Concept Illustration + Video

I've been painting for my book...and decided to record one to feed the ol' blog.

Thumbs

Did I ever post this? Three of these sketches were in that YouTube video I did a few months back. This is as far as I got with this particular environment.

Ambush

I have a friend who teaches grade 5. For her students' writing class, she has them write stories based on some of their favourite paintings of mine (which is a huge honour for me!)
I told her that the class could write a story of their own, and I would take a section and illustrate it for them. This was a point in their story where the protagonists are prematurely celebrating their conquest, unaware of a pending ambush.

More Portrait Sketches

My friend Steve was over yesterday, and I did a quick portrait sketch. This is oil on board, 8x10".

EDIT: Just added a quick sketch of Dean, one of the lighters at work. A few of us at the studio painted him over our lunch hour. I think the brushstrokes in that one are evidence of the time limit.

Working On A Book!

I've been looking forward to announcing this! I'm in the early stages of putting together a book. The book will be a collection of personal illustrations (like this one, and this one). I want the book to be comprised mostly of new images, so for that reason my updates here might be a little slow, as a lot of my efforts will wind up going into the book. Maybe I'll leak a painting or two every now and then...like the WIP above. I currently have no estimated publication date, but I'll keep everyone posted!

Portrait Commission

A recent commission. Oil on board, 18x24". The lower image is an extreme closeup of the head.
My goal with this one (other than capturing the girl) was to play with various levels of finish. The head being at the highest level of finish, and everything else tapering off according to how far away they are.

Lighting Keys + Video

Been awhile since I did a video! This one deals with quickly keying out a shot and exploring lighting possibilities. I decided to do a commentary track again. Not sure how helpful that is. You can turn the sound off if you like :)

Tall Town

I dunno. There's just something about nonsensical, whimsical environments that keeps me coming back to 'em. Anybody with me on that?

Character Art for the Film

This is a colour key/concept rendering for a character in the short film. This started as a 3D model (which I did not do). I did a quick lighting pass in Maya, and then painted right over top of it in Photoshop.
And yes, I am aware that Pixar did a monster with blue fur as well. The similarity ends there, I assure you.

Environment Test for the Short

Click HERE to see the Quicktime.

Threw a quick test together on the weekend to see how the hand-painted environments might look with the 3D treatment. The top image is the original colour key, and below it is the 3D set. The painting gets 'projected' right into the 3D scene, and the result is the ability to move the camera around the painting in actual 3D space. The quicktime video is just a simple camera move to demonstrate the effect.

More Keys & Designs

A few more colour keys from the project. These sets will be built in 3D, then fully painted in 2D and mapped with a common camera projection technique. My goal is to make the finished set have the charm of a small thumbnail. So let's see how badly I can fail at that.

Side Project

A couple work friends and I got together and decided to start a small side project! We're currently in the exciting early stages. The cool thing is that each person is a one-man department. I am the color/background department. Here's some keys that I've done, exploring various lighting and color design.

Nosferatu

A quick oil sketch of Nosferatu. This is the Klaus Kinksi character from the 1979 version, directed by Werner Herzog. Hard not to be inspired to paint when you watch that film.
Next post I'll get back to the illustration stuff, I promise.

Gabriel

This is the 2-year-old son of my friend and former co-worker, Colin Jack. In fact, some of you may know him from his awesome blog. Easily one of the coolest and best guys I've worked with. I have about 30 of his post-it note drawings of Batman in rehab cluttering up my desk at work.

Big Bridge...and New Website Launch!

The more I paint, the more I seem to appreciate the appeal of a limited palette.

New Website Announcement!
I've been working on a brand new site for the past few months with a really skilled kid named Taher Ali (he's only 17!). His cousin, Danial Jaffry did the coding. Both did excellent work, and the site was launched today. Take a look!

Dragon?

This one was for last week's DrawerGeeks. The topic was 'Dragon', but my illustration ended up being more about the environment than the creature. I don't even know if that's a dragon, really. I guess it could be a baby Dragon?

Sarah

Sarah is someone I've fortunately come to know over the past two years, and it was my pleasure to have her pose for this painting. Having done a number of portrait commissions where I'm basically painting the person straight-on, I felt the personal need to do something a little more interesting, but still with a strong focus on capturing Sarah as accurately as possible.
This is oil on board, 18x24".

West Coast Painting & Rest In Peace Aunt Paulette

Just got back from a short trip to beautiful Vancouver Island, Canada (the northern neighbor of Washington, to place it on a map for you). It wasn't a painting trip. My family and I went to visit my Aunt, who was sick with lung cancer. Tragically, my Aunt, still in her 60s, passed away before my family and I arrived at her house. She was an incredible person, and played a profound role in my own life. My Uncle asked me if I'd like to put one of the above paintings in my Aunt's coffin, to be cremated with her. I chose the boat painting, because it's probably the best of the three, and I think best relates to her. The painting now exists amongst the ashes of my Aunt. It's doubtful that I'll ever do another painting that will reach that level of personal significance.

Joker

Somebody asked me to paint the Joker for them. This is oil wash on masonite board.

Also, Whohub e-mailed and asked me to do an interview with them, which you can read here. In fact...after I answered their questions, I realized anybody can go there and be "interviewed". So, you should do it too!

