No one’s every questioned my Joss Whedon obsession before, but if they did, I’d just show them the pile of Whedonverse artwork I’ve done over the years. Only one of these was even done for a school project. The rest I did in my free time for fun. I’m going to post these in the chronological order of when I drew/painted them. Also, I’m posting everything I can find, so I will fully admit some of it isn’t all that hot. But I suppose the bad stuff will make the good stuff look even better by comparison.
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER/ANGEL
I drew this one as an independent study in my junior year of high school. The school actually gave out Buffy book covers to all the students that year, it was awesome. This piece is less awesome than the book covers were. I was playing a lot with distortion that year. Griding up a person’s face and then playing with the size and shape of the grid’s squares on the paper to distort the person’s features. Here I did it with Sarah Michelle Gellar circa Buffy Season 2:
I didn’t work with acrylic paint at all in high school and on only a few occasions in college, so I would mostly play around with it in my free time. This next Spike piece, I believe I painted while I was still in college. I love working on cardboard. It gives you a great middle value to start with and, if you plan ahead, you don’t even need to buy it. Just save the cardboard sheets from your latest Amazon or Overstock order.
I can’t remember how I came up with this next idea, but at some point I tied Indiana Jones fear of snakes to Anya’s fear of rabbits and this happened. I still love this piece.
As an art major, going to college in Connecticut meant constant field trips into New York City to visit museums and galleries. On one such trip, I saw the work of an artist who’s name I’ll never remember, who quite unintentionally created some of the most beautiful artwork I had ever seen up to that point. The gallery had decided to display some of the artist’s unfinished art, work he had given up on. As a result, these pieces were a mix of oil painting and under-drawing, graphite sketches intertwined with vivid oil paints. I loved them so much, I decided I would try to do something similar. These next few are from that series, I liked them a lot more when I first painted them.
This next one is a disaster. The Spike one above came out pretty well (his hair is terrible though), so I got cocky and over ambitious. I think this piece has a very cool concept. Using the light exploding from Spike’s medallion to decided what would be left in graphite was a great idea, but my execution is an utter mess. The canvas was WAY too small to do this much detail work and I didn’t have nearly enough experience with acrylic paint at this point to come close to saving it.
The next one is an Illyria piece and I was getting better working with acrylic paint at this point. I just wish I had used the graphite/paint separation to tell more of a story rather than just blocking out random sections.
FIREFLY/SERENITY
This first one technically isn’t a FIREFLY or SERENITY piece. It’s Elektra from Marvel Comics, but I used a screen-capture of Morena Baccarin from an episode of FIREFLY for reference, so I’ll pretend it counts. I really like this one because there is a story element to it. Elektra is an assassin, so the image of her in all darkness minus the one box of light makes sense. She’s always hiding in shadows.
This next one is another favorite of mine. I used a very specific shot from the FIREFLY episode OBJECTS IN SPACE for reference here. I like this one so much I sent a copy to Summer Glau for her to sign. She was lovely enough to sign it and wrote a very nice note. Conte crayon is one of my favorite mediums to work in. It’s a form of charcoal, but it’s much easier to control and not nearly as messy.
Before SERENITY’s release, there was an official SERENITY website where you could take part in challenges to earn points towards SERENITY merchandise. These next two were some of my entries to that website for those challenges. The first is a bumper-sticker, the second is a movie poster. I couldn’t find the original file for the second one, so I photographed the copy I framed (which is also signed by Summer Glau).
That’s all I could find for now, but I know there’s more stuff somewhere. I may update this at a later date.
Blog-A-Day Challenge: Day 10