Archive for the ‘illustration’ Category

Charity art

Thursday, July 10th, 2008

I’ve been incredibly busy as usual and putting off updating the blog. Sadly it’s been almost the last thing on my list of priorities in the past couple of months. They pushed back the date of the charity “Art for the Cure” event that I had planned on participating in and even though I knew the date was pushed back about a month ago I’ve managed to procrastinate doing the piece I’d planned. The composition could probably use some work… I came up with it in about a day after only 4 or 5 thumbnails. I promised I’d post progress in a previous blog entry so here’s a few shots so far:


final comp from my sketchbook, 8.5×11


Shitty scan job of the final pencil drawing on Rives BFK print making paper roughly 17×20″

I still haven’t quite mastered capturing the spontaneity and gesture of the pencil sketch in the final drawing but maybe I can still pull it off in the painting.


The painting so far.
This will be the first completely acrylic painting I’ve ever done that actually might look decent. I should have more updates on Sunday since this thing is supposed to be done by about Tuesday.

Other than that I have a bunch of photos and other things to post but it will all have to wait. The website is getting closer all the time. I’m almost to the production phase.

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Hey, Mickey you’re so… old

Monday, June 9th, 2008

Rarely in the history of cartooning have we ever seen a cartoon star fall so tragically out of the limelight as we have in the case of Mickey Mouse.

In a box by pier 23 he whiles away the days looking for his next smack fix and finding creative places to store his leavings. The once great star and spokestoon for the Disney corporation fell into trouble during the great depression of 2008.

An art community I used to frequent before I became so heavily ingrained in advertising was having an activity to re-interpret Mickey Mouse. This was my sarcastic little poke at wholesome family entertainment.

After about three months of nearly fully (at some points, almost every waking hour) dedicated time to my company and an incredibly fast paced project I’ve been allowed some vacation time. I’m only on day one of my 3 day vacation but it’s already been great. I feel like I’ve gotten so much done in terms of restoring order to my system. On top of that I’ve had a chance to work on my website design, visual identity, paint and be lazy. It’s pretty much everything I thought it would be and more.

miscellaneous pictures

Looking at this picture of my computer setup made me realize how out of date my technology is. CRTs? Old-ass 4.1 stereo setup? 4×5 intuos 3 tablet? $20 logitech mouse from 6 years ago? I need to upgrade. My hard drives are filling up like an overweight person in a buffet line. Maybe I’ll suddenly become rich…

I got a new plant to replace the one that died. It’s already helped to improve my mood.

Here’s another mood enhancer for me lately. This is one of the greatest parts about my place and one of the things I’ll miss the most if I ever move (I should say: when).

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A Doodle a’Day…

Monday, May 12th, 2008

I’m having a massive new-music-gasm right now. I’ve got so much to listen to and it’s all very good and very inspiring. The M83 album from my previous post is currently killing my last.fm statistics. Whenever I’m done designing the new wordpress theme and website design there will be a last.fm reader on the page so you can see how many times I listen to “Skin of the Night” in a week. I’ll probably be sick of it in a week but I reiterate: radical.

I was working on some hand-made textures and type this weekend and doodled this little guy. It’s pencil and acrylic, and actually must have spurred a few creative synapses in my brain because I’ve got the urge to paint traditionally again. Sometime in June (the 14th I think) I’ll be auctioning off a painting for “Head for the Art,” a charity event sponsored by my company. Since the crow was the last thing I painted and it was done digitally I’m considering doing a new traditional painting and framing it exclusively for the show. Of course, if I work toward that goal I will keep the blog updated with progress.

Here is another color study I did with color and a bit of the new mark I’ve been working on. I don’t think the texture is working out. I think I may have to stick with hand-made textures as opposed to vector texture (try to say that 10 times fast).

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A Little Here, A Little There

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008

Juggling all of my commitments is starting to get a little easier and I’m hoping it stays that way for a while. I could use some fun for a change.

Some things recently in the moleskin. I can’t wait to enjoy more of the nice weather. I anticipate more moleskinnery and artistry will take place as a result. I might turn the one up top into an oil painting. I bought some nice linen over the weekend. It might deserve a few more thumbnails and a color study before I put all of those expensive oil paints to use though…

the obsession never ends…

The guy with half a hand came from a commercial I saw at a friend’s house for a television show about how dangerous the logging industry could be. The guy was boasting about how manly he was on the commercial. I then felt compelled to record it in the sketchbook. Of course, pictured below it and completely unrelated: more mice. This time they’re portraying Hispanic gang stereotypes.

As far as free-time design goes, here is a color study I did using things from the morphology of this identity I’ve been developing—I need to add more than shapes—but it’s kind of a hodge podge of shapes (designed using the golden section) to see how the color palette I worked out might look.

