New WIP: - Marvel's Man-Thing

I don't know what it is about hot weather and Fan Art - I'm always compelled to do my favourite Marvel and Star Wars characters in the summer.

I think this pencil drawing of "Capturing Man-Thing" I did a couple of years back will finally get the colour treatment using ArtRage 3 over the next few days.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Man-Thing is © Marvel Comics and I am doing this fan piece without permission. I do not plan on making any profit from it.

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Scumble #15

Scumble:

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Galileo Sketches of the Moon - An Eye for Science.

Awesome New Trilobite T-shirt! - Neurotic Physiology - Scicurious is nicely fashion backward. Or retro. Or something with a joke about prehistory and style.

Creating Atheist Fine Art - Glendon Mellow, Mad Art Lab. Proud to be asked to contribute to this clever site and community!

A new generation of digital artists - Calla Cofield, CultureLab.

Visualizing Plants with Botanical Symbols - ArtPlantae Today.

Control over nature in music and art, Sumt Paul-Choudhury, CultureLab.

Tiny Thumbnails, The Tiny Aviary. Cute!

Concept scribble: Archie - drip | David's really interesting pages. Love the drama and clouds in this little expertly done concept scene. David Maas is doing a bunch of these, don't miss them!

New metaphors for sci-tech-med museums - Biomedicine on Display. Is a museum like a blog?

Milky Way over the desert in Utah - An Eye for Science.

History of Biology - SpongeLab. Game trailer! (video)

AI: Science Imagery, or Brightly Colored Liquid in Beakers - Brian G George, Mad Art Lab. Fight the stereotypes ruled by chemistry!

Squids in SPACE! - Katy's Notebook.

Scumble pick of the week: Goodbye, Spirit - by QuarkSparrow.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.

2 Comments

Creating Atheist Fine Art - post at Mad Art Lab

I'm really excited that today I've got my first post up at Mad Art Lab, the Skepchick art, skepticism and science blog.

It's raising the issue of creating atheist fine art - can metaphorical imagery create paintings as effective in their message as Gnu Atheist bloggers do in their writing?

I'd love for The Flying Trilobite's readership to check out the post, and please comment there! Do I make a good case? Are there better examples than the ones I use?

Thanks to Surly Amy for the invitation to contribute to Mad Art Lab and to Brian G George for help with editing and formatting.

Check out the post!

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.

2 Comments

Style Question

As I wander aimlessly in the woods of a webcomic sketchy experiment thing in an attempt to both develop new skills and get the Trilobite Boy story down, I come to the question of style. Here are all the panels so far, in order, of the Trilobite Boy webcomic. Click to enlarge.

What's your favourite image so far?

Spoilers after the jump:

Here's the basic gist of the story, which pertains to the style in which I tell it. As revealed on my Facebook Fan Page in discussion there.
Trilobite Boy goes to sleep, enrolls like an armadillo (or er, like a trilobite) and when he does that, he wakes up in other times and places. Just as the Toronto in the story is not identical to the real one (we don't have a Crinoid Tower), neither are the places he will visit. For example, he may visit an alternate WWI as in my painting Billy Barker and his Pterosaur Squadron (full image here).

The same character will always appear to tell him to wake up. And he will. Eventually he will understand something awful is happening after he leaves the other times and places, something pursuing him in his sleep.

The rest of the time, he's just a regular teenage skater living in Toronto, playing in a band hanging with hipster friends and going for appointments at the museum.

Ideally, I'd love to do an art style like #5 above where he arrives at the Museum for the "real world" stuff. And something closer to my oil paintings when he's dreaming. The style for the first three panels above was mostly an exercise to try speed painting and make sure I'm painting every day. But it's hard for a dyed-in-the-canvas oil painter like me to accept the quality. The downside is taking forever to finish it.

Thanks to the Facebook fans who've already weighed in - would love some more thoughts on this.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow

under Creative Commons Licence.

9 Comments

Trilobite Boy #5: Arrival

The new page is up!

This is a lower quality version than the one at the webcomic. Click to see it!

I did this one in ArtRage 3, mostly with the watercolours. The Royal Ontario Museum is one of my favourite places to go and draw, and I've loved it since I was a kid. The new design is something I wanted to highlight too. It's stunning.

You can also view the new page large, here, or below the fold.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow

under Creative Commons Licence.

3 Comments

Scumble #14 - Return of the Scumblies

Scumble:

"A painting technique in which semi-opaque or thin opaque colors are loosely brushed over an underpainted area so that patches of the color beneath show through."
From The Artist's Handbook, by Ray Smith.

Highlighting recent posts I found interesting, provocative, or otherwise caught my eye from the Science Artists Feed, and other sources.

This will be the first Scumble since February, a few months back. Now with a new logo! - what do you think?

