Before/After

The surreal is reserved for the imaginative.

perspective

The Spiderman movie made for an excellent source for this persepective exercise

Look mommy! A Swan!

Apparently I can draw if I really want to.

Licensing

I'm using this for a Licensing project in my illustration class.

Book Jacket

here's the same piece again except spell checked and elongated into a book jacket.

School Project

I didn't chose the title, I just had to make a book cover.

My Card

Paying work

Here's a small commission job I just did. It's a t-shirt design

Trying new stuff

Trying to break out of my normal photoshop habits and try something a little more contemporary

Elf concept art

This is a character I'm creating. His name is still in the works as well as a lot of other details. I can tell you he's a hunter, he's an elf, and he's about to make a big discovery.

Wow

This is like a montly blog now. Lame. I have a new picture to upload. I'll do it asap

Playing

Can't get enough Ghost Hunters.
As an additional note: This came out darker than it actually is.

Been awhile

To those of you who still check to see if I do updates, thanks!

I haven't posted anything because I'm not allowed to post actual work I'm commissioned to do because of contracts, and most of the work I have done has been doodles and and uninteresting stuff. I've been playing a with watercolor recently and here's some of the stuff I've done.

You'll notice I struggle with proportion and depth.
My compositions leave something to be desired as well.
I'm not too unhappy with the way the paint came out on these for the simple fact that I have never really tried to work with any kind of paint before... let alone color!

New Design Direction

Artists are everywhere. They are teenagers. They are adolescents. They are middle-aged, and the middle-class. "Artists" are blooming in fields of expression and creativity with each passing and moment, and as a result, are forced to compete. Compete not for survival, or land, or love, but for originality.
Man is an expressive beast. He longs to create with his own two hands. To accomplish. To raise his head high and know that he has worked long and hard to make something his own.
With the introduction of the digital medium, and the ease of access therein, it is unsurprising that so many have risen up to become "artists" in our new age of computer screens and "Photoshopping." It is with a sense of pride that I call myself an artist, not because I can look at the works of others around me and learn to copy and emulate what I've seen and studied, but because I have taken what I have experienced, and absorbed it. I have made it a part of my diet. I seek not to create what has already been created, but to create that which has not yet even been dreamed.
Often times I become frustrated when viewing the works of others that I believe to be superior to mine, as I'm sure many of us have from time to time. It instills in me a feeling of anxiety that at my age I still haven't reached a skill level which others younger than me have achieved years prior. It falls on me to work harder. To learn from the multitude of failures encountered each day, and to grow both artistically and spiritually. It is the struggle I face everyday. A struggle to accept that I am not the artists of whom I admire, and that I must learn to create works that speak to me, and others like me on a level that together we can communicate through.
"Fuck Art" is a conceptual idea aimed at expressing the inherent difficulties all artists face when trying to create original works of their own. Whether it be literature, dance, music, or the fine/digital arts medium, we all struggle in our own ways on a daily basis.
"Fuck Art" is for the artist. It is the low point before the brilliant idea. The hopelessness. The feelings of sameness, redundancy, and limited nature of our work that without proper maturity can lead to our failures. It is the hope that we can create something original among a sea of flooding artists.

Jim Viola
2007 Artist's Statement
Rowan University

Texture

Because I felt like doing something with texture.