St. Patty's Card 2011

So here is a personal project I did for our annual St. Patrick's Day party. Originally, I had wanted to do a cartoon of Otis, but my dad was the one doing the graphic design and mailing of the invitations, and he needed something sooner, and I didn't want to just crap out a drawing from any of the sketches that I did, because I am not totally set on any of them. I take personal projects like these just as such...personal.

I did have one cartoon sketch I did recently that I wanted to show...I still am not totally sold on it though. The invitation is a scan of a print, and the printer my dad has in his office, plus his really old computer, kind of knocked out a lot of the quality from the original drawing. His computer also doesn't have a CD burner or flash drive (in case you were wondering). We bought him the latest model of Mac last year for Christmas (or I should say 2 years ago, in 2009), but he never uses it. I guess when dads say they don't want anything for Christmas, they mean it.

Speaking of which, it is also going to be my dad's 60th birthday pretty soon. I can't believe that almost 30 years ago, my dad was already having his second child...me! And 30 years later, instead of a grandson for him, I have this drawing I did...on newsprint...because I am an artist...with no money...reaching around in the dark...wondering what the hell I am doing...

The bottom sketch is the higher quality version done for the card in charcoal and conte. I took a photo about half way through to show the "shadow mapping" phase. There was some damage to the drawing surface (again) from the bits of rock in the conte. Other than that, there are just 2 errors in proportion, and one error in rendering...I still really like how it turned out, and I plan to do more drawings of this guy. Everybody loves him!