Jimmy Dick

Jimmy Dick's birthday post card.

Join us at the house 9-16 for some pole dancing, booze, and general merriment. Contact me for the details and or I can mail you limited edition Karl-Art in post card form!

Heart Series Hotel

Wake Up Dead CD Cover Art

Wake Up Dead is a metal band that some of my friends belong to. I used a program called Alchemy to do a digital sketch of the beetle in a mirror mode that is one of Alchemy's features. I then brought it into Photoshop for some additional painting and texture.

Heart Series Hotel

This is just a compositional sketch. I going to be painting these on small metal tins with acrylic washes.

Druid Foxtrot Update

AW Golf Finished

I swapped out the bomb for a robot and widened the format.

AW Project Golf Update

Initial with out texture or shadows.
Texture, shadow, and color samples.

Druid Foxtrot

This is White Flag Delta recycled. It began with an ink wash, a build up of acrylic layers, and sanding.

AW Project Golf

80 lb. Vellum.
16 lb. Trace

This is the beginning of a process where I attempt to learn something new from a successful artist I admire. This time it is Ashley Wood.

I picked up a nice Pental brush pen, tracing paper, and vellum paper for the this illustration project. The vellum is noticeably more transparent than the tracing paper. The figurative sketch is getting closer to the loose expressive stroke that I want to achieve but it still feels sloppy and not deliberate enough for my liking. I'll keep at it. Once I get the line confidence issue resolved the plan is to add a masculine/industrial element in the background, then scan the images, color them, and overlay a subtle gritty paper texture.

An additional note on color:

I'm going to keep colors flat, limited, and saturate with an interest in stroke color opposed to just caning the line work in and leaving it black.

More to come.

White Flag Delta

Here the process was more time consuming than the end subject. This was an experiment involving acrylic washes (approximately twenty-ish) sanded down with a fine grit sandpaper and then built up again. I believe this will be recycled for a new painting.
Acrylic wash, ink wash, on 11x13 Masonite.

Jellyfish Echo

This is the beginning of a new commitment in Illustration where I have chosen to complete a piece every week that is new and different than the previous. Look forward to art emphasizing in new discoveries and more referential work.
Photoshop.
8.5x11 matte paper.
The original sketch that lead me to the finished product.
Graphite on 6x4 sketchbook paper.

Pinwheel Charlie Finished

Detail of Charlie. All of the line work and shading was done with a mechanical pencil and a lot of patience.
I used a piece of scanned sketch book paper as a texture, muted high value colors, and the multiply layer option to give the illusion of watercolor. I also chose to repeat Charlie in a pinwheel fashion to emphasize the subject and create a strong color pattern. This is going to be printed larger than the original sketch to show off the quality of the line.
Photoshop.
24 x 24 gloss paper.

Maternal Alpha Update

Detail of the offspring.
More layers of paint.

Piggyback Bravo Update

Detail of the piggybacker.
Warm acrylic washes that will be muted quite a bit before the end product.
Acrylic wash and graphite on 24x30 Masonite.

Pinwheel Charlie

Possible concept for the third Illustration project.
Photoshop sketch.

Maternal Alpha Update

More layers of paint. I selected a higher value background to better differentiate the figure and the ground. I also removed the tube form from the figures jaw. Originally I thought the line of that form created a nice flow and balance through out the composition but ultimately it was too distracting for me.

Piggyback Bravo

This is the second of the four part series I'm furiously working on for my studio in Illustration.
Graphite on 9x11 sketchbook paper.

Maternal Alpha

Masonite continued, mixed media, mostly acrylic.

24x30 Masonite.

This is the first of a four part series I'm doing for my studio in Illustration. The series uses the body as a unifying factor.
Photoshop sketch.