Medium: Oil Paints   Size: 8x10

This was my very first painting during my first oil painting class at the Carnegie Museum of Art.  It's a green monochromatic still life.  Monochromatic is the use of a single color with the addition of white and/or black.  In this instance, I did not use any black, the darkest of the colors is the just the pure, out of the tube color.  I believe that the color I used was Viridian Green.

This class was an introduction to painting class and many of the other students had never painted before.....so what did the teacher do?  She put up a striped ceramic cup, a striped background and an old-styled metalic, reflective tea-pot/pitcher.  I can definitely say that many of us struggled with the stripes.  What a pain, I used that striped container in another painting and decided after that that I would never include a striped subject matter ever again.

Medium: Graphite on Sketch Book Paper          Size:6x7

This is another house done on Pittsburghs South Side on 28th Street.  It's a tall 3 story house with aging brick.  It sits besides a pottery studio/shop and I was sitting around waiting to meet someone and had the time so I decided to make a quick sketch of the house.

It's probably one of the very few houses that actually has off street parking in this particular neighborhood.  There are a few other houses, but not many, it has a steeple like piece to the front corner and a couple of the windows have stained glass designs in them.  Perhaps this coming week, I'll try to draw the front of the house, I just found the verticals, horizontals and diagonals of this view to be rather interesting so I cut off the rest of the house.

Medium: Blue Col-Erase Pencil / Colored Pencil    Size: 8.5x11 white paper (x2)

This is a screen printing project that I've started working on dealing with Pop Art and since I'm from Pittsburgh...it's Pop....not Soda.  Haha.  Though Andy Warhol is the big Pop Art name in Pittsburgh and I draw a lot of inspiration from some of his works, these pieces are actually inspired by another contemporary local Pop artist named Burton Morris. 

Like most Pop artists, he takes popular everyday items and turns them into art.  His art though is fairly cartoony and is usually built three dimensionally so that it actually POPs out at you.

These two pages show how I work when developing a piece of art.  I came up with the drawing for the (soda) pop can and then I constantly rework it over and over and over, or until I come with a final design that I really like.  This type of process can take quite a while to finish since I'm still altering the design even after I think I'm happy with it.  I just want to make sure that I'm leaving no stones unturned.

Medium: Acrylic Paint, White Gesso on Kraft Paper   Size: 4ft x 5ft

This is an abstract piece that I did during an painting workshop.  The concept was to just try things that we had not done before.  It took me a couple minutes to try and figure out what I was going to do and was struggling when I decided to just dip my hand in the gesso.  As the gesso dried on the paper, I used tubes of paint to color in the negative spaces left between the handprints.  I held the tubes of acrylic paint as if they were a writing utensil and lightly squeezed as I drew and colored in the areas.  (That action was inspired by some of the artwork that Jackson Pollock created that pre-drip painting.)

Only one handprint is completely outlined and I'm still not sure that I'm happy with doing that, but I also think it was the starting point for color on this piece.

Medium:  2B Pencil on Strathmore 60lb Paper      Size:  6.25 x 8.5

This is a farmery-type character that I developed one day at Jeannette High School while on my prep period.  I was finishing up when the next class came and they seemed awe struck at the shading...which I thought was the most insignificant part =/

I really liked his overall movement and I don't normally shade my characters, but since I had the time I just went with it.  I think I had forgotten over time how bad a 2B pencil can smudge.  I'm very careful with my art, but when the students asked to see it, I guess I didn't consider that they would not handle it like me.  Thats what they make erasers for though =D.

This piece has 5 layers of sprayable fixative and still lightly smudges.  Sheesh.

Medium:  Oil on board            Size: 9x12

This painting is the view from my parents front yard.  They live in a rural area outside of Greensburg, PA and have fields that farmers use on almost every side of their house.  It's usually a very quiet area and good for painting though I sometimes find the amount of trees and fields to be very overwhelming in my paintings.

The only issue I have of painting this area is that there is very little large trees around their house that create good contrast from shadows and usually the sun light is everywhere.

Medium:  Col-Erase Pencil    Size: 5x6

This was an image made from the corner of Sarah St and 24th St in Pittsburgh, PA.  I was waiting for my fiance to come out from her pottery class/workshop and had about 15-20 minutes to wait.  I pulled out my sketch book and drew the empty corner lot and the 2 building next to it.  I also like the way the pole with the power lines broke up my view and decided to include it as well.

I've been drawn to urban landscapes over the past couple years and I'm constantly searching for new artists who use towns and cities as their subject matter.  I think Ed Hopper and John Sloan were probably the first two artists that really made me appreciate the way that light and shadow can be depicted across a structural surface.  Other favorites include Christopher Greco, Ron Donoughe and Ray DeFazio (the last 2 being artists local to the Pittsburgh area.)

I'm also sometimes leary of drawing these types of landscapes because of all the verticals, horizontals and diagonals.  After years of going to school for animation and working a couple years in that field as a freelancer, I now find that the Col-Erase pencils easily takes away all my worries when working.  I used these eraseable color pencils all through animation school and I now find myself using them whenever working with subject matter that I'm uncomfortable with, but they really do let me drop my inhibitions and just go for it.

Medium: Sharpie Marker       Size: 8.5 x 11

A random cartoon drawn while students were engrossed in a video during one of the classes I subbed for.  He was originally just going to be a guy, but once I threw the body onto the head, the background just came rather quickly.

I suppose he's a caretaker of that poor old cemetary, and I think the only thing missing would be a black cat.

Medium:  Sharpie Marker    Size:8.5 x 11

Another random cartoon of a guy.  It also includes notes of things that two students wanted me to draw for them.  "Something Amazing" - always one of the most difficult requests to fill and "Donald" as is Duck.

Medium:  Graphite      Size: 9x12

This is my new still life I've drawn.  It's an orange juice bottle and a small slightly warped bottle of contact lens fluid container.  I just felt like drawing one day and wanted to do something that I had not done in a while that was not cartoony in nature.