The Chad Frye - Illustration Guy
“America is a country of abundance, but our food culture is sad – based on huge portions and fast food. Let’s stop with the excuses and start creating something better.”
– David Chang (1977 – )
I’m not sure this is what Chef Chang meant, but the drawing still seemed to fit his quote in its own way. The thing about this kind of fast food, though, is that you have to be faster in order to catch it. However, just be careful with those portions. Too big might be too much to handle.
Okay, I rarely get personal with my posts online, but today I shall make an exception. Today is the 40th birthday of my brother Blair!
Now, normally I wouldn’t go all public with the age of someone because many people are sensitive to such things, myself included. However, Blair has his birthday, including the year, on his Facebook page. So, I figure I am safe. I may no longer be safe, however, when he sees this post.
So, without further ado, I thought I would share with you the birthday card I made for my brother that is a portrait of him at the age of 40. He has held up pretty well, considering…
Yesterday I wrote about an issue close to my heart, artists’ rights. Copyright for creative content is a vitally important thing for an artist. It is the only legal thing in place that is supposed to protect our creativity from being taken away by others which subverts the artist’s ability to make a living. If an artist cannot make a living with their art, then they lose the time to bring more creative joy and innovation to the world. Thanks to your actions yesterday, one more artist can continue to create.
Yesterday, many of you came here to read about my friend Dave Bowman’s (Design Turnpike) struggle with trying to get Hobby Lobby to recognize that they were wrongfully selling a reproduction of his handmade artwork, and you were not just content to read about it – you continued to make some noise about the issue by sharing it on social media. Well, it worked.
(Read the original post by clicking here!)
After countless blog hits, comments and shares about this issue, Hobby Lobby has reached out in a very different tone and begun the process of arranging a settlement with Design Turnpike to resolve the matter. I’m sure that they get many frivolous complaints as any large corporation would, but due in part to the noise we made, they realized that this was a legitimate issue that needed to be rectified.
Hobby Lobby has made a nice financial offer to Design Turnpike, and is refraining from ordering more stock. They believe the two blocks of product they did order have already sold out. They maintain it was an innocent oversight, and after some investigating, it does seem the majority of the wrongdoing was by a Chinese vendor.
Thank you Hobby Lobby for stepping up to do what is right!
Also, thanks to everyone for standing up for artists’ interests and keeping big corporations honest!
Earlier this year a friend talked me into joining Instagram. I was apprehensive at first because it was going to be yet another thing to update constantly, but when I took a look and saw all the amazing creativity there, it felt like I should have joined that party long ago. So, I got on my computer and joined it, not realizing that the only way to post was to do so from a mobile device. As a non-mobile phone user, this complicated things.
Well, I got it worked out, and have been posting lots of art there. While some drawings only make it to Instagram, some also get posted here on the ol’ blog. So, I invite you to check it out if you also are an Instagram user, and follow me there. My handle is ChadFrye_IllustrationGuy (naturally), and you can get to it by CLICKING HERE!
You can also be whisked away to Instagramland by clicking on the image below that features some Instagram posts.
“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”
– Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)
A new sketch made its way into my sketchbook the other day. Inspired by Auguste Rodin’s Thinker sculpture, here is a robot contemplating the meaning of life while sitting on top of a pile of discarded technology.
Our society today eats up the latest technology at a voracious pace. As soon as the next version of something comes out, whether it is a computer system, a smart phone, software, or music playing device, people just HAVE to have it even if their previous device still works and serves them well. How depressing it must be for a robot who comes to this realization.
Now excuse me, I think I hear my rotary phone ringing…
By the way, it has been awhile since my last Drawn & Quoted column (2012 – yikes). If you’d like to see more of these from the past, feel free to CLICK HERE!
The next time someone says to you, “It’s like a walk in the park,” think of this man and how difficult that walk in the park could actually be:
A couple of weeks ago I shared with you the fact that Paul Coker Jr. drew me into his story in the August 2016 issue of MAD Magazine. He later gifted me with the original art which I received two weeks ago. Since he poked fun of my Disney past (CLICK here to see Paul’s version of me), I thought I’d make him a thank you “card” that was Disney themed. So, it was time to draw the fellas again – Mickey, Donald and Goofy.
I liked how the finished piece turned out, so I thought I’d take you through four of the major steps in creating the painting.
STEP 1: Sketch the Image
I tend to sketch out all my illustrations on my Cintiq monitor. I draw with a stylus right on the screen using Photoshop. I am a sloppy sketcher. Lots of extraneous lines come out of my pen as I look for the right shapes. Quite frankly, when it is a piece just for me, I don’t need to be any neater. I know where I’m going with it. If I am working on something for a client, I would likely clean up the sketch by going over it one more time to make it less sketchy.
STEP 2: Underpainting
Well, before I start the underpainting, I need to transfer the art from the computer to actual watercolor paper. I print out the drawing in black so it is nice and dark, and I put it on a lightbox to trace it onto the final paper. It is at this time where I draw nice clean lines, and I finesse the drawing a little by making little tweaks to improve it.
Once the pencil drawing is on the paper, I did a purple underpainting of all the shadows. This is a little thing I picked up from Jack Davis who just passed away this week. (CLICK HERE to see the eulogy I wrote for the National Cartoonists Society’s website.) The idea is to let the purple do all the hard work of creating the shading when I lay down the colors in thin layers later.
STEP 3: Upperpainting
This is simply picking the final colors and painting them down quickly over the purple underpainting. I say “quickly” because A. you don’t want the paint to streak by drying before you can continue the color, and B. if you linger too long, you will start to smear the purple underpainting and get a muddy mess.
STEP 4: Final Details
This final step involved using colored pencils to give the characters an outline which tightens them up, and I added colored pencil here and there to accentuate the shadows and to create highlights. Very rarely did I use white. In most cases, the highlights were created with lighter shades of purple, pink, blue, etc.
So, there you have it – a super quick tutorial on how to create an appealing piece of art in a relatively short period of time. The more you do it, the less time it takes. Also, this fast technique creates a certain loose quality to the art which gives it more energy.
My recently departed friend Mell Lazarus (cartoonist of the comic strip Momma) has a white baby grand piano in his living room that he invited visiting cartoonists to draw on. It has sketches on it from the likes of Charles Schulz, Gary Trudeau, Will Eisner, Eric Goldberg, Gary Baseman, Bil Keane, Patrick McDonnell, Mort Drucker, Stephan Pastis, Barbara Dale, Tony Bancroft, Jack Davis, Lynn Johnston, Mike Kunkel, and many, many more. Perhaps you’ll recognize the characters even if you don’t know the artists names.
Back in 1997 when this project was pretty new and there were only a handful of sketches on it, Mell invited me to add a drawing. I had JUST moved to California to work for Disney, and was only a kid in the biz, so it was pretty intimidating – so intimidating that I drew a pretty terrible drawing. A few years later after the piano had filled up much more, I saw my bad drawing and asked Mell if I could redo it. He agreed (both to it being terrible, and to redoing it), so he pulled out some sandpaper from the piano bench, and I gently rubbed away my old drawing, and redrew the exact same thing, only better.
You can see my piece around the 2:28 mark in this video shot by friend and fellow cartoonist Rick Detorie (One Big Happy comic strip). Best of all, Mell’s legacy lives on as you hear him talking about the piano.