Drawn Portraits of Writers and Celebrities - Welcome to Sketchzebra.com!

People often tell me, "Tom, I love your sketch portraits of writers, artists, politicians and other celebrities... you should devote a separate blog to them." Well friends, I'm really happy to announce that my new blog "Sketch Zebra: Drawn Portraits by Tom Pokinko" is up and running at www.sketchzebra.com! I urge you ALL to check it out and throw your support behind it by following it as well. And don't worry, there's plenty of reason to keep coming back since I'll be posting a new drawn portrait every Monday! That's a new philosopher, writer, artist, musician, poet, politician... or someone else (currently accepting requests!) every week :)

Sketchzebra also has a web store where you can buy my portraits as fine art quality prints (framed and unframed) as well as prints on stretched canvas... all for VERY affordable prices! Why not support the arts and buy a perfect one-of-a-kind gift for yourself or your loved ones and friends? Ideal for the book lovers, musicians, political pundits and philosophers in your lives! Take a look by clicking the "Sketchzebra store" link on the top right of the www.sketchzebra.com ..... or just click HERE to go directly to the store!

Some examples of framed prints available at the Sketchzebra store:

Sheila Watson (writer)

Michael Jackson (musician)

Leonard Cohen (poet, musician)

Don Draper (TV character played by Jon Hamm)

Jeffrey Eugenides (writer)

Albert Einstein (scientist)

Lester Young (musician)

Jurgen Habermas (philosopher)

Thanks guys! Hope to see you there sometime! Remember... "follow the black and white" each Monday for a new drawn portrait! :)

Albert Einstein

A portrait of Einstein I made as a Christmas present for a friend ...

To see a step-by-step video of how I drew it, click here !

iPhones (Variations)

New Series: Art and Technology

Here is a new series of drawings I've been working on. In it, I want to explore the place and function of traditional drawing in our brave new world of technology. Of course, a large number of people, from the general public to professional art directors and gallery owners, etc, still love the look and feel, as well as the artistic possibilities presented by, hand-made representational drawings. This series of drawings on art and technology grew from my thoughts on this subject, along with the fact that, like many people, I am constantly surrounded by high tech gadgets. I love the ease of use and new possibilities for expression afforded to be by my iPhone, Macbook Pro and Wacom Cintiq tablet. For those who follow me on twitter, you know I like to occasionally post about high tech news alongside news from the art and illustration worlds. I especially like to read about Apple, a company that in my opinion has captured the public's imagination and is innovating and changing our world significantly. So perhaps it was inevitable that one day I would turn to the pieces of high tech all around me... and start drawing them.

I like these drawings because they do a number of things: on the one hand, they acknowledge my own struggles as an artist who does so-called "traditional" drawing. It can be difficult to get this type of art noticed and taken seriously, despite people in general "liking" the look and feel of hand-drawn work. The other thing this series does is nicely problematizes traditional drawing in the context of our fast-paced high-tech world. For one thing, despite all appearances these are not actually hand-made drawings using pen and ink, but rather 100% digital, made using Corel Painter software on my Wacom Cintiq 21UX tablet. When printed on fine art paper, however, they look like pen and ink drawings or etchings. What does the exclusive use of digital technology to create the drawings say about the way art can be mediated by technology in today's world? Also, the subject matter of these drawings is clearly technology itself (or, more precisely, technological products) but the approach is 500 years old (that of the European still-life). These drawings take a traditional still-life approach to objects such as the iPhone, an object of amazing complexity and design. Apart from challenging the traditional notion of a representational still life (can an iPhone or a mouse have the same silent beauty and provide the same scope for reflection as a landscape or an artfully arranged bouquet?), they also kick up a lot of interesting formal questions. For instance, how do you represent the luminous iPhone screen using black and white lines? (Personally, I think I still need to work on this... maybe I'll do a whole series of iPhones or computer screens to try and push this even further because it really is one of the things that fascinates me most about drawing technology).

Apart from all these considerations, I also hope to draw attention to the beauty of the high tech gadgets we keep around us. When's the last time you really admired the slightly recessed key of an aluminum 2008 Macbook Pro, or the patient curvature of a black computer mouse? I hope these drawings invite this kind of contemplation and admiration of the amazing technology that surrounds us. I hope you like this series. More to come next year!

Remembrance Day Illustration

Today is Remembrance Day in Canada (Veteran's Day in the US), and so a fitting day to post an illustration I made for the Literary Review of Canada's upcoming November issue. I call it "The Burden of the War in Afghanistan." It accompanies an article about the social, economic, and psychological effects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Canadian Soldiers returning from the Afghan war. War is a hellish thing, and its long-term effects haunt generations of soldiers and their families. I post this out of gratitude to veterans in every country who served in wars around the world, many of whom gave the ultimate sacrifice, and to those currently serving in wars today, all of whom have suffered and continue to suffer under the inhuman burden of living through that much violence.

