Artist Ilana Yahav creates art from sand — and not in a sand-sculpture kind of way, but in a sand-painting kind of way.  The video below kinda blows my mind a bit; Yahav’s art falls squarely into that “how the hell did they think of that?” space in my head.  I can’t imagine how much practice she must have put in to figure out how to make the images look the way she wanted, how to manipulate the sand using only her fingers to get the illusion of depth she managed, and how to merge these images one into the next the way she did.  Impressive stuff!

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21st Century Breakdown is no American Idiot…but that’s really praising with a faint damn, as Idiot is my favorite album of this century so far, and Breakdown is certainly a worthy follow-up. Breakdown may not be as musically cohesive as Idiot, but that’s on purpose: more songs here venture into new territory and incorporate different styles and genres (though always maintaining vintage Green Day punk-pop sensibilities). Billie Joe Armstrong’s gift for catchy pop melodies — still among the strongest in the business — shines throughout these 18 songs, most notably on the title song, “Know Your Enemy”, “Peacemaker” and “21 Guns.”

Grade: A

(Apparently I should note the fact the illustration above was indeed by me — seems that wasn’t obvious at first, which I totally take as a compliment!)

So here we are again:  that time annually in which I tell Terry and all my various moms exactly how much I love and appreciate them.  I mean, I try to tell Terry that daily, of course, but it’s nice to have that one particular day in which we really focus on the moms in our lives and let them know how much we adore and respect them, how much we appreciate their keeping us, y’know, alive.  So Happy Mother’s Day, Terry and Mom and Margie and Beth! And to all of my mom friends out there!

And in celebration of the most important mom in my life, I give you a drawing I finished last night of my gorgeous wife, Terry:

So it’s been, um, six months since I updated the site.  At all.  That’s just…just…deplorable.  You have my sincerest apologies for being so incredibly lame with the updating.  I’m sure I’ve been very very busy the last six months — I know there’s something which must have kept me from posting anything here.

I’m going to try to be around for you more.  It’s not fair of me to string you along with a number of incisive, witty posts and then drop you like you’re aflame.  I don’t have time for a full post here right now, sadly, but I hope to be back later this weekend — maybe after I see Star Trek tomorrow.  But in the meantime, just to prove to you I have been doing something, I give you two pictures I drew of my lovely daughters:

More soon!

OK, so I have a confession to make.

I’ve been holding out on you.

During the last two or three weeks, as I’ve been steadfastly sticking to my post-a-card-a-day schedule (current couple-of-day break excepted), I’ve been working on the side, too, without telling you about it. It’s not that I was ashamed of the other stuff I was doing; quite the opposite, actually. But it sort of went the opposite way from the entire concept of the card project: it was fewer pieces that each took longer to do.

See, I’ve rediscovered my love for doing computer-based artwork, which I’ve been doing some way or another as long as I’ve been using computers, which is most of my life. At this point, I truly believe digital art is “my medium” much more so than paper and pen/pencil, as much as I love using those tools. I didn’t want to bring this up yet because I didn’t want to seem like I was abandoning my project after only a couple of weeks — even though the project is directly responsible for re-igniting my passion for digital art. So I kept up the cards daily — and seriously think I might well continue to do so — because I was trying to embed into my brain that sticktoittiveness I’ve been lacking for so long.

I have a number of pieces up at my deviantART page. I’m still learning what I’m doing with Adobe Illustrator; I’ve been using it off-and-on for eight years or so, but am only now really getting into the guts of what it can do. I’m also practicing drawing in Photoshop — there will be more and more pieces I do which won’t have any paper component involved at all. Yes, a couple of these pieces so far were started from photos, but I plan to do more pieces that originate entirely from within my skull — right now, I’m still learning, and using photos as starting points helps me get right to the “these are the things I’m working on” point.

I was feeling a bit strange about doing this work I was actually kinda-semi-proud of and not sharing it with you while continuing to post quick works I wasn’t at all happy with. The more I work digitally, the more I’m starting to see where I can go with it in the future: I can see myself illustrating a children’s book, or putting together a comic book or webcomic, in a way I’ve never quite been able to see before. It’s pretty exciting, really. Here’s the piece I just finished this morning, to give you a taste of the kinds of things I’ve been trying to do:

(Click on through to deviantART for a bigger version.)

