It’s mine. It’s twisted. It’s art for its own sake. I draw things as I see it on paper and I draw things as they are in my minds eye. It’s sorta of a Magical Realism piece. There’s no need to straighten anything out just entangle my intertwine.
I’ll let you interpret the rest and allow you to see whatever you see. I’ve told you too much already, but a penny for YOUR thoughts.
NOTE: MAKE SURE TO MAKE IT THROUGH THE ENTIRE POST FOR ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY/GRADUATION GIVEAWAY RULES!
On the 21st day of October 2008, Jay Zuck’s Sketch of the Day was born with the digital painting the Battle at the Bridge. It was the opening salvo in a long journey of near daily art at least through my knee surgery in August. The pace slowed during my recovery and the rigors of my last semester of art school soon followed, but the principle of daily art remains.
When this site began over a year ago, I could not have imagined the number of amazing people who would honor me with their eyeballs, comments, support, encouragement and friendship. You have entertained my sense of imagination and art and I am so thankful that so many of you have done so.
According to Google Analytics, JZSOTD has been visited 404,056 times with 566,862 pagviews at the date of posting. We have had an Alexa ranking peaking in the mid 50,000′s worldwide and maintain hundreds of loyal subscribers. Numbers of course are just a metric and not nearly as meaningful of both new friends and old that have not only been a part of my artistic life and experience, but enriched it as well.
In honor of my one year website anniversary and art school graduation, I want to look back at some of my favorite art posted in the last year by category. Many of these pieces appeared on my Grad Fair Wall and I wouldn’t want to deprive any of my online following.
The Battle at the Bride was where it all began. It still remains one of my favorite digital paintings. I am reminded of staring down the foes and obstacles in my way with absolute confidence that they will be overcome.
Stumbling on to another digital painting On the Docks had me seeking some clarity in the online universe.
I really enjoyed exploring and reinventing some of the iconic subject matter of the Wizard of OZ. I can’t pick one favorite and have settled on three. First the winged monkeys of Oz…
And then the shocked Dorothy witnessing the Scarecrow Crucifixion near the beginning of her journey down the Yellow Brick Road…
Finally, the Wizard must get his due…
I always try to make it so that my layout sketches tell a story. Often the tale that I have dreamed up is more complicated than I can express in a single drawing, but I am often amazed about how much can be captured. The more I can encapsulate often the more successful the drawing.
I called this layout “It Came From Outer Space.” The rampaging alien is a combination of cat and caterpillar.
The next piece I entitled “Rabbit War.” In addition to all the fun I had drawing rabbits, it included the goat-taurs which where among my favorite character designs as well. The rabbit warriors are looking to reclaim their brethren, but the goat-taurs stand opposed and defiant. Of all my layouts this was perhaps my favorite piece from a composition standpoint.
Later in the year, I traveled to Hawaii to scatter my Nana’s ashes. I was inspired to draw something with a Hawaiian flavor and Big Kahuna’s Kite Shop was what I came up with. Big Kahuna, the best kite maker in Hawaii, works his craft creating enchanting kites of all varieties.
Returning to the coming alien invasion which is never far from my mind, I envisioned some aliens investigating what in the world is the deal with the prototypical mean girls. I could never figure them out myself, but perhaps some alien intelligence with roving eyeballs would fare better.
The Frog Shaq submarine “dive thru” was another fun layout sketch. With a smack of a frog’s tongue a secret sauce that brings submarine operators from far and wide is born. The Skipper and Gilligan-esque characters can’t get enough.
Journeying from lighthearted underwater depths we emerge on the cracked desert floor in the Shadow of a Carnival. There is a certain amount of wonderment a child finds at the Carnival, but there are sometimes a hint of the dark underbelly of animal slave drivers and evil clowns. Here, a carefree boy enjoying his cotton candy enters the menacing shadow of the ring master.
The next series of layout sketches are among my most recent art and center on the story of a young boy named Jack who having ventured down river on Halloween night is now lost in the woods where he comes across wonderment, wisdom, fear, and darkness. First, Jack warily listens to the advice of a Shaman who advises him that he is being stalked by a mysterious witch.
Without paying due head to the Shaman’s sage advice, Jack not knowing who to trust runs away in fear. He is pursued by spirits, but misunderstanding their protective intent he is pushed deeper and deeper into the woods.
Finally, Jack comes upon a kind-looking stranger girl. He knows nothing of the witch hiding behind the cute facade and struck by a magical and inviting house Jack is heading right for the Witchhouse Cypress.
Jack continues foolishly inside the witchhouse while the rest us, hope he sees the truth in shadows.
