Uncle David and Aunt Mary

These are two of my favorite people in the whole world, Uncle David and Aunt Mary. I can remember, as a little kid, taking trips to Utah to visit them. We always had a blast staying at their house. They are really fun to hang out with. My aunt called a little while ago and asked if I'd be willing to paint a caricature of my uncle for Christmas. As always, I replied yes!  So here is the final version... Merry Christmas Dave and Mary!

R.I.P Bowzer!

So every now and again I get to paint something that's a little more meaningful. Last month (November) my friend's dog, Bowzer, died from a coyote attack. Brent, Bowzer's human, asked if I'd be willing to paint a portrait of little Bowzer with some of my style thrown in for good measure. Of course I was happy to do it!

After I was done with the painting I asked Brent to write a little memorial to go along with this blog post...

"Bowzer had the heart of a lion and the body of a mouse. His entire existence was one of adventure and and kindness. He loved riding on motorcycles and going to the beach. He was the smallest dog you had ever seen, and strangers would often ask to take pictures with him. Bowzer will be missed, but we will always remember him for his courage and outgoing personality."


There you have it, rest in peace Bowzer!

Baxter and the Bumble Bee

Well, finals are over and I feel like an enormous elephant has been lifted from my shoulders,  that sounds like a good idea for an Illustration. Anyhow I don't know why but this semester kicked my butt. Glad be done with school for a couple of weeks.

One class that I had an absolute blast in was Will Terry's Children's Book Illustration! It's been really nice to cut loose and paint some fun pictures. This was my last painting for Will's class. I wanted to paint something warm hearted, hence the sepia pallet. Maybe I'll write up a little story about Baxter and his best friend the Bumble Bee.

Also, being that it is the holiday season I will give the first person that responds to this post a a free 11x17 print, of their choosing, from my artwork. Take care!

Tom Yorke speed painting

I've been studying for finals this week and I needed a break. Painted this real quick, about 2 hours. Time to hit the books again!

Lincoln Day-Lewis

This is my final painting for Advanced Illustration and I must say that I have had an absolute blast in this semester! For those new to my blog in the Advanced Illustration class, taught at Utah Valley University, we get to choose our own projects for the semester. I chose to paint caricatures from Hollywood movies.

For my last Illustration I chose to paint Daniel Day-Lewis from the new movie Lincoln, directed by Steven Spielberg. I saw this movie a few weeks ago, it is fantastic go see it!

I have always had a great admiration for President Lincoln and jumped at the opportunity to paint him, or at least a version of him. Hope you like this painting as much as I did creating it. Oh and here is a trailer for Lincoln...

Monsta Wreath!!!

Imagine that you are out for a night of christmas caroling with some friends and you come up to this door. Would you have the guts o knock? 

This was a relatively quick painting( a couple of hours), that I needed to do to recharge my batteries during preparations for finals. Hope you enjoy!

25 days of Christmas Munkey Cannon Style!

Hey everyone wanted to remind you to check out the Munkey Cannon blog for the 25 days of Christmas!

Mr. Toast Guest Blog!

Hey everybody! From time to time I have the awesome opportunity to guest blog on on some of my friends blogs. Today I asked my friend Trent (a.k.a Toast) Gersbach to do a little post on my blog! Enjoy...

Adam asked me to guest blog, so of course I thought to do a monster. I'd be lying if I said Adam didn't inspire me to do this piece. His monster drawings are incredible, of course pretty much everything he does is incredible.
I've recently graduated and I'm filling my time up with art and being with my beautiful fiancee Kristy. I work on pieces pretty regularly and I'm always trying to become better and to find my voice. I've found that being out of school was the best thing for this. I've always liked ink and watercolor, but no classes really offered much as far as those go. This really has been a good time for me to progress as an artist.

If you want to see more of my stuff go to mrtoastedtoast.blogspot.com

Here are a few samples of Trent's artwork:

Happy Hoildays!!!

Whatever you celebrate during this time of year Happy Holidays!

Check out Munkey Cannon Studious, for the month of December we are going to post up daily sketches of Christmas themed stuff with a little us thrown in for good measure. Have a good one!

Lightsabers!

We just finished our last big project in my concept design class at UVU. In this class we focus on creating designs for video games and movies. Our latest project is from the Star Wars universe. 