Kannagi in the Royal Court

(Detail 1)

(Detail 2)

My new piece "Kannagi at the Royal Court" has just been selected to be part of the "I Have the Right" exhibit on art & human rights sponsored by the PICTURE Art Foundation (http://www.pictureartfoundation.org/). Thank you PICTURE Art Foundation, and congratulations to all the artists who participated!

Where did the idea of "human rights" come from? We often assume it originated in 1948 with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations. Most people would be hard-pressed to come up with other sources for the idea of "human rights," perhaps (in a pinch) citing some texts from the 18th century European Enlightenment. In any case, most people pretty much equate the rise of "human rights" with the rise of modern Western democracies. However, it is a mistake to think that only modern (or Western) societies have exhibited a concern for "human rights." In fact, there is increasing evidence to show that pre-modern, non-Western cultures all over the world have supported ideas of "human rights" for centuries, mostly through story-telling. Also, most of the political and social ideas of these cultures were rooted in religions. Therefore, it's fair to say that many pre-modern, non-Western religions have also advanced (or at least supported) ideas of "human rights." One such example from India is the story of Kannagi from the Tamil epic Cilappatikaram ("The Tale of the Anklet," circa 2nd century CE).

R.I.P. Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

Very busy day today... but I had to pay tribute to a great innovator and creative genius. This took about 1/2 hr on my trusty Macbook Pro.

R.I.P. Steve Jobs.

Tom's Fairy Tales #3: The Elephant and the Sparrow

(Click to Enlarge)

So for my third instalment in my Fairy Tales series, I've gone way back to what many consider the oldest collection of fairy tales in the world. I've chosen a story from the Panchatantra, a medieval Indian collection of mostly animal stories in Sanskrit. It is one of the oldest works of literature in the world.

In this Sanskrit tale from the Panchatantra called "The Duel Between Elephant and Sparrow," a woodpecker and a sparrow, with the help of their friends, a tiny gnat and a frog, take revenge on a huge elephant, who in a fit of spring fever destroyed the sparrow's nest and crushed her eggs. The four friends devise the following plan to kill the elephant: first, the tiny gnat buzzes in the elephant's ear, so that he shuts his eyes in delight at the sweet sound. At that point, the woodpecker swoops in and pecks out the elephant's eyes, leaving him to stumble to where the frog croaks by the edge of a deep pit (sometimes a bog of quicksand, depending on the version of the story). Thinking that water is near, the elephant goes to where the croaking sound is and falls in the pit to his death. In my picture, the little gnat has just started buzzing and the elephant is lulled into a pleasant state, his eyes fluttering. The woodpecker is taking off to peck out his eyes and the sparrow watches attentively on a leaf…

Tom's Fairy Tales #2: Rumpelstiltskin

The final scene of the story:

"... Could your name be Rumpelstiltskin?," asked the Queen.

"The devil told you that!" shouted the little man [and] he ran away angrily, and never came back.

(from the 1812 version of the fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm)

Tom's Fairy Tales #1: Ogre (From Three Billy Goats Gruff)

(Detail 1)

(Detail 2)

I've decided to start a small series of drawings based on timeless fairy tales. This is a drawing from the Norwegian story of the Three Billy Goats Gruff... There's the first goat, yearning for greener pastures, about to cross over the dreaded bridge under which the Ogre resides... Will he make it??

Painter 11 & Wacom Cintiq.

"Awakening:" Cover for Oxford University Press

Well here at long last is my digital painting for Oxford University Press, called "Awakening." It will be the cover image for Sovereignty's Promise: The State as Fiduciary by Evan Fox-Decent, Professor of Law at McGill University. Once the book is released, I will post the actual cover once the fine designers at OUP are done putting my painting into it...

In the book, Fox-Decent re-imagines Thomas Hobbes for the 21st century. The painting shows a multicultural mosaic of people making up the State, which is personified as an androgynous figure. The central idea of the book is reflected in the way the people in the painting are crowned while the State is not crowned. The people have the power.

For those political philosophy majors out there, you might notice that my painting resembles the engraving on the Penguin Classics edition of Leviathan. That cover, which can be seen here, shows Leviathan (the representation of the State) with a crown, and the people as his loyal subjects. This relationship is turned on its head in Fox-Decent's book. The people now hold the power and the State has a fiduciary responsibility to them.

Clouds

(Click for larger size)

(Click for larger size)

From the piece I'm currently working on ... (will post the final piece in its entirety soon). Corel Painter XI & Wacom Cintiq

Letter Writing

(Click to enlarge)

Corel Painter 11 & Wacom Cintiq 21 UX

Multicultural Mosaic of People

(Click to enlarge)

(Detail - click to enlarge)

I've been working on a few projects over the past few weeks, including one that involves showing a multicultural mosaic of people seen from the back. These are details from that painting, still a work in progress. The tools I'm using are Corel Painter 11 and the Wacom Cintiq 21UX.

