Self Portrait: Homage to Norman Rockwell

For the final in our Figure painting class, the assignment was to choose a master painter and try to emulate his/her style either by color pallet, brush strokes, technique etc. I chose Norman Rockwell mainly because of his use of story in all his paintings and the color pallet he uses.
Out of all his paintings, I went with "The Letterman". Back in the day, I wanted to play high school football with some of my friends but my Mom just wouldn't let me do it. I figure since I couldn't play football in real life why not make it happen through the world of art.

Just a side note, I added the background because my teacher stressed throughout the semester about having a background so I didn't want to risk leaving it white especially on the final even though Rockwell kept his white/off-white.

Watercolor Portrait

A couple of weeks ago I discovered I still had watercolors when I did a piece for class. I've been working mainly with oils and acrylics this past year so it was nice to use this medium again. I decided to take a break from my Maya project and do a head study using watercolors. If you can guess the celebrity then Kudos to you

Unlucky 13

This was done for a class project. Our class is creating a "zine" about "That ONE Guy". We thought it would be a funny topic to illustrate because we all know "that ONE Guy". We all have said that phrase more than once in our lives. .. "Remember that one guy who always that head band" or "You know that one guy who always wears a green jacket, yeah, that guy!". We've all said it. Well I decided to do my illustration as more of a tribute page to my favorite quarterback. Dan Marino is known as that one great NFL quarterback who never got a ring.

Crew of You

This was done for my Conceptual Illustration class. The assignment was to create 6 characters based on yourself using your personality, life experiences, likes and dislikes as a basis for each. Once the characters were made we had to come up with a story using all 6 characters. The final illustration had to illustrate the climax of the story.

Fun Fact: Charles Schultz did this same thing to create the famous "Peanuts" Crew. Many of the characters were inspired by his own life

Spring Time

I was inspired by another artist who painted a portrait with birds playing with strands of a girl's hair. I was thinking about doing the same thing but then i thought about using butterflies since it's already Spring.

Pac Man

After being partly done for month now, it's finally finished. While taking a break from school projects, I was looking in my folders and noticed my unfinished Pac Man drawing thats been neglected for quite some time now. I decided to use my break to finish it off. For those of you who don't know who he is, he's Manny "Pac Man" Pacquiao. Former junior featherweight champion of the world from the Philippines.

Sketchbook

Its been a while since I last posted some work so here's some stuff from my sketchbook. Most of them were done at school and at Starbucks.

Gladiators Ready!

I caught the premiere of American Gladiators and I was surprised by the female gladiators. They're not what I expected to see. My favorite right now is "Crush". Don't let her innocent smile deceive you cuz she can actually kick some butt. I found out she's a MMA fighter specializing in Muay Thai. That's AWESOME! For this drawing I had some tonal laying around that I decided to use. I've seen comic book artists use a technique where they use pure black on tonal paper then add in the whites. I was afraid of using pure black on some places so I ended up using some black pencil to add another tone.


This one I did a week after other drawing. I was watching American Gladiators agian as I was sketching this out in my sketchbook. I splashed some color in afterwards on photoshop.

Lets-Go-Warr-iors!

After 12 or so years of watching the Warriors struggle even with big names like Starks, "Mookie", Jamison and Arenas, it's nice to finally see a group of guys that mesh well together making them playoff contenders for years to come. I always wanted to draw one of them so heres one as kind of a joke. If you're a Warrior fan, the Stephen Jackson cartoon should make sense. The other, my friend had a Warrior Girl calendar so I decided to draw the cover girl for the heck of it.

A couple of friends and I went to see a celebrity charity game last week at the Oracle and guess who we saw... Stephen Jackson, Monta Ellis, Donald "Turk" Faison, Terry Crews and many more!

Chewy

Just messing around with my Wacom Tablet. My main focus was to create an image that had more of a painterly look to it rather than a digital rendering. Why chewy you might ask? It was one of a couple images on my Desktop. I was gonna use it as reference for my Xwing but never had time to model a Really Simplified Chewbacca. Thought I'd use it before I erase it.

The Highwayman

This is a design I came up with for Alfred Noyes' poem The Highwayman. Its for a group blog that my friends and I started just to keep productive and to see each others creations for each topic.

Final Projects

Here are my Final Projects for my 2 art classes this past Fall, Beginning Maya and Intermediate Paining.

Beginning Maya

For our final we had to model a vehicle of our choice and animate a turnaround. I chose the X-wing from Star Wars. I think I had a little too much fun working on it. As it was rendering, I was watching A New Hope for sound effects just so I could get it as authentic as possible and because Star Wars is awesome!


Intermediate Painting

Our Final was based on the concept of "Self Reflection". I chose to play with Norman Rockwell's idea of Triple Self portrait. I noticed he had a Spartan Helmet on his easel so I used it since SJSU are Spartans. I thought it would be cool having me paint myself as a Spartan. As I was painting, my teacher told me to change the Spartan into the style of Francis Bacon. At first I didn't like the idea, but then it started to become fun painting in someone else's style. It was funny seeing people's reaction as I was painting it. People thought I was bottling up feelings haha. I thought it was interesting how a style can totally change a mood in a painting.

This is still a work in progress because there's a lot of things I need to fix up.

This is a close up of my back. My teacher got me to use my palette knife as an alternative to a paintbrush. Most of "me" in the foreground was done using a palette knife just to pop myself out more from the middle ground. I used it sparingly throughout the painting so that it looks like one consistent piece.

Merry Christmas!

Just a little quickie I did for Christmas. I wanted to avoid using the the usual Christmas Icons so I went with little Ralphie from A Christmas Story. Merry Christmas Everyone!

Happy Birthday Arissa!

I made this card for my Goddaughter who just turned 3. Shes a big fan of Dora so I thought it would be cool to turn her into a cartoon with one of her favorite characters. It went well with the gift that I bought her. If you're wondering what "Ninong" means, its "Godfather" in Ilocano and Tagalog.

Iron Man

This was done a few months back but I just happened to stumble upon it yesterday and decided to share. At the time, my friend told me there was going to be a new Iron Man movie so decided to paint him for fun. I had no idea how the movie version was going to look like so i had to find other images to work with that would look realistic. I actually ended up looking at a toy figure for this digital painting.