought in the original grunge text, added some hand-drawn elements, and here you've got the back of my card:
Anyway, I guess what the point of all this was to highlight how what seem like problems or setbacks can be the best (although unlikely) place to find inspiration. I ended up not having to compromise my original design and ended up with not only a business card design but also two new paintings. Often I get the biggest inspiration when I'm frustrated or completely at my wit's end when dealing with a problem.

Instead of trying to bash your way through problems (as tempting as that may be, especially for me), I find that staying fluid and constantly looking for new ways of viewing your problem can lead to unexpected and novel solutions. Also, I like to think across mediums. From what started as a tie design led to a new logo which led to a new business card which led to two new paintings. Think about some cool doodles you already have. Maybe that's your next painting or postcard design. Anyway, I hope this was informative and helpful!

Process: Using References for your drawings

Below is Seal's animation layout drawing of a surfer's beach hut in Hawaii. She didn't know how to draw a beach hut or what specific shape made a beach hut different than any other dwelling. As an artist, Seal uses a lot of references to give her drawings believability. There is a delicate balance between being too reliant and copying a reference to being inspired and studying a reference while finding your own unique visual language.

Below is an example of a reference sheet that Seal used for the shape of the beach hut rooftop. Notice that Seal took on a similar shape, but not exactly. It is in the spirit of a beach hut. She simplified the hut so it would resemble more of an everyday average person's surfer hut and hangout, not necessarily to live in it. She also used references to get basic feel of the tiki and foliages that can be found in Hawaii.

Even Monkey, who is a lot more loose in his artwork, still uses reference. Even something as loose as his Panda Rage print was still based on photo reference.
Even though he had seen many pandas, Monkey wanted to make sure that he put the fur coloring in all the right places. Yes, pandas have a very distinctive color pattern on their fur, and if you don't follow that, you'll end up with something that may or may not read as a panda. However, the claws are exaggerated, but part of making art is experimenting on what features you can and cannot push and exaggerate or modify and have your visual message still come across.

Both Seal and Monkey use fun google image searches in order to find reference, but because they are usually copyrighted images, they only use them to get basic ideas of shapes, design patterns, and compositions. However, nothing beats taking your own photos, as then you can use the photos however you please, as you the photographer own the images. We highly encourage doing this as much as possible, and we often find that when drawing certain poses or angles, it's much faster to take a photo ourselves than it is to try and find that perfect photo on the web.

Have fun, and go get inspired (but don't copy!)

Seal's Process: Swamp Treehouse in watercolor, gouache, and acrylic gesso

Both Monkey and Seal are looking forward to Handmade Ho-Down: Urban Craft Fair this upcoming Thursday, Dec.3rd. They will be selling original fine arts paintings and prints, handmade silkscreened ties, archival reproduction prints, zines, buttons, and more!

Below is one of Seal's archival glicee reproduction prints of her original illustration titled "Swamp Treehouse." So for this Saturday's Process Post, she will be doing a flashback and talking about an earlier work.

The original illustration was done on 15" x20" cold press illustration board, with watercolor, gouache, acrylic gesso, and graphite. The work was inspired by the story of Peter Pan, but Seal had always thought that Pan was a sinister figure, similar to the Pied Piper or the god of mischief, Pan. There is a selfish destructive, yet invitingly playful characteristics of Pan. So she decided that the Lost Boys' home would be in the swamps.

The sky and water were initially laid out in watercolor, she glazed some of the warm colors more opaquely with goauche. Below is a close up of the main tree on the right. She utilized acrylic gesso to create some of the undulations and textures on the moss and trunks.


Before working on the final illustration board, Seal does color studies with gouache on paper. She explored daytime and nightime lighting. These can be very rough, spending only 30-2 hours on each. She liked the mood of the foggy very early morning/late at night with the warm lights emitting from the treetops of the house. She pushed the different range of blues on the final painting to include some purples and greens.Seal is normally shy about showing her line drawings because they are unrefined and show a lot of mistakes, but below is a rare peek at her original line drawing before the color studies. Noticed she added a wooden boat to the left of the composition on her final illustration that was missing from the line drawing below, because she thought the habitants needed transportation to traverse across the swamp.

Seal will continue to do "gothic" series of the Peter Pan story. Please check back soon to see more. In the meantime, she hopes to see you at Handmade Hodown this Thursday. She will be showcasing this original painting of the Swamp Treehouse at the Monkey and Seal booth #41.

Process: Seal's 90 thumbnails

Here is a sneak peek at Seal's current illustration and brief process: Seal was inspired and repulsed by the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. It was the worst nuclear reactor incident that resulted in a massive explosion and severe radioactive pollution that is still affecting the area today. She is working with images of powerplants and her young female protagonist who is an adventurous survivor learning to navigate through a new world. Below is the initial color layout.