I have been thinking about another layout sketch where Jack escapes the Witchhouse Cypress, but in the mean time the conclusion…
As I said, a good layout sketch is about telling a story and trying to entertain you boys and girls with cool visuals. The loyal JZSOTD fans have been down a lot of rabbit holes with me and as always there are many stories left untold.
Beware of attempts to sap and impurify your precious bodily fluids. If ever there was a character begging for a graphic interpretation General Ripper from Dr. Strangelove was it.
There was also the Barge of the Dead in search of an increasing numbers of souls to fuel an evolution towards darkness which was another graphic goodie of mine.
And concluding this graphic graphic tour in a similar shadowy vein who could forget the outstretched tendrils of…. THE DARKLING!
A lot of my work incorporates elements of character design in some fashion. The combination of goat and man in a creature I termed the goat-taur was one fun example.
It was also a great pleasure to play around with some Scurvy Dogs and try to an encapsulate the pirate persona. Speaking of which I really need to finish the layout sketch with these mateys.
Since character design is such a broad category, there is a lot of potential crossover with some other categories I want to cover in the wide ranging look back on the year that was, but one of the true highlight of my year was working on the Eben 07 webcomic as a guest artist. Certainly, we never saw O’ Seven like this before…
Or for that matter his nemesis the Mountain Troll…
I think I summed up my feelings about the nature of fear best in my post accompanying the painting Fear of the Dark. There is something about the perspective of fear and darkness I have relished since childhood. Halloween in particular has always been my favorite holiday.
Embrace the dark and fear not of fear my friends.
When I talk about just letting my art flow, this is what comes out…
I term any art I do originating from this free-flowing style, Simian Style. Simian Style in an ancestral, instinctive, and primordial way is the heart and soul of my art. The pieces are generally in pen or some kind of ink. While many shapes and forms are intended, some spring forth organically and I get incredible satisfaction from seeing people interacting with my art and seeing whatever their mind interprets.
When life and art are combined, the results can sometimes be very rewarding. This landscape I painted at the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden sits prominently in my apartment and gives me just a bit of atmospheric enjoyment everyday.
Pirate’s Parlay was another painting I did from live models. It was quicky excercise, but came out pretty good.
And lastly, a little talent for painting a Scot which was no doubt a product of my partial of my Scottish ancestry.
Ralph Steadman was the first to bring the visual dimension to Hunter S. Thomson’s Gonzo Journalism and in the context of doing some character design myself, the rich psychedelic muse could not be denied.
I had a couple different takes on Dr. Gonzo, but I settled on the devilish version a la HST’s adrenochrome trip.
When I was originally playing around with designing my variant of the Gonzo-styled universe, I was thinking about a setting rooted in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The mutant hitchhiker with three arms fit well within that general concept and of course, the fortuitous second thumb adds just the right amount of extra desperation.
The character design of Raoul Duke aka Hunter S. Thompson was a particular challenge. I kept pushing and pushing and pushing and after a lot of drawing this is what I came up with.
I also wanted to create my new version of a Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas movie poster. Behold HST basking in warm (possibly radioactive) glow of a futuristic Vegas.
And finally a little Fear and Loathing painting which I actually painted pretty early on in my Gonzo excursion.
Knowing of course you can never stop in bat country, we forge ahead with that particular “fantastic universal sense” of doing right and winning.
This painting I entitled “At the Precipice” and it shows a man at the edge of a void reaching out into the spectacular and brilliant spiral of the unknown. The painting may be a little on the older side, but it has great significance to me and maybe more so today given the ocassion.
I have spent a lot of time lately both thinking about the future and looking into the past. I have worked very hard constructing my professional portfolio and preparing for my grad fair which in some fashion will launch a long career in art I have aspired towards for many years. We have had a great first year here at JZSOTD and I am hoping the new year will bring even greater things.
To usher in JZSTOD’s second year online and in celebration of my graduation I am offering a free giveaway. Anybody who drops a thoughtful comment, subscribes to my RSS feed, submits or votes for this post on ANY social media site (assuming you’ve enjoyed the retrospective), or links this post or the JZSTOD homepage will receive one entry in our giveway for each discrete act. For instance, if you post a comment, tweet, digg and provide a link that will give you four entries. Send me an email at jay@jasonzuckerman.com or tell me what you did in your comment. Don’t forget to give me some contact information on you so that I can inform you if you won!
To three lucky winners chosen at random, I will provide a signed high quality print of any piece of art on this webpage shipped directly to your doorstep. Additionally, to ten others also chosen at random, I have some sick new post cards featuring some of my best art that has your name on it. The giveaway is running through December 26th at 11:59 pm.
