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.
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.
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.
So, to elaborate a little on my last post, I thought I’d share just a tad bit more about my camping experience a few weeks ago in the Russian wilderness…
Camping and I just don’t get along well. I prefer seeing nature through the protection of a window – protection from the insects. I am big and juicy, and every manner of mosquito, black fly, and anything with wings with a taste for flesh manages to find a spot on my skin and digs in for a delightful smörgåsbord.
Not having gone camping once since I was fourteen years old, I had hopes that this trip might be different. After all, Russia and America have been on decent terms with each other since the early 90s. Surely their mosquitos would welcome me with open arms just as the Russian people had. Just the same, following Ronald Reagan’s advice to “trust, but verify,” I went armed with the best deet bug spray I could find, and coated myself with that stinky armor ready to defend my pure, lily-white skin. The Russian mosquitos welcomed me alright – welcomed me with open teeth.
Ranging from teeny tiny to flies about the size of my head, my body became a living sacrifice to the whims of the wild. Due to the frequency of the swatting, I got to know the tone of the slaps on my body so well, that by the end of the camping trip I was able to flawlessly play Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture on my skin. This was strangely appropriate since that song was written to celebrate the 1812 defense of Russia against invading mosquitos – I mean, Napoleon.
All humor aside, the trip did have many wonderful moments with friends old and new. The 50 or so other folks I camped with did indeed welcome me and showed me such incredible hospitality. The father of one friend graciously loaned me sleeping bags and a tent, one family saw my discomfort in not being able to sleep and loaned me an air mattress they had brought for swimming, while another family loaned me an extra sweatshirt as I was woefully unprepared for the drastic shifts in temperature, and the camp nurse graciously gave me a salve for my countless bug bites. Other folks did all the cooking, sometimes with a hot three-course meal which always helped distract from other discomforts. So yes, it was real camping away from the comforts of home, but with the generosity of others, it was an amazing six-day long experience.
Still, I’m not sure that needs to be repeated.
Today’s sketch was a little something I created on the first page of a sketchbook I gave to a friend’s niece. She is a creative 10-year-old, so why not make a little gift of something to encourage her with her art!
The sketchbook is your regular ol’ white-paged book and the drawing was inked in it with a brush pen with just a splash of yellow watercolor to define the honey. I just decided to goose it a little digitally by scanning it into Photoshop, dropping it onto some brown Canson paper, and then adding some modest highlights and shadows on the bear.
A few years ago, I was hired to create a portrait of Noah that was to be used as Noah’s profile picture on Facebook. Yes, you read that right. Noah was going to join Facebook.
Answers in Genesis, the organization in Kentucky behind the Creation Museum in Petersburg, had announced back then that they were going to build a full-scale replica of Noah’s ark. I was told by the ad agency hiring me that they wanted to set up a Facebook page for Noah where he could talk about the new Ark Encounter theme park, and answer questions from kids and the like. Well, tomorrow the Ark Encounter opens in Williamstown, Kentucky after all these years of planning and building. I’ve seen pictures, and think it looks pretty neat!
Sadly, I don’t think Noah ever joined Facebook. I never saw this portrait used there as it was meant to have been. So, five years after having painted him, it is time to let him “out of the ark” so to speak. His look is based on photos of Noah mannequins on display in the Creation Museum, but hopefully with a little more life and a twinkle in his eye. (Museum mannequins tend to creep me out a bit.)
This Noah was created with watercolor paint and colored pencils, just as they would have used back in Noah’s day. Well, maybe not EXACTLY like back then, but certainly no digital art methods were used back then.
Actually, come to think of it, it makes sense that they would have had WATERcolors available. (rimshot)
