More Blagojevich

Here's a watercolor of Rod Blagojevich I did today. I was pretty pleased with it, but there are parts of the facial expression that didn't go quite how I planned. Oh well.

Gov. Rod Blago...asldfkjasdflkj..jevich

Just a couple sketches here. The first is of Governor Rod Bagojevich of Illinois who has found himself in a little hot water lately. I missed an opportunity to do a cartoon of him when his senate seat for sale first made the headlines. The Stoutonia was done putting out issues until the new semester which is now. But as luck would have it, his impeachment hearing started yesterday, followed by him making a TV circuit circus. So I'm currently working on a editorial cartoon of him. I'll post that one as soon as its done.

Also theres a sketch of my cousins daughter who I had a very candid photo of. and right above her there's a young girl I saw somewhere.... or that might be the other way around.

cartoonage

It's been a while since I've drawn any editorial cartoons. The last issue of "The Stoutonia" was at the beginning of December, and I've taken a break from cartooning since. Anyway, It's high time I started drawing some Obama's and other schinanigans, so with no further adieu I present to you my first cartoon of 2009. The top one I did a 30 second coloring job in photoshop, and the bottom one is in watercolor. I'm not to impressed with the watercolor job, but I like it better than the photoshop version.

Horse- not the basketball game?

Here's a couple of horse studies, going along with the animal sketches I've been doing as of late. One of the biggest advancements in my drawing over the last year has been a "relearning" of how to sketch. In my last life drawing class, my professor really stressed using the entire body especially the arm and shoulder when drawing. And at the large scale that our drawings were done at, it was essential to make any well placed marks that one would do so. I was pretty confident in my ability to draw with the whole arm from my past drawing experience most notably drawing at Valleyfair, but I found that the retail caricature style was rather counterproductive when it came to figure drawing. But a little refresher in the sketch style of life drawing has helped the accuracy and structure of my drawings of almost anything now.

I apologize for that pointless rant, but I was watching one of my professors draw the other day, and just the fluid action of their mark making made me realize how far I really have to go before I'll be satisfied with any of my drawings. But hey, its a new year and a new semester, we'll see what new things I can pick up on this year.

The Old Man

Here's a sketch of my dad. I've been enjoying drawing with micron pens lately. I never really used to like them, but I think I'm starting to get a better handle on using them more effectively.

Sketch Dumperoo

Here's a couple random sketches I pulled out today. I noticed that I had very few animals in my portfolio, so I thought it would be good to draw a couple. I had a ton of bird reference photos stockpiled from my days in high school as a duck painter and wild life artist. Its been really good getting back into drawing wildlife. Its something I really missed for a while. Any way, there's a Leonard Nimoy sketch in there too.

New website!

In my last post, I mentioned that I've been redesigning my portfolio/illustration website. Originally it started out as a project for my computer imagery class over a year ago. I'm pretty sure I was the only one in the class who was building their website and actually expecting to use it, so I tried to really do a good job on it. I thought it had a really nice clean design, kind of a trendy simplistic graphic look. It ended up looking very blocky and like a web page from 1995-not quite what I was going for. Aesthetics aside, it was great to learn how to use the Dreamweaver software, and FTP clients and what not. I have an alloted space on the UW-Stout server, so I still have the old website up here: https://bluedrive.uwstout.edu/users/students/andersonma/wwwroot/ Anyway, it was time to give it a refresh, so I've spent the last three days starting from scratch with a more flashy, aesthetically pleasing look, along with a lot more images on it.

I'd love to hear what everyone thinks, and I'm very open to suggestions for improvement. Check it out! http://www.marcandersonillustration.com

Some old ducks and wood cuts.

The last couple days I have been completely redesigning my website. I thought it might be fun to add a "Fine Art/Design" page, but in doing so, I had to go through and get some photo's of all my old paintings, sculptures, woodcuts, drawings etc. Here were a few that I nearly forgot about until I dug to the bottom of some rather large stacks of drawings.



This was a print of my brother I did last spring. It was taken from a photo I took of him on the morning of his wedding while we were eating breakfast. Go figure.




These two were a diptych taken from a few photos taken by the gracious Zack Wallenfang. The project was "social commentary" so I thought I would take a stab at the media exploitation of the 35W bridge incident. They were titled "Structurally Entertaining"




Here's a couple 9"x12" paintings from high school. My art teacher really pressured me to enter in the Wisconsin Junior Duck Stamp Competition, and so I did pretty much nothing but ducks and wild life for most of the classes I took with her. The first duck actually got Honorable Mention when I was a junior, which I was rather excited for, but now looking back at the painting, it really isnt that good, and my technique was terrible. However, it was fun to look over all my old work.

Brewing Beer: the diary of the Marc and Lucas micro-brew

For the longest time, my roommate and I have been talking about brewing our own beer. It all began when I was a freshman living in the dorms, and I started making something that resembled wine. I'd get gallon jugs of 100% grape juice, add a little bread yeast and sugar to the mix, then I fashioned an airlock out of plastic tubing. The airlock, I feel, was the most innovative component on my part. I just put a loop in the tubing, taped it off with duct tape of course, and poured a small amount of water in it. Then put a hole in the bottle cap, and epoxyed the crap out of it.(i know, it doesnt sound very healthy, but it never touched the wine so its all good.) Anyway, this was a great operation for me in the dorms. Not being 21, it was a good way to get alcohol, and it was a lot of fun- making wine in the dorms.

So after a while, Lucas and I decided we should up the aunty and actually brew beer. We ordered two ingredient kits- and Irish Stout, and my personal favorite, and India Pale Ale. Somehow they sent us just a regular pale ale, but we called up, complained and they sent the IPA for free. Pretty sweet if i might say so. Anyway, we brewed the pale ale first.



Here is my roommate Lucas showing off all the ingredients. I had done plenty of research on brewing beer and winemaking ever since i started my wine experiments as a freshman, so I decided that we didnt need to order those pricey supplies kits, I would just piece it together myself.



Here's the grain being boiled in.



This is the very appetizing finished wort. this is after all the malt and hops have been added and boiled sufficiently. at this point it smells very much like a bready beer with a hint of a pale ale smell.



We then added the wort to our good ol' Fleet Farm bucket along with the yeast.



One thing I did not take into account when placing so much faith in my Fleet Farm brethren was that the bucket cap would not seal air tight. This was very problematic seeing as we had already put the yeast in, and fermentation had begun. But never fear, with a little quick thinking, our MacGuyver like instincts led us to a solution. It just so happened that I had a bunch of modeling clay from an art project, so I rolled up a very thin coil, shoved it in the cap to make a seal, and BOOM crisis averted. After a week of fermentation, we did our bottling which was a modgepodge of different bottles we had collected- mostly the great and the cheap Milwaukee's Best Light.



The bottles had to sit for about two weeks. You would have thought we gave birth to our first child we were so happy. Our first beer. Its a pretty good batch if I might say so. There were roadblocks, but we got through em, and it turned out okay. So if you'll excuse me, I've got some beer to drink; we cant brew another batch till we have 50 more bottles.

Cheers!

Really early Merry Christmas

I have recently returned from the land of dial-up internet more aptly known as my parents house. By no means would I say I need some lightning fast internet (or any internet for that matter) to survive, but it kinda served as a reminder of life before the all empowering interwebs. Anyway, this drawing was of my girlfriend and I for a Christmas card. It was a fun one, and this was the first time I've drawn Amanda with out her kicking me in the face.