For each project we (the students) get to design certain elements for the game. I scored Lightsabers! I can remember as a little kid finding old flash lights and pvc pipes and trying to create my own lightsaber. Now years later, I once again get to design my own!

There's Something Fishy...

I have a good friend, Phil Cannon. He creates these awesome monster fish drawings. Being inspired by his work I drew this fish last summer and recently I decided to paint it. I've been on this kick lately of painting old sketches. It's a blast to revisit some of my favorite drawings and give them some more love. Hope you enjoy... Oh and case you didn't guess he is a voodoo fish loosely inspired by the Princess and the Frog villain Dr Facilier.

Mickey's biggest fan!?

Drew this sketch (bottom) of Darth Maul a few months ago. Ever since then I've been wanting to paint it. With the recent news of George Lucas selling his company to Disney, I thought this would be the perfect time to finish it. (ball point pen ink and marker with a little white colored pencil and of course photoshop)

More Sketch Madness!!!

I really love to draw! Most of my life I have had a pencil in my hand scribbling on something. When I was a little kid I was drawing so much that my parents bought me a large roll of paper. It had to be around10 inches in diameter and I went through that pretty quick. I wish that I had some more drawings from when I was a child. I have a box full of old retired sketchbooks from the last ten years or so. It's fun to go back through them every now and a again and see how I've grown as an artist. So keep those sketchbooks they are like an artistic journal! Maybe I'll scan some of those old drawings and post them up. What do you think?

 I wanted to share a some more recent sketches with all of you. Most of these have been posted on facebook, twitter, and instagram, but for those of you that don't follow me on those social networks here you go.  (Col-erase pencil, ink and marker on toned paper)

Jetpack Jack and the Beanstalk

What's everyone!? I wanted to share my latest painting from Will Terry's Children's Book Illustration Class at UVU. For this assignment we were to Illustrate a scene from the classic tale of Jack and the Beanstalk. I choose to take it a little further and take the story in to the science fiction realm and rename it Jetpack Jack and the Beanstalk. I know original, right?

You can see that I changed the composition as I moved into the final painting. I felt that there needed to be more visual interest in the image so I cut out jack and flipped him. Doing this created a nice X intersection.

I really enjoyed creating this and as with every painting I learned a lot and can't wait for the next project. Stay tuned...

Borderlands 2 DLC Concept Art

This is some concept art for an imaginary DCL (down loadable content) for Borderlands 2. This was actually a project for my Concept Design class taught at UVU. I was happy to do some  character and vehicle design  for the project. I had a lot of fun with this for sure! Check out Nate Call and Jared Salmond's blogs to see more concept art for this project.

Demo Painting...

Last night I had the opportunity to do a quick demo for the Illustration Club at UVU. For this demo I wanted to show my initial steps for creating digital paintings in Photoshop CS5. I had about 30-45 minutes to work so I had to work faster than I usually like to. This isn't meant to be a full tutorial but quick guide into my process.

Step one: I open a previously scanned image in photoshop.
Step two: I separate the line art from the white background.
Step three: I create new layer and fill it with 50-70%  gray. I place this layer underneath the line art.  Step four: I create a new layer and sandwich it in between the gray layer and my line art.This is the layer that I will start to block in my ruff values. When I'm blocking in the values I stay zoomed out and use a large brush. This step should only a couple of minutes.
Step five: Starts after I'm finished blocking in ruff values. For this step I create a layer above all of my art work, I call this my overpaint layer. On this layer I will paint out the line art. Also I start varying my brush size and start to zoom in and out to get a little more detailed. This is the layer where I start to blend the brush strokes.
Step six: When I am happy with my grayscale painting I start glazing color over the grayscale image. I do this by using multiply and color layers. After I have the colors blocked in I flatten my image and continue to refine the painting.

Killer Croc Sketch

Haven't posted some sketches in a long time. I drew this one while watching some college football this weekend with my wife. Stay tuned for more sketches to come! (prismacolor col-erase pencil, ink and Utrecht design marker on toned paper)

Walk'n with Walken

So I have to start off this post by saying that my wife finds Christopher Walken super creepy! I can remember the first movie that I saw him in... Batman Returns. He played Max Shrek a wealthy business man. I loved that movie and from then on I have been a fan of Mr Walken.

