Recent Doodles

This is my first submission to Illustrationfriday.com. This week’s word (or concept, rather) is ’80s.’

There are more preparatory sketches for this piece than many others, since it was a special commission. I was asked only that it show a little boy, and involve trains.

This was a sketch for a large family portrait I had in mind. I happened across a book on the Kennedy family, and the cover had a photo of several generations of the enormous family all together. I thought I would try something similar, since I’d always wanted to do a piece with a lot of people in it. This would have 15. But I decided the time wasn’t right for it, and put it down. For now.

I can still make out some of the notes though, “D3″ for “Daughter #3″ “S2″ for “Son #2″ and a flow chart of arrows connecting parents (or circles that would eventually be parents) to their children.

Here’s a sketch that literally never got off the drawing board. I did use elements of it in later works though. I’m very drawn to fashion of the 1920s. I was going for that asian inspired ‘Evening Kimono’ look here.

This was the complete opposite of the background painting exercise. I wanted to do several quick studies of characters without working them into a background. The white around the figures is exposed canvas, which leaves a more weathered look. As these were simple sketches, I was ok with that.