crappy hand of haiku

Fhew!  Well that was fun!  I just finished working on a piece for a contest that the School of Visual storytelling is holding.  I've been working in small chunks on the project for weeks, but decided I needed to put some time in to finish it.  Since I am always looking for posts on people process, I thought I'd share mine with you for this piece. We were given a prompt which was to create a scene based on the line ...and Bernie escaped the zoo. When I read this the first thing I thought of was a rat.  A rat that escaped the zoo with a bag of all the animal's food.  Often times I am at work or in meetings when I come up with an idea (I have a day job.  You gotta pay the bills).  These were my original sketches.  I wanted the rat running away but wanted the action to be towards the reader and not to the side.  I also knew that I wanted to have some pissed off zoo animals in the background and started sketching out ideas for them a...

I know I've shared versions of this before, but I did a scan of the work today so you could see the final product (my cellphone pics didn't do the work justice).  I'm really happy with the way this turned out.  It scares my wife every time she sees it, but even she thinks it looks pretty good.  For this piece, I call RoboCharmer (the original is called Little Charmer), I chose to work with acrylic to start.  I never went to art school so much of my learning came from bits and pieces I've picked up off the internet.  The article that got me started painting was about the process that Mark Teague uses to make his wonderful paintings for his books (if you don't know Teague's work, he is now best known for his illustrations in the How do Dinosaurs... books).  That is where I learned that I needed to start with a toned underpainting which is a process I've used for almost all of my work.  I usually use burnt umber for its warming quality.   S...

I'm working on another painting.  I'm calling these fine monsters and plan on selling prints of them on etsy and maybe a website.  Once again, Em said it was creepy. To view my other work, please visit benjhutchison.com Ben