Pixar-themed drawing contest

back in July i entered into a local contest to design a large poster-like drawing, and the rules were as follows:

1. Use only Pixar characters  2. Stage them inside a fairy-tale  3. In a foreign country

so this was my crack at it: Ratatouille's Colette as Snow White in the Black Forest, Germany.
Skinner is holding a poisoned apfelstrudel...

though i didn't win anything, it was nice just to be working on a big project

i always like it better before the coloring begins..

After that was done i began a long work on my dear friend's wedding invitation. They're the coolest couple, they wanted to be partying with their favorite characters (plus the usual dragons, dinos and pirates any couple wants for their wedding day - Click to enlarge:)

So though i wasn't able to make the scene as crowded as a "Where's Waldo" page, it was still a pretty "derivative" month of work.
And in September, Michael & Shahar's wedding was even more fun than the illustration :)

people at the airport

 Back in June i traveled with my dad to Munich to see family, and luckily we were able to squeeze in a day in Vienna, which was great (and way too short) - especially this year, when the city celebrated the 150th birthday of artist Gustav Klimt, one of my all-time favorites.

We also witnessed some gut-wrenching art from Klimt's amazing  rock-star student, Egon Schiele! *swoon*

There's so much Klimt-ness to see around the city, it was a crazy 28-hour marathon of museums and galleries sprinkled with Austrian cuisine! a recipe for success :)

heaven!

Standing in front of their art, for real, was a dream come true... words and photos can't do it justice.
That didn't stop me from going nuts with the picture-taking, which you can see here.

A few months later i found out about the Google Art Project, where the world's museums share parts of their collections in high quality, for free, with advanced search options and detail magnification. It's quite addictive. you can check out the Vienna museums here:
Leopold Museum (largest Schiele collection in the world)
the Albertina (largest graphical collection)
KHM - Kunsthistoriches Museum


if all the museums opened up to it, it could save me taking hundreds of awful photos :)

Caricatures

I came across a wonderful post on a history blog, about photographer Robert Doisneau, who made an amusing experiment in a gallery window: he positioned a provocative painting on the side of the display case, relatively hidden to the main paintings, and photographed the surprised passers-by.

There were some great faces there (see above link), so it called for a bit of caricaturing:

TV-inspired

some old sketches done while watching m' shows :)

Catching up on Damages season 5 !

post-it!

Sketch dump continues..

random old sketches

kids playing

Some quick sketches done from Chris Sanders' photos from his awesome trip to Japan (MAN am i jealous of those kids!!)
Sanders' blog is always an inspiration, especially while not being able to go out and draw from life.. this was just fun to try and learn, even from "still" photographs.

Aubrey Beardsley

After a visit to the museum i was sucked into the usual Wikipedia spiral of links, and came across the photo of artist Aubrey Beardsley. i knew his illustrations, but not what he looked like, and this picture just begged to be drawn from :)
He reminds me of my good friend Elad - this one's for you!

Sketch Dump

So i haven't been very present in the past year, and time flies by so fast. To make up for lost time, i'll start off a year's worth of sketches. Not many, unfortunately, but it just makes 2013's resolutions easier to accomplish  :-/

Back in January my dad went on an amazing trip to Ethiopia, and after coming back his group made a book of photos from their time there. I looked through it and saw the beautiful and interesting faces of the locals, and started drawing from the photos (no tracing, just from looking at the book):