Portrait Sketches

Finally got a functional studio space. I've been having friends/models come over and sit for a portrait sketch on a regular basis. Lots of fun! Here's some recent ones.
These are all 11x14" or smaller, done in 2-3 hours, oil on masonite usually. Sometimes linen.

Pushing for Colour

This was was done solely for exploration of colour. Or I should say, varieties of colour within a given palette. Don't really feel like I can type it out in a cohesive way right now (it's late)...but stay tuned for more stuff like this, hopefully.

Even More Nintendo DS?

You bet! Did these for this week's DrawerGeeks topic - Tiki.

Again with the Nintendo DS

Still haven't put it down! Sketches from this past week.
Once again, I uploaded a few of the playbacks.

Nintendo DS: Reloaded

I have a weird relationship with this thing. I will go months without using it, then I find myself not being able to put it down for a few weeks. Right now I am in the latter mode.
Update: You can view playbacks of some of these paintings here.

Sketchy Illustration in Oil

It's strange; I often sketch without reference when working digitally, but I rarely do that with oil paint. Why not? So last week I decided to just sit down at the easel and push around the paint, with no pre-planning, to see what would come of it. And it was fun!
Oil on masonite, 11x14"

Recent Quick Sketch

One of those fun sketches where you load up your canvas with abstract nonsense, and begin pulling things out of it. On a psychological level, I've noticed that I paint more snow scenes during the winter months, even though I'm working from imagination. Interesting.

Portraits (plus Announcement)

First one is a commissioned portrait - 10x12"
Second one is a self portrait, painted for my Mom - 11x14"
Third one is a quick head study from class - 8x10"

Announcement: I am doing a lecture thing on digital painting (using photoshop) at Sheridan College campus on Wednesday, Februrary 4th, from 12:00 - 1:30pm. I plan to cover technical, photoshop-specific stuff, as well as painting concepts in general. It's free, so if you're in the area and you want to attend, contact me and I'll tell you where we'll be.

Mountainscapes

The thumbnails at the top were done as excersizes for shape, space, and light. For some reason, I felt the urge to take the first one and turn it into a full out matte painting. The thumbnail took about a half hour, and the matte painting took like 4 days. Have to get these out of my system every now and then.

Not Really A Sketch

This was intended to stay in the sketch phase, but it grew out of control and turned into this. At least the zoom tool got a workout (and so did my patience).

Winter Plein Air

The challenges of painting plein air are great enough during the best of conditions, but in the winter, you gotta be a real sucker for punishment. There is one nice part though...you don't decide when your painting is finished - the frost bite does.

Memory Sketch

I drive by a small forest every morning on my way to work. Always have been intrigued by how abstract, yet still completely "readable" it is at a quick glance. This speed sketch is an effort to recall the scene from memory today during lunch.

Thumbnail Idea-Generating

I'm working on a small side project with a friend. This was just the first round of concepts. Of course, my feeble brain went on auto-pilot and immediately began getting dangerously close to a Todd Harris Tak painting. I tried to steer away from that once I realized it was happening. That's what thumbnails are for though, I guess. No voice narration this time...got sick of hearing my own voice.
Music: Peg by Steely Dan & Reality by Antoine Dufour

Hello, I'm Marco Bucci and I'm addicted to Batman

I've been very recently inspired by the graphic novel called 'Arkham Asylum', illustrated by Dave McKean. Apart from his art being a breath of fresh air to me, I loved the way he dealt with showing Batman; he exists only in sketches and silhouettes...almost phantom-like. This painting is a small tribute to that concept.

New Environment Demo

Anyone wanna share some good Camtasia settings for video codecs that work well with YouTube? I seem to be losing quite a bit of quality once YouTube does its thing. Hope you enjoy!

Cold Landscape

This painting was just waiting to be let out. One of those rare times when I actually had a clear idea of what I wanted to see before I open Photoshop and start sketching. This one was hideously blue for the first 3/4 of it, with a cheesy, oversaturated warm light in the cave. It might have made Kinkade smile. And as soon as I had that thought, I spent the rest of my time trying to tone it back and get some more varieties to happen.

Acrylic Pages

Takin' care of business with more acrylic sketches. Strange, strange medium, I find. Sometimes it obeys, other times it gives you the middle finger. I'm having fun trying to better understand how to handle it! And the reason there are so many witches is because that was one of the sketch topics at work this week.

Sasquatch - For the sketch group

Topic at some point last week was Sasquatch. This was a digital sketch, the scope of which was far too big for me to finish in any reasonable amount of time. So I left it really messy.
Anyway, more little acrylic sketches coming soon.

Work Mortal Kombat

The sketch topic today was "Mortal Kombat". I had the ambitious idea of re-doing the character-selection screen, with caricatures of some co-worker friends at the studio. I had to do it in time to get it up on the wall, so it's kept rough. Maybe those of you who work in the Toronto animation scene will recognize some of these guys.

More Life Work

I feel much more at home with oil than with acrylic. Here's some recent studies from the model (taken with a cell phone camera...). The first one is a 9 hour painting that was broken up into three, 3-hour sittings. I took a photo after each sitting to document the progress. A useful way to pinpoint when you began to overwork the painting.
The bottom painting is a 2 hour alla prima sketch.

Playing With Acrylic

Been playing around with acrylics lately, and having fun! Makes me want to stab my eyes out when the paint skins over on the palette though. I only have the patience with it to do small sketches like these. They're hit-and-miss, I know...still figuring this stuff out.