Good Listening

I rarely listen to music while conceptualizing, but when I get down to working on color studies and the final art good smart music helps make better work. Here's a list of some of my favorites with a link to them in iTunes:

M Ward Belle & Sebastian Sue Jorge


Architecture In Helsinki Sufjan Stevens

Yo La Tengo Antony & The Johnsons


Spoon The Mountain Goats Deerhoof


Animal Collective The Format Gorillaz


Cake Third Day Switchfoot


Pela Menomena Iron & Wine


My Morning Jacket Danielson

Rushmore Soundtrack Rufus Wainwright

John Hiatt Soul Junk Rosie Thomas

Bright Eyes Morning Becomes Ecletic (free podcast)

Brick Weekly

Brick Weekly recently bought one of my promo illustrations for a cover. It's great to see work published especially promo work. It's obvious that this illustration was meant to be a Brick cover.

FARMIDABLE IS LIVE!

FARMIDABLE: I’ve become more and more interested in patterns as my illustration has progressed over the years. Last year I started making my own when I got together with a couple of friends and came up with the idea of making patterns for desktop wallpaper and selling them. We knew that there are a lot out there for free but that we could offer higher quality than the average beach scene or puppy image. We made a handful of tile patterns and built a site to offer them to the outside world. It's been a lot of work and a very fun project. The site is still in beta but everything works. Hopefully it will do well and we'll be able to continue making patterns and offering other features on the site.

Manhattan

I've been pretty busy with small illustration jobs as well as the new FARMIDABLE site (which is finally up) so I haven’t added a news post in awhile. Here's an image of a map I did of Manhattan about building projects that never became reality. It was a fun project especially since I haven’t done a map before. Not being a New Yorker I did a lot of research. It was especially interesting finding references for landmarks that don't exist.

Octoface

This is the color study for a piece I've been working on. I've started working on the final here and there and am really enjoying the blue.

Microchips

This piece spawned from looking at computer mother boards. I recently saw a great article in Craft Magazine that showed how to use mother boards to build a cabnet and I've begun to collect some to build my own.

I showed a version of this painting to a close friend and fellow illustrator. He suggested it was a bit too abstract and I agreed so I added the orange highlights onto the figure hoping to keep the abstractness but bring it one more step away.

In Progress

I've been really busy lately and haven't had much time to post to the news blog. I've done two pieces for InfoWord, a painting for POZ Magazine and one for Treasury & Risk Management. It's nice to be busy with work. I've been working out a couple of personal pieces too and I think they're going to be fun when I get a chance to really focus on them.

As I work there are always various stages where I really like a piece and then stages where I'm just not so sure how I feel. I really love the underpainting of this piece for T&R. Something about it's rawness. It breaks my heart sometimes to bring a piece to final never to have that underpainting again. It's like having a child grow up. The challenge is to bring a piece to the point where it has the best of both wolrds.

kaybu

What kind of husband would I be if I did not do a post about my wife's new venture. Meg has been working on hand made handbags for over a year now, often working late into the night. Each one is designed by her and screen printed by hand with her own drawings. She has worked very hard and I'm sure when you see (buy) them you'll agree that they are amazing. She has also created headbands that she screen printed as well.

Not only beautiful but talented and hard working too. Check out her shop at www.kaybu/etsy.com

Most Used Asset

I have a lot of places I look for reference: Goggle images, old photos, Japanese prints, classic paintings, even video sometimes. Most of the time though my best option for getting what I want from my rough sketches to more finished ones is the 10 sec timer on my camera and a nice tripod. Sometimes it can be humorous other times I look at all the pictures of my self in my iphoto library and it just seems strange.

Not so Haiku and Cancer

Round Online is a great online collaborative magazine that focuses on a particular topic or art form per issue. I had the opportunity to do an illustration for a very sad a poem titled, After Dave's Body Turned on Itself, (that is not a haiku) by Marcella Hammer about cancer for the new Haiku issue.


Like many my wife and I have suffered loss because of cancer. Over the last few years we have been blessed to help support the fight against it. Please consider purchasing the original framed artwork. My wife and I will donate all the proceeds to The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. Click here to purchase the artwork.
Thank you for your help.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Color studies have become a very important part of my process. I often do three or four and then going to final do something else entirely. The most important thing isn’t that my colors are all planned out when starting a final but that I’ve played around with color and have put my self in a painting mindset. Sometimes I just have to get the bad color ideas out of the way too.



Here is how the final turned out. Merry Christmas and Happy NewYear.

Late Influence

Over the past few years I've become intrigued with Japanese watercolors and prints. It started with a picture book by illustrator Anno Mitsumasa called The Tale of the Heike and has grown into a small collection of books about Japanese art. What attracts me most is the purposeful use of red and the incredible line quality. Kamata's Plum Garden and Plum Estate are two of my favorite recent discoveries.

Robert Burch News 12 - 19 - 06

This is my first news post, so it's pretty much just a test to make sure every thing is up and running smooth. I plan on trying to post news once per week.

This is a sketch for a Christmas card I've been working on. The three wise men have made it to a line drawing stage but I'm sure there will be some changes before I go to the final painting. Because the wise men didn't see Christ until long after his birth I'm allowing myself to send the card a little after Christmas.