Finally, let me give some thanks to some of my favorite creativity-loving souls and webmasters online (certainly not a complete list and in no particular order):
Here’s to a great new year filled with some great new art! And let us never forget to continue to be free create and grow roots.
Art Center Grad
It’s Friday the 13th and we’ve got a brand spankin’ new post: my version of a Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Movie Poster.
I’ve been working on this for a while now. I’ve been super busy getting ready to graduate school and I found the time to finish up and polish this piece which I am pretty proud of. It’s kinda the culmination of all of my Fear and Loathing posts.
For those who are wondering, yes that is not the original Ralph Steadman lettering from the book or movie poster. I made it myself with ink, brush, and watercolor paper. It was fun as hell trying to recreate such iconic lettering. I used the original as reference, but I wanted to bring something new to the table.
Below are some of the steps I took to creating the poster and character, Enjoy
above is a rough layout sketch, below is one of the final thumbnail drawings for the poster
below are some thumbnail sketches and silhouettes when I was designing the character Raoul Duke
To whet your appetite for daily art, a snippet of something I’m working….
If your not sure what the hell this is, welcome back to bat country!
“We’ve gotta get out of here. I think I’m getting the fear” ~ Dr. Gonzo
This is the sketch I came up with for a Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Movie Poster. I shaded it a bit in Photoshop to make it look punchy. I cropped out the bottom because I have yet to put the logo in it. I have already started the final colored version of this and it should be coming around fairly soon so keep your eyes open.
Well, today I’m also having knee surgery which sucks. Hopefully the doctor will be able to fix the problem. It might be hard to post art while I’m recovering, but I’ll be back…..
Many moons ago, I was working on the tonal study for a layout sketch of this Hawaii beach kite shop you see partially digitally painted today. Obviously, it is still a work in progress, but all my selections are made so the boring technical stuff is over.
The selection process essentially allows me to stay true to the shapes I created in my original drawing. With these shapes all selected out, I am able to paint within a particular selection which is a pretty powerful tool.
I am having some trouble thinking of how far I can push the colors for the kites in shadow. That is to say, how much color can I get away with without drawing attention away from the main kite the little girl is playing with and the story which is supposed to go along with that.
I refer you back to the origins of the sketch in original layout “Welcome, to Big Kahuna’s Kite Shop” and the first tonal step. I still have a ways to go, but things are coming together.
Below are some sketch concepts for the prop design for the kite shop. Enjoy…..
“The possibility of physical and mental collapse is now very real. No sympathy for the Devil, keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride.” ~ Raoul Duke
In this final Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas character design of Raoul Duke, I wanted to spend a minute recapping the journey. Most of the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas work I have posted on the site have been part of a class assignment for a character design course I have been taking. I was instructed to choose a story and to create my own designs of the various characters.
This may be my last character design for my class, but it doesn’t mean this is the last one I will draw. I do plan to rework a few thing here and there including the Dr. Gonzo character. I will probably also make a movie poster.
From the Hitchhiker to Dr. Gonzo and from the Vegas Lizard People to Raoul Duke, all the different character have been a lot of fun to draw. There are a few other characters that I’d like to tackle in the future including the cops and Lucy, but if anyone wants me to do a particular character in Fear and Loathing I am open to suggestions.
I may also show some more tweaked versions of these characters along with some other conceptual sketches from time to time, but for now this is the last one except for the completed reworked version of that “ rotten attorney” Dr. Gonzo.
You may be seeing a little less Fear and Loathing soon as I will begin to move on to some other things, but fret not as one thing you can count on is that more sketches are on the way.
“Where there is no imagination there is no horror” ~ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
I remember growing up thinking, wouldn’t it be cool if one day there was a zombie outbreak and life changed dramatically. I still don’t feel this way, but I remember wishing something would happen. It didn’t have to be zombies. It could have been vampires or werewolves. Just something crazy so life wouldn’t feel so mundane. Now I create art to keep things interesting.
I’ve never been a huge fan of the zombie movie genre, but I am a fan of horror. I remember when I was little and walking into a bookstore and being mesmerized by the book covers that had the scariest monsters on them. I would look at the book having no clue what it was about, but I would beg my mom to buy them for me. It was the same way at the video store.
I even remember enjoying my nightmares. The earliest art I could remember making was always horror. My mom would look at my work and say why don’t you draw something pretty like rainbows or butterflies and I would just laugh. Since then I have expanded my horizons, but I guess you could say horror was my gateway drug into creating art.
