Bonus Chinatown Drawing!

Bonus! Here is a piece that I finished recently during my first week of winter break. It's a portrait of Jack Nicholson as detective Jake Gittes from the 1974 film Chinatown.

Red Wind Illustrations

So it has been a while since the last update, but the last term has been insanely hectic. I took six classes in addition to 6th Term portfolio review. Everything went well, and now I'd like to show some of the things I did over the last few months.

The following drawings are from my term project for Drawing for Illustration. I chose to do a series of ten illustrations to go along with the story "Red Wind" by my favorite author Raymond Chandler. The story is about a detective, the iconic Philip Marlowe, who witnesses a murder, gets caught up in an extortion scheme, rescues a damsel in distress, and butts heads with some crooked cops.

All of these are FW Acrylic ink on Strathmore bristol.

Joltin' Joe DiMaggio

Here's a portrait of baseball legend Joe DiMaggio. I'm not a Yankees fan, per se, but I'm really amazed by what he has accomplished in the sport.

Bogie

Neil Percival Young, OM

Everybody's Rockin

Here are a couple portraits of Elvis Presley and Howlin' Wolf I did over the last week. FW Acrylic Ink on Rives BFK. I'm still practicing with the medium and getting used to the way things work, but I think these turned out pretty decent.

Illustrative Storytelling - The Stories

"The Hollow Men" by Thomas Wolfe



















This story is about a man who jumps off a building and kills himself in Brooklyn. In the process, he hits a lamp post before hitting the ground and splatters blood all over a young Italian man. The story dealt with loss of identity and anonymity in a big city. I kept this illustration pretty desaturated. The only bits of color are the blood splatters on the Italian man to bring emphasis on him and to show that he has now escaped the drudgery of anonymity, for better or for worse.

"The Visitor" by James M. Cain



















This story was about a man who wakes up to find that a tiger has entered his room. Throughout the story, it is unclear if the tiger is real or a dream. The idea behind this illustration was to have the shadow of the tiger be ambiguous. Is it a shadow or is it some apparition? Who knows?

"The 548" by John Cheever



















This story is about a business executive who has an affair with a newly employed young woman, and then fires her soon after. Little does he know that this woman has a history of mental illness. She follows him onto the train, the 5:48, and threatens him by brandishing a gun. She leaves him alone in the rain with his face in the mud, literally.

"The Killers" by Ernest Hemingway



















This story was about two men, presumably mobsters, who enter a diner to wait for and kill a man known as "The Swede". After realizing the Swede isn't coming, they leave to kill him in his apartment. Nick Adams, one of the customers at the diner, rushes to warn the Swede who lies calmly in his bed, awaiting his impending death.