I'm a big jerk

Also I'm pretty lazy about doing color correcting on things that I've already spent hours correcting for print. But whatever! You folks deserve better.

So, I spent the last couple of weeks tidying up my portfolio for my Society of Illustrators interview for the Zankel Scholarship, and that entailed getting my ass in gear and doing some heavy alterations to a few pieces. I was totally going to be all ready to have them up here before I posted anything, but well, here I am. I'll post them some other time.

I had my interview on Wednesday with the other three nominees, and although I didn't win the whole shebang, it was a fun trip. Francis won. You know Francis, right? Francis. Congratulations also to Cassandra Diaz and David Jien, who also deserve some money.

Aside from doing color correcting and what have you, I decided to redo my Macbeth illustration that I posted a while back and to do a semi-accompanying Julius Caesar piece. Here's the Macbeth:


I think, in general, it's miles more successful than the earlier version. A lot of times when I'm doing a re-draw of a sketch, I like to post both side-by-side to determine if there's anything, anything, that I like better in the first version. In this case, I don't think that there's anything I prefer in the first piece. That said, it is not my favorite piece I've done and I can't quite place why. Hmm! I'm just going to have to keep working. Acrylic and digital.

Here's the Julius Caesar:



I was pretty pleased with this when I was doing it and immediately afterward, but I've soured on it quite a bit since then. I've been called out on my Sam Weber influence before, and so I'm going to make a conscious effort to distance myself from this certain style of mark-making that he's famous for. Nothing upsets me more than stuff like that, so I'm panicking and trying to resolve the issues.

I don't have any concrete ideas on what to do for a new project, but I've got a couple vague things kicking around in my head. I'm trying to keep up a pretty quick turnaround on my work over the summer so I don't fall into that ever-enticing lull that have plagued my past summers. Hopefully I'll have more to show for myself in the coming weeks as I hammer things out.