I’m still not where I want to be. I’m still learning. But I’m happier overall now with the kinds of things I’m able to put together, and more excited about what I’ll be able to do in the future, than I’ve ever been before.

More to come.

For your extra Saturday enjoyment, I give you a piece I just finished coloring in Photoshop. I know I’m not allowed to draw Superman for my 3×5 Project anymore, but this isn’t part of that — in fact, I didn’t want to draw Superman at all, but Kelsey pretty much begged me to, so I did. And since it’s not part of the project, I decided to take it further and finish out the colors digitally.

Superman by ~AllenHolt on deviantART

The coloring in this piece was mainly me trying to figure out a process for digital coloring/painting that’s going to work for me. I’m not all the way there yet (which I think is obvious looking at the final piece), but I’m getting closer. The original drawing was done in pencil, inked, then scanned and manipulated in Illustrator; the coloring was then done in Photoshop. I learned a lot putting this piece together and I hope to be able to learn a whole lot more about using Photoshop as part of my artistic process soon.

Also: I went and got myself a Deviant Art account for posting my stuff. If any of you happen to have accounts there, feel free to let me know!

For too many years, I wanted to be Jim Lee.

I fell passionately in love with Lee’s amazingly detailed and dynamic artwork and design sense while he was the artist on Uncanny X-Men in the late 80’s and early 90’s, right before he and five other über-popular artists left Marvel to found Image Comics. I’d been drawing comics-style artwork for most of my life, but Lee quickly became my number-one influence [1]: I used Lee’s artwork as reference material, as inspiration — and ultimately as the yardstick I measured my own work against.

And I’m wondering just how much damage I might have done to my artistic sensibilities over the last fifteen years by doing so.

Somewhere over the years I lost much of my desire to draw, and I think that a lot of that was because I was unfairly judging the quality of my work against unrealistic standards. My expectations for myself were so high that I couldn’t possibly achieve them — if I couldn’t draw something that was somewhere at least approaching the the ballpark of Jim Lee quality, then the drawing was shit.

Thing is, there’s only a handful of artists out there that I think are in that ballpark, so expecting myself to be able to pull that off and berating my skills when I couldn’t… well, that wasn’t being very generous to myself. I think I judged myself so harshly that I found myself not wanting to draw at all. It’s not fair, of course — I’m not Jim Lee, and I never will be.

But when I say “I’m not Jim Lee,” I mean more than just that he’s a better artist than I am, though I think that fact goes without saying (not knocking myself there, just being honest). I also mean that my natural art style, the style that tends to come through when I’m not forcing a particular look on it, doesn’t resemeble his work at all — my “voice” differs from his considerably. I tend toward more open shapes, toward thicker and more angular lines, toward less rendering and cross-hatching. For years, though, I defined “professional” in my head as “Jim Lee-like” and tried to make my stuff look more like his. It’s like I was trying on a series of suits, each of which might have looked fantastic on someone else but none of which were flattering on me — but if I just kept trying them, dammit, I’d find one that fit perfectly.

Problem is, I never found that perfect suit and quit looking altogether.

Now, though, I want to get back into drawing again. I miss it. Not drawing has never felt right, but every time I’ve tried getting back into it, I’ve run face-first into that same wall of anxiety over and over again — I feel like I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t know how to draw in any style other than this one that doesn’t feel natural to me, and I hate it.

But no more. I’m reclaiming my “visual voice,” I’m no longer looking to Jim Lee as an influence, or at least not as a major one. I’m rejecting that overly-rendered style as Just Not Me; there are plenty of artists I can learn from and gain inspiration from whose work more closely mirrors my natural style. I want to try to separate myself from the frustration and self-flagellation of the last ten years and try something all-new, all-different. I want to enjoy drawing again, both the process and the results.

I don’t need to be Jim Lee. What I need to be is the best me I can be.

[1] Funny thing: Even as I took him on as my primary influence, it seemed obvious to me that we were both influenced by the same artists when we were starting out (mainly George Perez, John Byrne and Arthur Adams). He just has way, way, way more talent than I do and was able to synthesize those influences into something new and exciting while I… didn’t.