As a new dad and freelancer in lean times I gave them a break. I won't expect to catch up on everything since then, and really the Scumble posts are just a loosely-passed brush highlighting a few areas. Hence the clever name.

So, brew yourself a cup of joe, put your feet up and enjoy the science-art!

Click here for earlier Scumbles.
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AI: What a Beautiful Work of Art! Here, Let Me Ruin It For You - Brian G., MadArtLab. Discussing copyrights, mash-ups and making money.

What's up, Stretch? - McHugh Studios - more thoughts on fan art and copyrights. Also, The Messy World of Fan Art and Copyright - Plagiarism Today.

My palette - Jeffrey Hayes: Contemporary Still Life Paintings. For anyone who thinks art is all fluff, here's a great post on chemistry and colour theory in oil painting by a modern master.

Waking up Inside an Object - Adam, Biomedicine on Display.

Espresso Brain - prints by Michele Banks/@artologica. Also, Behold! My Coffee Brain! - review by Scicurious, Neurotic Physiology.

Hadrosaur Gallery - Art Evolved. The lovable duckbills featured by many of the Art Evolved contributors.

Adrian Bobb Portfolio - came across this Canadian concept artist and scientific ilustrator a couple of weeks back. Stunning portfolio, and you can leave comments on the art.

BFA Thesis Exhibition - Omegafauna. Congratulations Sharon! Love love those prehistoric prints.

New Print Giveaway: Galapagos Finches - The Tiny Aviary. Enter!

Giveaway! Botanical Art Note Cards & Matching Seals - Carol Creech Illustration. Enter!

Instead of Words: An Artistic Journey Into the Spirit - interview with Carolina Avalos by Ruthanna Gordon, Mobius ASI. Interesting interview - a mix of philosophy, spirituality, and the muddiness many artists subscribe to between actual material oneness and causality. Artwork is excellent.

Art Talk with Arthur Huang - interview by Paulette Beete, Art Works. Interesting that there's only one image accompanying the interview and no links to his site. You can find his work here.

Trevor Jackson Skulls - Jennifer von Glahn, Street Anatomy.

Trilobite Boy - I've started a new webcomic on my character.

Art and religion for science policy? - bioephemera. More excellent comments from Jessica Palmer. Jessica, if you read this, please stop pepper ing your posts with questions if you are going to keep comments disabled. It hurts my brain. And puppies.

Sasquatch illustration featured on Royal Canadian Mint coin - News from the Studio by Emily S. Damstra.

Photos from the exhibit - SONSI - Southern Ontario Nature & Science Illustrators. Show is on now at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington Ontario. Two of my pieces are hanging there.

Birds-of-paradise: encountered on the street, in passing - Tetrapod Zoology.

Flame Nebula - Lucyjain's Blog.

Pick of the Scumble: Muddy Colors' tribute to the passing of sf and fantasy (and so much more check out the anatomy paintings) artist-illustrator Jeffrey Catherine Jones.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow

under Creative Commons Licence.

4 Comments

Museum Robot Guard - wip

Say hello to Mr. G, the Museum Robot Guard. Or at least his upper torso, it's a work-in-progress. Originally that thing in his chest didn't start out as an eye, but it's kind of gone that way. Thinking about WWI biplanes when I painted this.

Working on the last panel of the next Trilobite Boy page in ArtRage 3.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.

6 Comments

Trilobite Boy arrives at the ROM - wip

Here's what's on my desktop this morning. Trilobite Boy arriving at the Royal Ontario Museum. It's a work-in-progress.

Click to enlarge.

Getting used to ArtRage 3, loving some of the tools. The rulers are helpful, and right after I took this screenshot I realized I can use the frosted palette knife on the lettering. I'm aiming to ink the outlines and use the watercolour brushes for the colour - I love adding random little drops of water and paint on the image. Hoping to give it a bit more of an animated/anime look in this panel.

I love both the old and new R.O.M. and can't wait to paint the building in the next panel.

You can see the beginning of Trilobite Boy's adventure on my webcomic Tumblr, and some clothes & stickers in my merch store.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow

under Creative Commons Licence.

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Trilobite Boy tees and stickers!

They're ready: the first two Trilobite Boy t-shirt designs.

Trilobite Boy on a skateboard. Probably late getting somewhere.

The Trilobite Boy fangirl shirt design, seen in the webcomic and highly requested on Twitter.
Pick you shirt colour, long sleeve, short sleeve or hoodie.

Stickers! Mystify your friends and neighbors and plaster these everywhere.

All the apparel in my shop is sweatshop-free, and you can choose multiple styles and a whole whack of colours. Multiple currencies are accepted by RedBubble, secure through PayPal.

You can view the whole shop here, or go straight to the Trilobite Boy merch.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.