This painting was once again done for the Advanced Illustration class at UVU taught by Richard Hull. Painted in Photoshop CS5. I think this one could use a little more cow bell whad'ya think?

Gallery of Terror!

Every fall semester the Illustration department at UVU hosts the annual Gallery of Terror. It's a fun opportunity for the students to paint or draw something with a little halloween theme... (Col-erase pencil, Photoshop and Painter)

Nine Ball Corner Pocket

As some of you know I'm currently a student at Utah Valley University. We (the students) are really lucky to have such an amazing faculty here. I have a deep respect all of my instructors at UVU they are amazing artists. Also I'm really impressed with the wide variety of classes that are available to the Illustration majors. Sure there are the basic fundamental drawing and painting classes but we have some really cool classes like Concept Design. This class focuses on creating designs for environments, vehicles and props for video games and movies.

This logo was created for this class. For this assignment we were to come up with a fictitious company name and design a logo for our company. I submitted a couple of ideas along with my classmates. The class narrowed it down to a couple of really good names and then we voted on them. My idea was chosen and along with that I got the privilege of designing the final logo.

Freaking...Incredible!

I can remember several years ago seeing a trailer for this bizarre movie about this dorky kid in moon boots and large head of hair. I thought Napoleon Dynamite was hilarious. I know that movie was not everyones cup of tea but I loved it. To be honest I think that there is a little Napoleon in all of us.

This was painted for my advanced Illustration class at UVU taught by Richard Hull. For this class we get to choose our projects for the semester. The only catch is that they have to all have some kind of theme or connection. My theme was "hit" movies. I painted Spider-Man first and now Mr. Dynamite. If you like this or any of my other paintings on this blog please leave a comment I'd love to hear from you!

Darth Maul Sketch

I've been home sick this weekend with the stomach flu. My wife and son are sick as well, so we have been having a movie marathon. Can you guess what movie we watched when I drew this? (colored pencil, ink and marker on toned paper)

Amazing???

Let first start this bog post by saying that I really liked the new Spider-man movie. I thought it was a fun interpretation of the character. For me one of the big disappointments from the Rami Spidey flicks were the organic web shooters. I let it slide because it was great to see the web head on the big screen. When it was revealed that Spider-Man would have his trademark mechanical web shooters in the new film I was super stoked. It was really cool to see Peter build his iconic web shooters. I always thought that showed how smart and creative peter was. For this caricature I thought it would be fun to have Spidey caught in his own webs, probably due to some type of mechanical failure in his invention.

Lil' Miss Muffet

How's it going everyone!? I wanted to share my 1st assignment from Will Terry's Children's Book Illustration class at UVU. The project was to paint a scene from the nursery rime Little Miss Muffet. We could paint any scene from the story. I decided to paint the freakout moment when she sees the spider. I really had a blast painting this one!

Mitt vs. Barack!

A few weeks ago my friend Drew Milton emailed me and asked if I would be interested in painting a piece for the UVU review (the university news paper). He told that this would be an editorial piece on student voting in the up coming presidential election. So here we have Mitt vs Barack in a tug of war over a wolverine plush doll wearing a UVU t-shirt. For those of you that don't know the school mascot is a wolverine. I had a great time painting this and look forward to doing some more of these in the future.

Supes!

How's it going everyone? Here is another painting that I recently finished. This one was for my Dad's birthday. He, like me, has been a life long Superman fan. He grew up watching the George Reeves TV series and I grew up with the super friends and of course the Richard Donner/ Christopher Reeve Superman movie. Most of my family, both immediate and extended, could tell you all kinds of stories about me running around with my super cape that my mom sewed for me. Great memories! Anyways when thinking about a possible birthday gifts I thought this would be a fun one. Happy birthday Dad!

The Dark Knight

 I really  had a lot of fun painting The Joker so I thought that I needed to do a Batman caricature to go along with it.

I have a teacher/ friend by the name of Will Terry. His art work is really vibrant and amazing. I've taken several classes from Will at UVU over the past couple of years.  In Media Techniques 1 and 2 (both taught by Will) we explored traditional mediums such as oil,watercolor, acrylic and gouache. Often we would be painting from photo references. One of the many things  that I have learned from Will is to pick good quality reference. I've found that when I'm creating caricatures the reference photos that I choose make all the difference in the world.

