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I had been looking at a bunch of pop illustration from the 50s, images that embraced the new age of modernity and convenience and welcomed the World of Tomorrow. I was feeling inspired by the clean lines, simple shapes, and flat color and I knew I wanted to express that by drawing a house. Of course, I intended to draw a modern house, but when I was combing Google for references, I came across this image from the film, Mon Oncle. The film itself is a commentary on modernity, and this storied old Parisian building stands in stark contrast to the newly contrived suburban home of the antagonists.  

Although this house isn't what I set out to draw, I was immediately drawn in. All the elements were there, clean lines, simple shapes and...well maybe the color wasn't exactly flat but I could see how it would work.

Here's my process:

This was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed expressing the detail through minimal shapes and rendering the home in the very style it was intended to parody.

Here's the final piece. Scroll down for details!

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This is a series of studies I did with the intention of improving my ability to draw stylized clouds. I'd previously been relying on a variety of photographic brushes to paint clouds, but it felt like a crutch, and I wanted to see if I could render them with more intention. These studies are done from photos I took, most of which are from around my home in San Francisco.

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This is a piece I did for fun after seeing a sketch by Pascal Campion called the The Right Spot. Something about the room in his sketch made me think of Kiki's attic and I just had to merge the two. I originally had a flower pot in the window, which is there in the film, but decided that the image would tell a better story if I replaced it with Jiji's love interest, who is apparently called Lily in the film's credits. 

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One day while at a local tea house with friends, a friend was talking about some of the portraits I'd been drawing. One thing led to another and I left the tea house with a plan to draw all of us, tea house and all. This is my interpretation of the moment. I created a very stylized version, and really pushed the color and light.

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This is a sketch I did of my step mom's Jack Russell Terrier, Penny. It's from a photo I took over the Christmas holidays. I liked the lighting a lot, so I thought it would be a good challenge to recreate the scene in photoshop. I'm particularly pleased with how the lens flare turned out, which would have been easy to do with the lens flare filter in Photoshop, but created my own.