Showing posts with label portrait. Show all posts
Showing posts with label portrait. Show all posts

Friday, December 9, 2016

Inner Circle


Michael Flynn as 
The Angriest Bird.

Steve Bannon as 
The Thing That Needs To Crawl Back In Its Hole.

Ben Carson as
The Sleeping Leviathan

Kellyanne Conway as
The Plumed Dragon

Chris Christie as
The One That Got Away

Rudolph Guiliani as 
The Thing That Ought To 
Fly Away By Now

Jeff Sessions as
The White Goblin 

Scott Pruitt as
The Toxic Cloud


Tom Price as
The Fallopian Moose


Newt Gingrich as
The Spiteful Sprite

Elaine Chao and Mitch McConnell as
What You Find When 
You Drain The Swamp

and Donald Trump as
The Phoenix That Launched
A Thousand Tweets

Sunday, August 11, 2013

Rock and Roll Highway: The Robbie Robertson Story


One of the great joys of children's book illustration is, of course, the secrecy.

I don't know about you, but I'm terrible at keeping secrets. This isn't to say I can't keep them, it's more that I'm not smooth in any way about keeping them. My poker face is terrible, and I wander around my day twitching a mumbling, and generally feeling like a pinless grenade.

In the case of picture books, there's this six month to year long period of planning, drawing, and painting during which (near) radio silence is customarily reserved, followed by another year before the book in question hits the shelves, real three dimensional inventoried shelves or futuristic/imaginary cybershelves. This quiet time leaves plenty of room for hand wringing, regrets, quiet self defeatism and the occasional brag-that-never-can-be.

Since I'm in the middle of one those such projects right now, it gives me great pleasure to break the previous year's silence and mention this biography of Robbie Robertson I finished illustrating a few months back, penned by his son Sebastian Robertson and set for publication by the great Christie Ottaviano's eponymous imprint of HOLT.

It won't be hitting those previously mentioned shelves till Fall of 2014, but there's no harm in pre-ordering...

Here's another glimpse or two.



oil on paper, various sizes


Saturday, May 4, 2013

Another semester, another string o' demos

So, let's start of with the weird ones.

Really, they'd be more aptly labeled the "economical" or "versatile" demos. 

This little feller, for instance, started life out as a still life demo, specifically a still life of a pear. He went on to find employment as a skin tone mixing demo, whereupon he found himself sitting in the midst of a cloud demo which soon developed into a landscape demo. You see? He's not that weird after all.

  

Up next is François the Impressionist Man Boy. He began life as a demo on the proportions of a child, but several months later reappeared to assist in a demo about skin tone mixing techniques and lighting on facial hair. I'd like to say that, like pear man above, he's marked more by versatility than sheer weirdness, but no, he's weird. Like, don't-make-eye-contact-with-him weird.


That's it for the oddities. We're now up to some academic nudes, rendered in pencil and white gouache on toned paper. Various sizes.



 Some one hour oil painting demos. These are all completed on either canvas or primed paper, between 11" x 14" and 13" x 19".





And these last two chaps are little one hour demonstrations of what we in illustration affectionately refer to as "the C. F. Payne technique," though it has been used pretty broadly by Mark English and others as well, and to remarkably different effect. 



Demo Guy is one of the world's more unsung supervillains, if such a phrase exists. His only known superpower is a seemingly limitless supply of patience, which is of surprisingly little use in the superhero arena. As a supervillain, though, he has essentially donated his body to the whims of other villains as they work out the kinks in their freeze rays, paralyzing gazes, or—in this case—updates in their makeup regimes.



Thursday, December 20, 2012

The semester in demos

A selection of one hour oil painting demos from this past Fall semester at the University of the Arts.

Various supports (paper, canvas...),
various sizes,
various levels of success...





Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Hey! It's a mini interview with life sized me.

Care of the fabulous Molly Idle.  Wherein I expound on questions about the creative process, style, and the five words that describe me best.

Read the whole shebang here. The word here, that is. Just in case you thought it was here on this blog somewhere, which it's not. It's here.

To lure you in, here's a new image from a new title spoken about therein. And when the book comes out, there'll be 34 more where that came from...

From Rock and Roll Highway: The Robbie Robertson Story, by Sebastian Robertson. 
Christy Ottaviano Books, 2014.

Saturday, May 5, 2012

Now available, folks!

The latest offering from author Bill Wise, Silent Star: The Story of Deaf Major Leaguer William Hoy, which is, hey, illustrated by Adam Gustavson, is now both available and the recipient of some awfully nice reviews.



"At a time when deaf people were routinely called “Dummy,” William Hoy accepted and owned the nickname proudly.

". . . Employing rich descriptive language with just the right combination of drama and information, Wise emphasizes Hoy’s steadfastness and determination in his baseball exploits and in every endeavor before and after his career. Gustavson’s sharply detailed illustrations, rendered in oil on paper, follow the text faithfully and offer glimpses into the look and feel of life and baseball in the19th century. Line sketches of baseball action and hand signals fill the endpapers.