Lastly, I have to recommend some more music. I recently discovered M83 put out a new album and it’s so boss I can’t even find better words than “boss” to describe it. It’s a bit of spacey electronic shoegazing goodness and I highly recommend it.

Listen to the full thing on Last.fm FTW

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Charity, Politics, Music and Miscellany

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

So it seems I’m tracking at about a post per month on average. I fully intend to blog a bit more but right now I’m involved in a lot of time consuming activities. The biggest of which is a project I’m working on for SAP. It’s been a lot of late nights, frustrations and stress but it’s really coming together and I can’t wait to share it. Other than that I’ve been working on freelance as well as my own visual identity system. My ultimate goal is to get things well wrapped up by June on all fronts so I can spend some time away from the computer screen. I’m actually thinking about traveling a little.

But I digress. Onto the substance. Last weekend I thought I would work on my karma a little and participate in some charity events. I have never been into the community service kind of stuff but after pushing myself to take part in all of that last weekend I felt really good about what I’d done. Friday I went to a cancer benefit put on by my company at the record bar. Saturday I got up and drove over to the Historic North East in KCMO and volunteered with AIGA to help design a chalk square with the Restart homeless youth art program. Sunday I got up early and ran the Trolley Run to benefit the Sabates Childrens center for the Visually Impared. I ran what I think might be my record Trolley Run time, in fact. Four miles in 27 minutes. A blisteringly fast 6:49 pace (maybe not blisteringly fast but pretty good for me anyway). I felt very fulfilled after it was all over.

I don’t have photos from it all but I do have photos from the chalk walk. Here is our square in construction. I will note Chi Hiu, my partner, and I were less concerned with design fundamentals than we were with making sure the Restart Kids had a great time. They were both a little reluctant at first but after we got started they really got into it.

They decided we should do a giant Pooh for our “growth” theme:

Other people had some really nice designs. Some of the local design shops/agencies were represented. Here are a couple that were pretty gnarly:


Willoughby design


Barkley Evergreen

Many many more photos are up in a flickr set.

Politics
Among other things I’ve spent my money on in the past week or two, I donated to Obama’s campaign. I guess I felt compelled to do something other than voice an opinion and vote for the guy. A friend at work has been trying to convince me that my vote didn’t count. This may have been what motivated the decision. I just feel that that sentiment is fundamentally wrong. A vote is a voice and without a voice we’re stuck with another dumb-as-mud pandering politician who will snake his way into the White House. Sure there are levels above the popular vote that we as US citizens cannot control. There is certainly no guarantee that your state’s delegates or electoral votes will go with the will of the people but to me it seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy to eliminate the possibility of that happening from the beginning by not voting. Where is the optimism? Maybe it is cynicism I’m hearing every time someone tells me my vote doesn’t count. I can’t really hold it against the cynics. Al Gore lost the election even with the popular vote. It’s certainly happened a number of times. We have the right as citizens though. Why not exercise it? Vote for whoever you want, but please vote.

Music
So I was working on some freelance tonight when my itunes shuffled to some tracks I’d composed about 4-5 years ago. To my surprise they still sounded descent! It made me want to dabble again and maybe polish them up but it’s probably one of my lowest priorities at the moment. I thought I would share one of my favorites for now. I used to put these together in my free time. Most are about half finished and pretty rough. They’re all instrumental and electronically composed. I got a lot of inspiration from movie scores so a bunch of them are a little slow and moody. I used give them whatever working-title name popped into my head as I was listening and on that note, here is one titled Riptide:
Riptide (mp3)

Cheers!
I hope to catch up again here before June but until then, see you around, internets.

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Sketchbookery

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

Hey, again. So I’m finding it quite nice having some free time to do things for myself lately. I’ve done some site design for my mom’s piano studio that I’m now able to actually dice up and put on the web. It’s nothing too special but It’s a good step for her business. I’ll post the link if I’m not too embarrassed later on. Other than that I’ve had a chance to actually cook some descent meals, surf the internets, draw and design.

I discovered some great music too if you’re into low-key Simon & Garfunkel type stuff: Kings of Convenience.

give them a listen on last.fm if you’ve got some time.

Here are a few things that are going on in my sketchbook recently. The first two are referenced from photos and the last one is a bunch of crazy brain-diarrhea.

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A little bit of everything

Monday, April 14th, 2008

So it’s been a while since I blogged. There are a number of solid excuses I can throw on the table but that just seems petty. Let’s let bygones be bygones and get on with the pretty pictures, shall we? Since a bit of time has passed and I haven’t gotten to blog about things I’ve wanted to blog about I will just combine several posts into one and organize it with subheads.