Such is the case with Batman and the Joker. For The Joker I wanted to be a little more painterly so super sharp HD photos weren't much of a priority. When I painted Batman I wanted to have more detail so I searched for higher resolution images. Overall I'm happy with how they came out but you can tell how much more tight and detailed Batman is over The Joker.

I also have included an updated version of The Joker. I was showing the first Joker painting to another teacher/ friend Don Seegmiller. He had some great suggestions to improve and simplify my painting.  One thing that Don point out were some bad tangents in the back ground. He suggested to stray from the reference and recreate the prison cell. After talking with Don this is what I came up with. I tightened up the eyes and simplified the hair. Also I though it would be fun to have the shadow of the bars fall on character to create some depth. Personally I like the mood of this one better it's a litter more creepy.

Why So Serious!

I can remember as a kid going to see the first Tim Burton Batman Movie in the theater. I loved everything about it. Batman (Keaton) and the Joker (Nicholson) were so rad! When the Chris Nolan Batman movie was announced I was super excited to see the Caped Crusader on the Big screen again. Batman Begins was awesome! Christian Bale rocked and I was eagerly waiting for the sequel to come out. I was so nervous that it would suck, but when The Joker showed us his magic trick I new that I was in for one heck of a ride! Heath Ledger was so good as The Joker that he, in my opinion, stole the show from Bats. The Dark Knight joins the elite list of sequels that were as good if not better than their first film. Films such as The Godfather Part II, The Empire Strikes Back and Terminator 2! Why so serious! (Photoshop and Painter)

Grandpa Bailey

What's up my fellow bloggers!? Finished this painting a couple of days ago. This one is a little more on the personal side for me because the subject is my Grandfather. He is 90 years young and is the most amazing pianist. He's been playing the piano since he was 2 years old so He's had a few years of practice. He has traveled the world playing for sold out crowds all over.

On the Fourth of July my Grandmother, also 90, passed away. A couple weeks after the funeral Grandpa and I were hanging out at his house and he asked if I'd be interested in doing some art work for him. I replied with an enthusiastic YES! He gave me a reference photo and left the rest up to me.

My Grandpa has a terrific sense of humor. I can remember as a little kid coming over to his house and watching Laurel and Hearty. He and I would read the funnies (comics) in the new paper together. He always has a good joke to tell. So with that in mind I decided to have more fun with my reference and paint a caricature of him. Hope you all like.

Man's Best Friend

 Lately I've been doing a lot of value paintings. Over the years I've been taught by several mentors to focus on value in my work. They would teach that if I got the values correct the colors would work almost no matter what. When I paint I tend to think in black and white. I do this mostly because before I started painting I would draw with pencil and ink. When working with graphite or ink the real trick is to control your whites. "Don't let your darkest dark be lighter than your whitest white" is phrase that I hear often in school. I love this saying because it is the real key to balancing your image. As with everyone I'm still am learning with every drawing and painting and look forward to learning more and more.

Holmes

I was out to lunch the other day with my friend Phil. On the wall of the sandwich shop we were eating at was an old vintage tin sign with Sherlock Holmes on it. I thought it would be a great idea for my next painting. When I got home I quickly sketched out my version of Sherlock. Later that night I was supposed to do a digital painting demo and figured that this would be a great time to start the painting! It was a fairly quick painting and I finished it just in time for the art show last friday. (pencil, Photoshop and Painter)

The Art Haus

Sup everyone, here is a special invite to all of you. Come and join us at the Art Haus Show this Friday night. The featured artists are Phil Cannon, Salvador Medrano and Myself. There will be Original Art and prints for sale! So stop by and and check out some great art work.

Lets pick up the spare!

I was Bowling on the Wii last night with my kids. Thought out the entire game I kept on getting eight or nine pins down and would occasionally pick up the spare. While we were playing, I thought back to the old NES games of the 80's. When I was a kid my parents would take us to Toys R Us and I would walk up and down the video game isle and look at all the awesome covers.  I love how the cover art would sale the game. I'm pretty sure those covers were a huge factor in me loving cartoons, video games and comics so much. Before I went to bed I quickly sketched this out and painted it this morning. I thought it would be fun to turn the equipment in to cartoon characters. I wanted to paint in a background but ran out of time... maybe I'll turn it into a vintage looking NES game cover! (colored pencil and photoshop)