DennisJones
eclectic artwork & other random things
Geaux Vous Tigres!
Last night our refrigerator died a horrible death, so Karen and I made the best of a bad situation and ate ice cream like there was no tomorrow. Today while waiting for the repairman to come save us, I scribbled this picture out for the LSU peeps in my family who seem to be pretty excited about this years football season.
Notre Dame FUMBLE!
As a good lil Hoosier who lives 30 minutes away from South Bend, all I wanted to do on Saturday night was see how Notre Dame did playing Clemson in a monsoon. To kill time as I waited for the game, I scratched out this picture. The game started and Notre Dame proceeded to fumble the ball away about forty-seven times. I’m not saying I was responsible for any of that… I’m just saying maybe next week before the game I will draw a Notre Dame football player leaping into the end zone with the ball securely tucked under his arm.
2nd Annual Walk Into My Future Day
I woke up on Wednesday… deja vu… and found myself once again standing in front of small groups of children showing them how they, too… can draw goofy pictures… just like me. It was the second annual Walk Into My Future Day at Huntington University. Here are a few of my exceptionally talented art students and some of the amazing pictures they created!
Back To The Future
I just got back home late last night after being on the road for three weeks. I’m currently working on several different projects for a bunch of interesting companies and I can’t tell you about any of it… other than to say there is a lot of really fun stuff currently in the works. Hopefully it will all make a grand appearance someday in the near future.
Halloween
It seems that summer is coming to a close and fall is just around the corner… I guess it’s time for Halloween pictures. I posted a few on my Behance portfolio site.
You can see them by Clicking Here.
Running With The Big Dogs
Concept work is always fun. This is a project I worked on a couple of years ago… a crazy little pack of finger dog puppets.
In concept work my role is not to create finished color artwork, but to develop characters and then show them in front, side, three quarter and back views. My sketches are then used by animators and sculptors to create 3-D versions of the characters. These are some of my starting ideas for the pack of dogs and a few of the 360 degree views.
Release The Hurt
Last Sunday the pastor’s sermon was entitled “RELEASE THE HURT” so I immediately started my sermon notes with a pixie and a viking getting ready to “release the hurt” on somebody. Much to my surprise, the sermon went in a totally different direction than I had envisioned.
The pixie painting (and video) was done on my iPad using ProCreate.
An Unsolicited Guitar Pick Tip
I suspect there are very few people in the world who look to me for guitar tips, but here’s something I came up with the other day that is sort of art related.
Because of my drawing process, I blow through a lot of kneaded erasers in a year. The reason being once they become overly saturated with material, they get sticky and don’t function very well as erasers anymore… but what do you do with a kneaded eraser when it won’t erase anymore? Throw it away? Not me, I save them… why? …because, you just never know when you might need a useless, worn out kneaded eraser to MacGyver something up with.
A few weeks ago, I was playing a fairly aggressive acoustic guitar riff on a stage that has big tv monitors and those things radiate serious heat. As the temperature on stage rose during practice, I had more and more trouble holding on to my guitar pick. When I got home that night I started experimenting with solutions to this problem. I tried drilling a hole in a pick so my fingers could sink into it and hold tight, but that destroyed the integrity of the pick and it quickly broke in two. With an exacto knife I scratched up the surface of a pick, but that didn’t seem to make much of a difference. I just needed something tacky on that pick that I could hold on to… hey, wait a minute… what about A KNEADED ERASER. I put a thin layer of worn out kneaded eraser on the pick and it worked like and charm! Give it a try if you struggle with the same issue.
Digital Painting With Procreate
Another quick picture (and video) I made on the iPad. I just discovered an option that lets you see the brush cursor as you paint in the ProCreate App… which doesn’t sound like a big deal, but for me was a game changer. Being able to see exactly what size your brush is on the picture is huge.
My Annual Ipad Digital Painting Rant
Once a year I seem to go on a rant about the iPad and how I wish it were a better device for mobile digital painting. All I’m wanting to do is collapse into a chair in my living room in front of a football game on tv, press a button and instantly be able to digitally paint during the commercials… is that too much to ask?
I do my professional studio work on a Wacom Cintiq hooked up to an iMac with Adobe Photoshop and I’m a huge fan of all these products. I have a smaller 12 inch Cintiq (which is great) to work with on the road, but it has to be powered by a laptop computer, has six kazillion cords to hook it up with and you have to be next to an electrical socket to make it all work… not exactly the spontaneous mobile painting experience I’m looking for in a portable device…
…so I keep trying to make the iPad fill this need, and while Apple’s not doing a whole lot to help me out with this (other than to provide the most fabulous, ground breaking, magical device ever) outside developers are quickly filling the digital painting void. I’m currently using a Wacom Intuos Creative Stylus 2. It has a finer point than a typical stylus, links to the iPad via wifi and delivers faux pressure sensitivity. The product I cannot say enough about is a painting app called ProCreate. It honestly has almost every Photoshop tool I typically use to paint with plus a few… like saving video of your work process.
So this is my latest experiment to see how well an iPad could work as a mobile digital painting studio.
First of all, a traditional sketchbook, mechanical pencil, iPad and Wacom stylus are all extremely portable. I still prefer to draw with a pencil and paper, so I snapped a photo of a drawing in my sketchbook using the camera on the iPad and imported it into the ProCreate app. Because I am just wanting to have fun (and don’t want to paint a background) I fire up the iPad internet browser, find an image and import it into ProCreate to paint on top of. You can see my painting process in the short video (exported out of ProCreate) below.
My conclusion: I was able to plop down in a chair, fire up my iPad instantly with the press of a button, snap a photo, surf the web, paint a picture, export video of it and when all was said and done, the most important part of the whole thing was …it was really fun.
Another Wall Mural
Here’s another wall I did for the church in Memphis.
On this one I was asked to use their existing logo and create a bunch of children interacting with it in some way.
Custom Church Wall Art
I recently had the opportunity to create illustrations for the walls of a really great church down in Memphis, Tennessee. They sent me photographs that mapped out all the appropriate wall dimensions. I imported those pictures into photoshop and roughly figured out what the different components would be for each illustration.
After the wall ideas were approved, I executed the finished art and sent it to the printer.
The illustrations were then printed out in sections and installed to the wall.
1970 Opel Kadett
My very first car was a pale yellow, 1970 Opel Kadett… basically a tin can with custom installed Cherry Bomb mufflers. It’s best feature was a gigantic, state of the art, AM-FM/8 Track/Cassette stereo that cranked out more horsepower than the poor little 4-cylinder engine ever did. Sadly, I have no pictures of my beloved car, so I had to draw it by memory…
…and according to my razor sharp memory, this is EXACTLY what it looked like.
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