I was thinking about posting some clip from some zombie movies, but I am unsure which ones are really best. The only zombie movies I remember liking were Thriller, 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead. I know there are a few others I liked, but nothing else immediately comes to mind. I guess just a couple of faceless movies that were on in the wee hours of the night sparking my imagination.
What I am a big fan of is the Robert Kirkman comic: The Walking Dead. Now there is some good reading. The stories being told in that book just blow me away. Stories like that remind me why I’m glad we live in a world without zombies (or do we?).
So many of us live our lives on a routine. It’s like we’re sleepwalking through life. It’s the same thing over and over and over again. Consequently, our brains all too often vacantly skip from moment to moment and our lives just fly by us.
I hope today’s zombie sketch messes with your head a little, but I hope you take the next step to evaluate why you find this interesting, disturbing, or whatever. For me, the answer is simple. It’s reminder that’s it’s high time time for all of us to start changing our patterns and explore the possibilities life has to offer us lest we become the mindless monster of passive destruction rather than a thinking affirmation of the creative force. I cannot express how important it is for all of us to find that spark in our lives which will stop that unconscious drift so our brains can turn on again.
Right now I want you to remember what it was like to be a kid and the joys of discovery clear eyes could make. Maybe if we could all look at the world again with new eyes, it wouldn’t appear so mundane and we wouldn’t be too afraid of stepping out of our little boxes. Maybe we would find ourselves excited to make this world a better place, start using our imaginations and no longer be content with the status quo.
The sad truth is that there are obviously worse futures than a zombie outbreak and we are seeing hints of it everyday. Maybe I’m just babbling, but I know we have no future if we continue to be zombies. I also know I’m just as guilty as anyone else so I’m going to try and follow my own advice and start living.
With every piece of art I guess you could say I am trying to create a new vision of the world: a world inside the world. By coming to my little corner of the internet, you participate and interact with my creative force. You empower my ideas with your thoughts and perspective, but I also hope I am empowering you to see things a little differently. You may not always manifest your own vision as I would, but I would like to think you carry that audacity to create into the world and that you make real what only you can see in your own life with your own imagination. I aspire to be a part of that.
I want you to know that all of you are capable of being artists as long as you make that affirmative decision to bring your imagination into the world in whatever form inspires you. If you can accomplish that, you are the farthest thing from a zombie imaginable.
Well, I hope you enjoyed today’s post. You never know what you going to get here at Jay Zuck’s Sketch of the Day so stay tuned. There are few projects in the works I’m really excited about showing you guys. I guess that’s all for now, so I’ll leave you with some awesome music from one of my favorite DJ’s: D-Styles. It’s a little song called Murder Factory from the amazing album Phantazmagorea.
“I’m the one who steps from the shadows, all trenchcoat and cigarette and arrogance, ready to deal with the madness. Oh, I’ve got it all sewn up. I can save you. If it takes the last drop of your blood, I’ll drive your demons away. I’ll kick them in the bollocks and spit on them when they’re down and then I’ll be gone back into darkness, leaving only a nod and a wink and a wisecrack. I walk my path alone… who would walk with me?” ~ John Constantine
Today’s post was a exercise in mimicking a noir style based off of a Hellblazer comic book cover. It all started as an ink sketch in my sketchbook.
I actually drew it a while back and completely forgot that I did. I was flipping threw my sketchbook when I rediscovered it and I was greeted with the satisfaction one feels when finding lost money in a coat pocket.
I decided that it would be fun to scan it in to play around a bit with Photoshop. I experimented a little with partially inverting my line work which added some interesting textures. I also started to add some highlights to make the character pop and then overlaid a brick texture to give it a dark alleyway look. Finally, I slapped on my Simian logo for your friendly neighborhood graffiti. Good times and smoke’em if y’ah gottem and by that of course I mean happy belated 420.
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And if you made it down this far you totally deserve an extra bonus in the form of another Constatine sketch.
“Ours is not a perfect world, and therefore the old must die in order that the young, that which is more perfect or at any rate capable of greater perfection, may live. Thus death becomes a thing necessary and useful in the evolution of the whole; the destruction of one celestial body contributes to the progress of the rest of the universe.” ~ Max Wilhelm Meyer
The last thing you might have been expecting from the colorful cartoony scene above is that it was really depicting the end of the world. It is not a realistic interpretation of the apocalypse, but is rather more of a symbolic and dream-like view of those end of days in which a father explains to his son how the world fell apart and how even in these most dire hours things aren’t so bad
I often wonder myself whether the end of the world is but a dream and the act of finding something uplifting is necessary to begin anew.