« July 2005 | Main | September 2005 »
August 24, 2005
Sketchbook & Website Update
I was trolling around the web and stumbled upon Nate Williams' fabulous IllustrationMundo (Where illustration gets all the love!). Great site, and it got me inspired to freshed up my own site. I've been spending a lot of time at invisibleman, and I've been neglecting my poor old jonkeegan.com.
So I have posted a new spread of pages from my latest mini-moleskine sketchbook, added some new work onto the site and placed my most recent work in my featured illo section.
The days are numbered for my stogy old site, and I'm looking forward to ripping it's guts out and blogifying it's innards. Big fall project, ready to be tackled upon my return from our imminent vacation in Old Europe.
Posted by keegan at 03:35 AM
August 19, 2005
Step by Step
I'll keep the step-by-step ball rolling with a few frames of an illo that I just finished. This is part of a series I'm doing for a magazine. I will post the finals and the details shortly.
I have been trying to keep my process as much like traditional paint-on-paper as possible. Keeping the "underpainting" is an important step I did not want to abandon. I'm still tweaking the formula a bit, as I do more of these with the pencil drawing on top of color in photoshop. The thing I'm happiest about, is that my drawing gets preserved, and doesn't get buried under a layer of opaque gouache.
Posted by keegan at 06:08 PM
August 08, 2005
Rockwell Kent
Early November: North Greenland - Rockwell Kent 1933
Just got back from a breathtakingly beautiful vacation up in Boothbay Harbor, Maine. One of the suprise highlights was a quick stop in at the beautiful Portland Museum of Art, where I was delighted to find a huge Rockwell Kent exhibit. I don't know if it was all the salt in the water that I swam in or too many lobster rolls, but this show just floored me.
The first images that come to my mind when I hear Kent's name are the amazing black and white ink drawings of Moby Dick. I had always kept him firmly in the camp of the great American pen and ink illustrators of the early 20th century. This show completely enlarged my view of his work, and of his amazing life. This fellow was a grade-A swashbuckler, travelling to the world's most spectacularly desolate and awe-inspiring places, and surviving any shipwrecks that nature threw his way (at least one that I am aware of).
His glowing landscpaes of Monhegan Maine, Tierra del Fuego, Greenland and Alaska are meant to remove the viewer's self-consciousness, and just revel in the marvel of the scene. He was quite a modernist as well, producing playfully cartoonish shapes, yet preserving their deep cobalt blue glow and blindingly bright snowfields.
I'm looking forward to reading his wild tales of adventure as he sails to Tierra del Fuego in his book Voyaging. If you happen to be up in the area near Portland, ME be sure to check this show out. It runs until October 16th.
Amazon: Rockwell Kent: The Mythic and the Modern
Amazon: Voyaging
Link: Portland Museum of Art
Posted by keegan at 11:01 PM | TrackBack
Work in Progress
I'm working on this illustration right now, and I though I'd show a few frames of how it is evolving. I always loved reading Step by Step Graphics magazine, and I feel that tutorials are really one of the best ways to learn. I plan on doing some more in-depth tutorial stuff in the near future....I'll update this animated gif with a new frame when I complete it, which should be very soon...
In other news, The Lambkins, (my first book cover) is now on store shelves.
UPDATE: I have added the final frame.