Even though I've written about this before on this blog, I have to say it again: I just love the way Painter lets you leave evidence of the "artist's hand." This is (ahem) hands-down one of my favourite things about Painter: the way you can see each stroke, and the way strokes interact in natural-looking ways without losing their individual qualities. You can also adjust each stroke so it has very specific properties before laying it down. In practice, this provides a lot of opportunities to DRAW within paintings... to distribute pigment using lines and also to create crumbly textures. In this image, there's a lot of brushwork using the Oils Smeary Round brush as well as some Sponge to get nice textured splotches... and I used dark blue to give the whole thing a bit of a woodcut feel.

I enjoy drawing or painting for articles/books that promote multiculturalism and tackle issues of identity. Here are some more drawings along these lines, done for the LRC (Literary Review of Canada).

The Walkers (Closeup)

Don Draper (Jon Hamm)

I think Mad Men, Matthew Weiner's series about hard-drinking, fast-living advertising execs in '60s Manhattan, is hands-down the best show on TV right now. 

This portrait of Don Draper (brilliantly played by Jon Hamm) was a blast to draw. It was fun trying to capture the classic Hollywood handsomeness of Don/Jon without resorting to generic stereotypes (i.e., comic book shorthand). By the way, in case you haven't heard Mad Men has been renewed for three more seasons! This calls for a celebration - triple martini lunch anyone?

(Ps: check out this article about the real-life Don Draper - below. Really fascinating!)

Barack Obama

What Is Baby Harper Drinking?

Here's a little cartoon of Stephen Harper, our current PM, not finished yet, but I've posted a few early stages just for fun. I've been thinking about what to put on the bottle. Any suggestions? Get creative and send me your best idea (comment or email, or contact me on twitter)!

It's so much fun making political caricatures :) By the way, for those digital painters out there I tried a new brush for this piece: the "Smeary Flat" brush under the "Oils" menu in Painter along with a "Smudge" blender. Nice blending results although not as distinctive as the Real Bristle brushes... Much nicer tilt control on this brush however.

Velazquez Jesus

This is my 3rd painting with the Cintiq 21 UX and Corel Painter - an image of Jesus from a Velazquez painting. Very loose and sketchy... I started this with the intention of turning it into a more finished painting but then had to go away for the weekend. I came back and thought "you know, it's interesting as is!" It betrays my comic book influences, and I like that. All the scraggly patches of brown-green in the hair was meant as an underpainting... more refined versions of the image would have included drawing tweaks (the hair needs tweaking, especially in the top left where it meets the crown of thorns at an angle that doesn't quite match up with where the hair starts falling from beneath the crown).

Second Cintiq Painting ... Learning Much

I'm loving my Cintiq 21 UX!! Got it 2 weeks ago, made a few sketchy paintings since then just to get a feel for it along with Corel Painter 11... amazing program. So this is my second "oil" sketch done with the Cintiq. It's a detail from Caravaggio's "Calling of St Matthew." I decided to start using Painter and the Cintiq to copy these great Renaissance/Baroque paintings because I love the old masters. I love looking at the way they depict faces especially. I've always enjoyed drawing people's faces because of the way faces tell stories and offer us a glimpse into people's psychology. That's why my favourite illustration contracts are the ones where I get to draw or paint portraits and caricatures of political and literary celebrities (see my website under the "portraits" link for some examples).

The whole sketch took me about 4 hours from start to finish. I found it a real challenge to depict the subtle light variations that Caravaggio's art is known for. I think this is because I'm still such a novice with Painter. Overall, I avoided using the opacity sliders and just tried to lay down thin glazes of oil colour (I did this through adjusting the pressure of my stroke with the Wacom pen) and mix them naturally using the Mixer palette. The whole piece is done on one layer. For now, I prefer keeping things on one layer because it duplicates the feel of a traditional painting on canvas. You could say that at this early stage I'm trying to forget I'm on a tablet and just paint as if I would on a canvas. Oh, and the brush work is not nearly as blendy as Caravaggio's original with all those thin glazes of oil. I was just discovering the Real Bristle Brushes and restricted my use to the Real Flat, Real Oils Short, and especially the Real Flat Opaque brush. I also used a Fan brush for some blending, and the Real Blenders. Overall, I learned a lot with this painting (I learned what the Mixer palette was, for instance, and about a few more brushes); however, in the future I am going to try to create smoother gradations. If that means resorting to opacity sliders, I'll give it a try.

If anybody out there has any great tips on how to Blend in Painter, let me know! I'd love to hear from you!