We gather here today…
I’ve had this plant for 5 years now. It’s survived a few wild college parties and a number of reckless room-mates. It’s always been my rock. I thought it would never die no matter how much strain or wear and tear I inflicted upon it. This is the plant as it sits in my living room today:

It was thriving before my trip to London. During my two week trip my parents came to my apartment occasionally to water the plants and make sure they were doing alright. It nearly croaked during that time. Luckily due to my father’s shrewd green thumb it narrowly escaped an extended period next to that cold window. It perked up for a while. I thought it was going to survive but I must have over watered it or under watered it. either way it’s been like this for a couple weeks. I keep hoping it’s going to spring back to life when the spring weather sets in but it hasn’t yet and the outlook is looking pretty bleak.

Is it dead? Can I revive it? I don’t want to throw it out before I know if it can be saved. It was such a trooper…

National Champs 2008!
If you don’t know, I’m a University of Kansas alum and although I’m not extremely plugged into college basketball every season, I do follow my hawks. This year they won! I was in Lawrence for the Final Four as well as the championship game. I’ve never seen that town erupt like it did. I was in town for our loss to Syracuse a few years ago and although the streets were flooded on that occasion it was nothing compared to our victories this year. Here are some pictures and a couple of videos I took during and after our NCAA championship victory:

Here’s a video of the final point, our victory and the flood of people into Mass St. Ignore me. I’d had a few beers at this point and got really excited:

And here’s a video from the crowd on Tenth street:

I’ve got a few more videos but I’m already clogging your internets so here are the rest of the pictures:

Life drawing
My latest life drawing semester is wrapping up. Unfortunately we had a majority of male models this semester. I don’t mind drawing male models but it would be nice if we alternated or had an even mix, know what I’m saying? I guess I got practice where practice was needed though. All are done with charcoal on 18×24″ newsprint. Some are done with pastel / conté as well. Here are some highlights from that:

Design
I’m hoping to blog about some design sometime soon as well. I’m just waiting for things to slow down a tad. There are definitely a few things I want to wax on about. That reminds me. I should be working on my site redesign and blog redesign still. I have to keep on myself about that. Keep on me about that if you happen to see me in real life.

Cheers.

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ye olde sketchbook

Monday, March 24th, 2008

Things are moving along. I’m hoping I can wrap up some personal projects in the next month or so. This weekend I did some cleaning, saw some friends, watched some basketball, watched Chelsea Vs. Arsenal and found some time to draw. I also have some descent life drawings I think I’ll try and take photos of tomorrow.

ghosts:

I bought what I thought was a blue colored pencil but turned out to be conte. It’s got a cool blue sheen to it in real life. Kind of a happy accident I guess. I Didn’t anticipate having to spray-fix my sketchbook though. Oh well.

From photo reference. 60s clothing:

Spring is on the way. Every year around this time my demeanor seems to improve almost by default. Maybe I should become one of those neopagans that celebrates the equinoxes.

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Old man winter (pull the plug)

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008

I’ve been back a week or two now and have readjusted to harsh temperature shifts of KC. 71 and sunny one day, 21 and threatening to snow the next. It’s weird. When you’re routine takes place for more than a week in any place other than where you’re used to residing you start to set into a new routine (or at least I do). Now that I’ve been back as long as I have I can say I actually did have a little bit of culture shock coming back.

While I was settling into my old(new) routine I saw (and photographed—although not very well) a lunar eclipse:

and fell in love with my moleskin. For some reason—maybe for its size—I feel more at ease taking it with me wherever I go. I’ve ended up with pages of life sketches montaged with other weird doodles:

I’ve been thinking up ideas for the new website design. Hopefully I’ll have some free time to realize them soon.

I almost forgot to mention Spring is around the bend. Let’s all piggyback-ride old man winter into the grave and push up the plant life that signals the changing of the seasons. Cheers!

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Across the Pond

Sunday, February 3rd, 2008

So the plan was to launch blog.samhendricks.com along with a redesign of samhendricks.com but I thought it might be cool to hack together a quick wordpress blog (and when I say quick, I mean I slopped this mess together in a couple days) so that I could update friends and family while I’m in London—time permitting.

Now, why am I going to London? Unfortunately it’s no vacation. I’ll be working with a partner agency on some client-work for the next couple of weeks. The details are likely not as exciting as you might think so I won’t elaborate. In the meantime I fully intend to immerse myself in London-ism. Yeah, I made that word up. That’s how we ad-jocks roll. So subscribe to the RSS feed or check back for some pictures now and then. I’ll try to take a few.

Cheers.

On a side note, about a week ago I’d made a time-lapse video of the illustration that’s in the header but my screen capture software failed after I was finished and I thought I’d lost the video. Just yesterday as I was getting my stuff ready for the trip I actually found it! So here it is. About three and a half hours of painting all scrunched up into about four and a half minutes of video. Enjoy.

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