It isn’t often that I stray from my signature color palette. Recently I was commissioned to create a group of portraits for a family here in Chicago. I was asked to use an earthier scheme so I decided that it would be fun to change it up for once (and it’s always a treat to pick out new colors for my paint collection). So what I’m trying to say here is that if you like what I’m doing but want to coordinate your art with your curtains I am probably willing to accommodate you with color requests.
This week I worked on a small series of dog paintings. I wanted to have a recent example of what my pet portraits can look like and to also have some available on hand for the upcoming holiday season. If you have a request for a specific breed consider ordering a custom painting or shoot me an email with any questions at info@ornaglyphology.com.
This summer a client asked me to create an Egyptian themed painting using my characters as the subject. I am not posting this particular painting because it’s going to be a wedding gift. However while working on her painting I became interested in researching Egyptian gods and goddesses. It became apparent that I wanted to paint a few of these deities in my style. I find it fitting since I’ve been told that my ornaglyphs look like either hieroglyph’s or ancient Mayan art. After doing these 5 paintings I think I’d like to try doing more deities from civilizations all over the world (when I have some free time). If you are interested in seeing or purchasing any of these paintings click here.
I finally put 4 new paintings in the store. These are all small paintings that I created to carry around with me to festivals. There are more coming. I also knocked off $5 off my older paintings that are on paper.
One thing I have been experimenting with is putting my ornaglyphic writing on the backgrounds instead of in thought bubbles. I like this approach because it could still represent the characters thoughts or it could represent what’s going on around the character….or it could be awesome wallpaper…or……what do you think? This is now an option for custom portraits as well because it looks cool but not everyone wants a cartoon panel painting. Talk to me if you want to order a custom….info@ornaglyphology.com
Recently I was commissioned to create this painting that a client ordered as a gift for her beau. She asked me to do whatever I wanted as long as it took place in the restaurant that she sent me photo of. Her boyfriend owns this restaurant in Europe. I’m being vague because he hasn’t received the painting yet (but she gave me permission to post it). I have never been asked to do a setting in one of my paintings so this was a challenge but I am very happy with how it came out.
When I sent my client a photo of the painting she sent me a couple emails that made me super happy. She told me how she met her boyfriend and that the painting eerily depicts it. This is an excerpt from one of the emails she sent me:
One more thing, and then I’ll stop gushing. The night I met M. — I was a customer(!) and he was working front of house (which he almost NEVER does, he’s always in the kitchen) — I stayed at the restaurant for hours. I even helped him close, and we sat alone in the restaurant talking until very, very late at night. The two lovebirds in the painting (the way they’re looking at each other!) — I’ve decided they’re M. and I. Well, those lovebirds are not only sitting at the same table that M. and I sat at, but they’re in the exact same PLACES. It makes me smile.
The reason this is so cool to me is because I work very spontaneously. Basically I sketched out the scene then added the characters in afterward before I painted it. There was no planning involved, no thumbnails and no consultations between my client and I.
So this is the first time that I created a full film. Actually it’s more like one scene with credits at the beginning. It is very short, but i really just wanted to use it to brush up on motion tweens, titling and adding music. The process is documented below:
1. I played around with making a background in Photoshop which is the very first frame. After that I created about 30 more layers and changed the background bit by bit making it come to life.
2. I imported the backgrounds in flash and changed them into symbols. I used the alpha option to fade from background to background which gives it a neat stop-animation feel. In the future I think I want to continue morphing the background throughout the entire video…I don’t love how it just stops when the “stars” are flashing.
3. I looked for a song on the amazing Free Music Archive website. There is tons of great music to use and it would have taken ages to find the perfect song. They have an option to search by artists who allow their music to be synched to video. I clicked that. Then to narrow my search down I typed in different keywords that I thought described the atmosphere of what I had so far…and found “Somewhere Between Night and Sky” by A.M after listening to about a dozen songs.
4. I downloaded Audacity so that I could edit the song down to fit my very short video.
5. I found the character from my friends (kelly pelka) flickr account, I asked for permission first. It’s actually a metal sculpture with feathers that she and Todd Willing collaborated on. I put that in photoshop, erased the background and put the head and each wing on separate layers. Then I imported that into Flash and turned those into layers. Normally I am going to use my own artwork but I envisioned something by her in this background.
6. Then I created the titles which was a little bit of an ordeal. I hadn’t started with that so then I had to learn how to add more frames to all the layers so I didn’t mess up the rest of the video. This is where mistakes can really teach you how to do things right.
7. Then I added the feather head character. I learned that in order to make the feathers flap I had to edit them separately by double clicking them and adding motion tweens. I was going to have the head fly around but didn’t really like how it looked. Instead I have it start as an alpha layer and become more opaque then fade away as well as grow in size while staying in the middle. Another thing that was frustrating me was that the right feather had a white highlight around it, even though I had erased everything around it. I couldn’t fix it without going into photoshop so I just copied the left wing and flipped it.
8. Lastly I had to encode it so that I could upload it to YouTube. When you do this you have to export the file as a .mov or .avi file. Then you add it to Media Encoder where you can change it to a FLV file.
All in all I probably put in a good eight hours of work just for 20 seconds of video (and if I had hand-drawn everything that would have taken much, much longer).
A couple days ago I was surfing the web, checking out other sites that offer coloring books, and came across this great website called Birdorable. Arthur and Amy have created a large collection of birds (drawn in the style that you see in this image) which can be purchased on all kinds of merchandise (and many of them are quite humorous). They also include a blog, free educational coloring pages, desktops, e-cards, and more. And they also donate money to various bird-related causes.