90 thumbnails. Seal really likes working on thumbnails. They are small, quick, expressive, and are not committed to any sequential order, specific story, or a uniform style. She worked on these small compositions in the course of two days during her lunch breaks at work and at night. They range from 1min. to 10min. thumbnails. Most of the time, Seal doesn't have a concrete idea to begin with. She just knew that lately, she was inspired by Russian architecture, Victorian metropolis, and steampunk.

In her thumbnails, she quickly indicated 3 value range and three depths of field: foreground, middleground, and background. She is also fascinated by the interplay of light.

Below are some of her favorites. The color rough is based on the fourth thumbnail. Please check back soon for the finished illustration.

Seal's Process: Designing Shapes

Seal recently finished one of her animation background layout - a violin antique repair shop (above). She was inspired by the renown violin-making city of Cremona, Italy. She likes the shape of violins, but has never drawn one before, nor seen one up close. So in her process, she had had to research some of the essential shapes associated with a violin. Below are some of her sketch studies.

Every recognizable object has an essential shape, it's what makes them identifiable and separates a cow from a violin. Back when we were cave people and even today, our brain likes to quickly categorize shapes- "friend or foe- that is the shape of an edible fruit, or that is a lion I should run away from," "that is my friend across the street, or my boss coming down the hallway." So as an illustrator/artist, we have to make sure that we clearly communicate the shape of objects (if you want clarity). Sometimes as fine artists, we want to play with our audiences' expectations and create ambiguity, in which case, we can deliberately distort shapes.

It often takes several drawings for our brain-hand muscle coordination to get into sync in expressing the right line or curvature and shape. Below is the line drawing used for the final illustration. You can see that some of the violin shapes are good (recognizable, typical, relatively realistic) and some are a little off (perhaps too elongated, not having quite the finesse). It probably would take me another month of practice drawing the violin, to be able to draw them from memory.


Sometimes it is good to "push" the design of the shapes (as seen below). In the animation world, this "cartoony" style is called "wonky." Going "wonky" helps my brain to loosen up and to experiment on how far I can exaggerate the shapes of the violin while still keeping them recognizable.


Thinking about shapes is not only applicable to illustrators or 2d artists, when designing anything from jewelry, to bags, to hats, to hairpins, you want your products to be recognizabe, yet different from anything anyone else has done before. In order to do that, you have to start at the basic shapes. What makes a top hat different than a beret? Before anything else-- color, texture, material -- it inevitably boils down to their essential shapes.

Happy Halloween/ Style

Keep your poisoned apples to yourself!

Happy Halloween everyone! Monkey's favorite holiday of the year is here, and the Monkey + Seal duo will be hitting the street as Narwhals tonight. To celebrate, here are some studies Monkey did in acrylic, as well as a Halloween serigraph (above) he pulled for kicks.

The caption (which got cut off by the scanner) says "If I'm Not Dead I Should Be."
Truly, the Devil incarnate.

Since this is a Saturday Process Post, Monkey has decided to talk a bit about style. Not style, as in fashion, but style as in how you choose to express yourself visually. I guess that could be through fashion, and now that I think about it this post (although written from an illustrator/fine artist's standpoint) could apply to fashion designers as well, but I admit that I'm quite ignorant of all that. I'm writing this from the standpoint of an artist who is actively trying to make a living solely off his art (as opposed as someone who doesn't care if they ever sell a single painting/drawing/etc.).

So. Many young, budding artists think a lot about style. I know that I certainly do. Do you want to go stylized? Realistic? Abstract? Stylized realism? Graphic? Art Brute? Impressionistic? The list goes on and if you're anything like me, you've probably tried out quite a few different styles, trying to figure out what works best for you.

My art instructors always said that style is something that you just eventually fall into. Either you find something that works for you or you find something that appeals to the masses and you keep riding the praise, even if you aren't necessarily really into your style. I have found this to be pretty true. If you haven't figured out the way you want to work professionally, it just takes time. Seal talks about mileage in her last post on working. You really do have to put in the mileage to find yourself. I know it may be frustrating, but believe me, it'll happen.

Also, realize that style evolves. If you constantly draw or paint in the exact same way, while it may make you money, I feel like you are stagnating as an artist. Being completely consistent means you are not taking risks, which generally means you probably aren't learning anything new. While this is fine, I personally prefer to learn as much as I can, as often as I can, as that's the only way I'm going to be the best artist I can be. Now I'm not saying that you should put up five different styles in the same gallery show, but if you look at the work over the years of anyone from Picasso to Jeff Soto, you'll see changes and growth. Sometimes it doesn't work out, and the artist will return to the way they did things earlier, othertimes they'll try something new.

But what if you've been making art for a while, and you're STILL not sure what style you want to go with. Well, there are lots of things that could be preventing you from finding a style you really like.

