Astudan

I started this piece as a pencil sketch for The Borgia Popes, an Ohio band, from the Cincinnati post-punk scene in the 90′s, for use in their album cover.

I wanted it to have a very Beksinski feel to it, dark, brooding, and mysterious. Zdislaw Beksinski was a great influence on my art, and one of my favorite artists to this day – I could say the same for many of the post punk bands from the mid 80s to late 90′s, and it seemed like this combination would be a perfect mesh.

At first, I was going to do the pencil sketch only as the cover, do some adjustments to lighting in photoshop, maybe a bit of blending – but I felt this piece was demanding more, and so I took to digitally rebrushing and coloring the entire thing.

Anyway, here are some pics of the piece from beginning to end – I wish I had saved more pics from the middle of the process, but it pretty much went from sketch to almost done in the course of a day… and then teetered on the brink of being *really* done, for days and days after.

Prints and posters of these are available at RedBubble [here], I am also selling 10 Limited edition full sized and hand-embellished prints on acid-free fine art paper [here].

Like all of my giclees, they will be available for a limited time, and, if any are left – they’ll be available again a year or so down the road when I decide to re-offer them.