L'éveil du coeur - Hanna Silver by Bouguereau

L'éveil du coeur

Hanna Silver in L'éveil du coeur (The awakening of the heart) by William Adolphe Bouguereau (1892)

This manipulation is a gift for the beautiful and talented +Hanna Silver and a big thanks for making my awesome jingle: http://youtu.be/KZIh3WDiQA8.

I hope you like it Hanna. Happy New Year!!!

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Charlie Watts of The Rolling Stones

This was another attempt ar a caricature study of Charlie Watts of The Stones. The source image was pretty small on this one so that added to the difficulty. I attempted to caricature Watts once before and it was a disaster. This one isn't much better. I don't know what it is about him. He has very prominent features but I have a hard time with him for some reason. Anyhow, it is what it is. Off to the next one.

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Audrey Hepburn II In Grayscale

Tonight I'm posting another caricature study of Audrey Hepburn, this one in grayscale. I'm always on the lookout for cool profile shots and this is a classic  In this one I was more concerned with exaggerating the mood than the image. This image has been caricatured by many artists so the caricature itself is nothing new. I did learn some new tricks on this one.  I'm loving the new CS6 Creative Cloud updates which offer much more versatility to non-destructive editing to smart objects. I know it's geeky but I love this stuff!

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Audrey Hepburn Caricature Study

Tonight I'm posting a caricature study of I did ofAudrey Hepburn. I've been looking to get some practice caricaturing women because they are really a challenge to me. Ugly or funny people are the easy ones. This was just a loose quick study. I have another of her which is a profile. I think I'll experiment with that one next and see if I can push the exaggeration a little further. Women are really hard to caricature... for me anyhow, so I need practice. With the personal portrait commissions I've been doing, I need to be ready if I get handed a pretty girl to caricature. Those are the hardest.

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The Ad That Never Happened

This is the ad that never happened. I was commissioned by an individual businessman who will remain unnamed to create a far right political satirical illustration for the recent Presidential election. The illustration was to go in USA Today as a full page ad. The individual who commissioned me for this piece was not able to raise the near quarter of a million dollars for a full page illustration in USA Today so it never went to print. The initial illustration was based upon the famous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware. As you can see, very little of the original painting remains, NOTE: This illustration has nothing to do with my personal political views. This was a job in which I was paid to create an illustration to the clients specifications. These are not my views. The original source image is posted below.

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The RWPike Project Winner - Arturo Adams

Last October I was contacted by a high school Digital Media Teacher in Orlando in Florida. She liked my work and shared it with her students. The teacher and her students came up with a new assignment called The "RWPike Project". Students were to study my works and try their hand at creating a caricature in the "Rodney Pike" style using Photoshop. She sent the images to me and I put them in an album on Google+ allowing my one million plus followers to choose their favorite by plussing the images they liked most which I am now featuring here and on my blog. The voting is complete and the winner has been chosen. The official winner of the "RWPike Project" is Arturo Adams. Here is a word from Arturo and a sampling of his Photoshop work. Note: This feature will be shared among my entire extended network across the web, Google+, Facebook, Linkedin, etc. etc. That's approximately 1.1 million direct connections. Congratulation to Arturo Adams and thanks to GiGi for bringing this to my attention. Let's continue to promote the arts among our youth!!

The winning Caricature:

My name is Arturo Adams and I was born and raised in Orlando, Florida. I’m 17 years old and a high school senior at Lake Nona High School. I have a passion for arts, ceramics, music, digital design and also paint. I first got interested in art my sophomore year when I decided to take Digital Design as an elective class. I felt really comfortable in the environment it had to offer.  I then decided to further my art involvement by learning to play the guitar and after that, I knew what I wanted to be in life, an artist.

I feel that as an artist you get to express yourself in a more creative and unique way rather than bold words. It’s my mission to become and artist and make the world a little better with my passion.

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An Ugly Caricature Study

This post is a fun little caricature study I just finished. I didn't feel the need to push it to a polished state as I was just kind of playing around. I'm not exactly sure why but a couple of days ago I typed the work "ugly" into Google search and found a somewhat less than handsome man. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder? Not sure about that after this project. The mouth wasn't exactly a funny ugly... it was more of a disgusting ugly, so I changed it up just a bit. This is about a 50/50 blend of photo-manipulation and digital painting so very good practice for me. Anyhow, it was fun. Sorry if you spilled your coffee on yourself. The original source image is posted below.

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Bruce Willis Caricature Study

Here is the finished Bruce Willis study I've been working on the past couple of days. I wasn't concerned with the background as this was strictly a practice piece. I did a lot of experimenting with noise reduction and creating skin textures from scratch on this piece and learned a lot. I have a ways to go yet but I think I'm onto something with these texture experiments. So, it is what it is. The source image I worked with is posted below. No time to waste... on to the next one.

Thanks for stopping by. Have a great day and be inspired!