"A fascinating introduction to a little-known hero."
-Kirkus Reviews




Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Must be the time of the year for demos.

Just a few...




The oil paintings were attempted during the community college Art Appreciation classes I teach in Paterson, NJ, while the black and white acrylic number was for my sophomore level Pictorial Foundation section at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

Each demo was completed in just about an hour; the oils are of students in each respective class, and the black and white piece completed from a scrap of photo reference, originally taken for another project.

All the demos in this batch were done without any preliminary pencil drawings, just attacked with a brush from the start. The oils were completed using a limited palette of titanium white, cadmium yellow light, yellow ochre, cadmium red light, permanent alizarin crimson, ultramarine blue and cerulean blue, with some sap green thrown in for mixing up blacks and some burnt umber to tone the support. They're painted on canvas, linen, and prepared paper, respectively. The acrylic piece was completed on an acrylic primed sheet of Fabriano Soft Press 140 lb watercolor paper.

I should probably put a step by step at some point, but for now finishing an image with a dozen or so students huddled around might have been miraculous enough...

In other related news, this Friday, the 9th of December, I'm looking forward to conducting an after school oil painting workshop at Millburn High School here in NJ, working from a model and broken up into a one hour demo and two hours of supervised painting on the part of the students.


Friday, July 8, 2011

Who is this guy?


Well, for now his identity is classified, but he's definitely not the world's first major league deaf baseball player.

And while I can't divulge his identity at this point, I'll be posting further updates on his travails as his Fall 2012 world debut approaches. No action figures are in the works right now, but you can see why I might want one.


IN OTHER NEWS, I was recently profiled and interviewed by the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators NJ chapter regional adviser and all around go-getter Kathy Temean, and will be participating in the NJ SCBWI November 5th-6th Craft Day at the Princeton Hyatt Regency, with an oil paintin' workshop on Saturday, and sticking around to participate in their Illustrators' Day Mentoring Workshop on Sunday.

The whole kit and caboodle and be found here:
http://kathytemean.wordpress.com/2011/07/02/illustrator-saturday-adam-gustavson/



Tuesday, November 30, 2010

For Demonstration Purposes Only.

It's that time of the semester when I find myself doing demos. Lots and lots of demos. So skipping over the one where I painted a tarnished brass frog sprinkler in blue and orange gouache to demonstrate a logical place for a complementary color scheme, here's a portrait of a student in my Art Appreciation class, executed over the course of an hour in class.

Fabiola, 2010.
oil on canvas, 11" x 16"


The following two were separate technique and color scheme demonstrations, based on a sketch from my "Mind Your Manners, Alice Roosevelt!" book. They're both variations on tertiary, triadic color schemes, one utilizing a combination of red-orange, yellow-green and blue-violet, while the other is comprised mainly of red-violet, yellow-orange, and blue-green.

Each of these took about an hour and a half to complete (thankfully, the sketching and reference had been taken care of two years ago). The watercolor was for my University of the Arts Pictorial Foundation class, while the gouache was for a Seton Hall University 2-D Color & Design section.


Watercolor on Fabriano 140 lb. soft press, 10.75" x 13"


Gouache on Arches 140 lb. hot press, 10.75" x 13"

Here's the original oil that appears in the book:

"She simply decided to spend her time over his roof." 2010.
Oil on paper, 18" x 30"

...and the original sketch...

"She simply decided to spend her time over his roof." 2008.
Pencil and white gouache on gray Canson paper, 11" x 19"

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Mass Transit Hipster.

7.25" x 8," 2010.
pastel, conte and charcoal over gouache
on gray Rives BFK paper
.

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Coming soon to a bookstore near you!





By Leslie Kimmelman, Illustrated by Adam Gustavson
Peachtree Publishers, Atlanta Georgia


Knock knock.
Who's there?
Wah.
Wah who?

Wah hoo!

Saturday, September 27, 2008

I'll tell you what it's for later...

oil on paper, 18 x 30. 2008.

But for now, it's for a book. About a person. For, like, a company.

A company that publishes books. When it's done, and furthermore when it reaches shelves, I'll be happy to give the author and I a big, loud, virtual pat on the back, with maybe a chest pound and a "hey look at me look at me look at me."

But for now, I'll be vague.

Sunday, March 30, 2008

Some three hour paintings.


oil on canvas, 12 x 16. 2008

I started taking a painting class at the Art Students' League in New York this past month; as of today, two of the paintings have even dried. I'm plugging away at a picture book deadline till May, and thought I could use a visit back to the land of fundamentals with some intense observation and improvisation thrown in for good measure. Hopefully this will help keep the studio paintings from looking too stale as I dig in further.