The biggest hurdle, I've found, is that there is a hierarchy in style, and this is what constantly messes me up in the head. Realism is always on top, with different fads (art brute has been pretty big in the lowbrow scene for a while now) taking their place underneath it. Now, I personally do not believe that painting things realistically is the best way to make art, but if you ever show a painting that's painted photo realistically to anyone, they'll say "wow, you're a great painter." If you show the best abstract in the world to a random stranger, you'll get reactions from "you're amazing" to "what does this even mean," to "you're not a painter, you just put random splashes of paint on canvas." Humans naturally are drawn to things that remind them of themselves and what they know, so realism always tends to feel like it's the most important way to make art (this is not true, however).

At Academy of Art in SF, the illustration and fine art programs both emphasis learning strong draftsmanship, line control, rendering form, color theory, etc., etc. It is a very technical school that places a lot of emphasis early in the program on classical realism. However, as a painter who is more inspired by Camille Rose Garcia and Luke Chueh than Rembrandt or John Singer Sargent, this mucked up my painting for a long time. While I could paint realistically, I didn't really like to, but people really liked the work that I was doing. This made it hard for me to really embrace the style that I wanted to do, and I would end up doing a little bit of both styles, which made my pieces mediocre, as they weren't painted very technically, but they weren't really stylized either. This is something that I'm still fighting now.

The other major roadblock to finding a style is that for people like me, I like lots of different styles. While I plan to succeed as an artist with multiple styles, this is very, very, very rare. Like I said before, styles evolve, but you don't see many painters known for both their photorealism and their abstract paintings. I have found that once again, this is a question of mileage.

In a week, if you're trying out three different styles, and it takes you on average 24 hours to do a painting, assuming ALL you do is paint (no sleep, eating, potty, etc.), you can get 2.3 paintings done in each style. If you are just working in one style, in a month you'll get 7 paintings in the same style. No wonder if you're constantly experimenting, things will take longer for you to find a style you really like. No one really falls in love on the first date, you have to keep on going out and figuring out if you really like the person. The same goes with style. If you're looking, it will take you longer in the experimental phase the more styles you are interested in. But the only way to figure out what works for you is to put in the time and effort and see if it's right for you.

Anyhoo, thanks for reading this lengthy post, and I hope you got an insight into my personal struggle with style and were able to take away something useful.

Process: Monkey and his acrylic paintings

So Monkey has recently come to terms that he does not like painting in the style of classical realism. While there are more musings on that on Monkey's personal blog, this post is about his process when coming up with one of his acrylic painting. So without further ado, take it away Monkey!

Hello! So, first off, I alway start up with some toned canvas or boards.
I like either strange colors (to give me a pre-existing color palette to work with), or a nice mid-tone gray. Working with a mid-tone gray is super helpful, as it allows you to see a better relationship between your darkest darks and your lightest lights. I find if you start with a blank, untoned canvas, I tend to paint my shadows too light, as I'm comparing them to the white of the canvas and not the local value of what I'm painting. More on toning canvas later.

Because so much of Monkey's work relies on the interplay between text and image, Monkey brainstorms a lot. Sometimes an idea will hit him while he's working his day job, and he'll jot it down on a sticky note and put it in his wallet for later use. Other times, when he has his paints ready, he'll start with an image and then use that as inspiration. In this instance, Monkey worked out a bunch of different concepts, and wrote them on an envelope as a guide for his painting session.
Because I hate wasting paint, a lot of times I'll tone some canvases with all my left-over paint that I have at the end of a painting session. I'll usually mix complementary colors to get rich mid-value browns to tone with, or, I'll go with analogous colors to get a nice rich background. If I do this, I'll usually save this canvas/board for a painting where the image will be the complement of the background. For example, if I paint a greenish background, I'll save the canvas for a painting that has orange-red hues for the majority of the painting.

Since I'm going to paint a barn, which has a lot of reddish-browns in it, I pulled out a greenish canvas I had been saving. I start by doing a quick sketch of the main contours of the image. This is mainly to get a sense of composition and scale of the piece.

Then, if I'm not doing a strong lighting statement, I'll mass in the local value. If I am working with strong lighting, I'll first mass in the shadows, then the lights, then I'll add the darkest shadows and the highlights last. Finally, I add the text. Notice that it's a bit different from the initial concept that's written down on the envelope. I wanted the barn to have a soul (as opposed to just being a "talking barn") as it adds some sort of moral implication to the barn's dialogue. Also, I wanted to make it a wee bit more obvious that Farmer Joe is getting nasty with someone/thing in the barn by using the text to really paint the picture in the viewer's mind about Farmer Joe's pants being on the floor.


And that's that. Thanks again for reading, and I hope it gives just a little bit of insight to my thought process when I'm painting. Maybe next time I'll do the process behind a more detailed piece, just for kicks.