Queen Bee Sketch

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This was a quick sketch for the heroine of what will eventually be a series of paintings. The paintings will be a series of narrative still lives about bees, life, death, and war. I've been collecting objects over the last year: new, antique, natural, and handmade...to be assembled into compositions for the narrative to play out against. The queen (in the above sketch) is represented as a human, with her head and neck covered in a white-porcelain shell. The tentative title of the series is "Tangle: The We That Wage."

Sphinx I series sketch

Sketch on bond paper, 8"x10", title: "Speed Yer Head." This is the final graphite sketch for the piece. I'll do some test renderings on scrap paper before I move onto the final piece. I plan on blocking in the background with graphite power to keep the wisteria soft...another element I'll need to practice on scrap first.

Above is the initial digital sketch. I first drew it digitally so I could more easily play with the scale ( I probably should have made it bigger). I printed the image and then lightboxed it onto the bond paper.

These were some scrap paper tests for the design of the masonry. I only decided on this more complicated design after I was close to finishing the graphite sketch. It's one of the reasons the piece could have stood to be bigger, but I'll just stick with mechanical pencils for the smaller details and rendering...and maybe a magnifying glass.

I also post this personal work, in a stripped down version, on my second tumblr »

The taffy pullers WIP

This will likely be a new Butterbroda picture.  For a change, I decided to sketch out an idea by pencil, rather than stylus. Quite a few times I reflexively thought I could zoom, undue or move part of the drawing...it's funny how wired the brain becomes to certain tasks. Years ago I once found myself trying to "command-z" my way out of a spill on the kitchen counter...in my defense, I think I had a bit of monitor burn from many hours of nonstop computer usage.

Up and away

I finished off the Dark Horse cover and decided to go back to an old sketch. The colored part is still very much in the "slop" stage, so the shapes haven't been refined and the colors are subject to change, depending on the background that gets used.