Punk Rock Festivus

Just a little Festivus post to round out the year. This piece is 8"x16" and was one of the first sketches on canvas I did 4 years ago. It sat unpainted in my closet that whole time until I chose to clean out the closet and stumbled across it. I had fun painting it. Cheers to all, I hope you all have a wonderful and prosperous 2013. ~M

Francis the Baby Naming Robot

Let me explain... Isabella was going to a Baby Shower and she asked me what was going to happen at the party. Seeing that my wife was out of the room I took the opportunity to regale her with the 'fact' that the star of a Baby Shower is often a 'baby naming' robot that gets to select the name of the baby. I went on to describe the local baby naming robot is named Francis, and due to some glitch in his programming he names all babies 'Francis'. This, of course, explains why there are so many people in our town named Francis... both boys and girls. This story was quickly recognized by Isabella as goofy fiction, but we both continued to run with it for a few weeks.

At one point I returned from a business trip to find that Isabella had crafted a 3 foot tall cardboard Francis robot for me. He now resides in the studio.

After Isabella made this awesome robot for me I decided I would have to paint Francis as well.

Pimp strutting with a cane while blowing binary smoke rings is pretty bad-ass but Isabella made an actual cardboard robot so she wins this round in my opinion.

Development Painting

This piece was a development painting I did for the project that I'm currently working on. We went in a very different direction in terms of the art style, but I really liked how this turned out. I was going for a 'children's book' look, a water colour washed feel that recalled older Saturday morning cartoons (like 'Fables of the Green Forest' Opening Intro ).

Something classic and timeless that doesn't really push at any new boundaries, nor does it really run the risk of offending anyone's sensibilities. Maybe a little boring, and that's probably one of the reasons the client ultimately passed on this approach. I liked it, and it's different than the other stuff I've been posting so I just wanted to toss it up here to break the monotony of my regular stuff. This piece is digital paint in Photoshop and I tried to really make it look warm and sunny like 11am on a hot Saturday morning in a really fun tree house... I may have overcooked the sunlight FX, as it looks like it could be Chernobyl outside.