Sea Goddess, unfinished (c) Constanza Ehrenhaus 2011

Last year was really a dry year for me and my art (you can also see the lack of blog updates!). The lack of sleep affected how much I actually wanted to work, or how much I could tolerate it, really. Plus the lack of sleep implies that the baby is not sleeping so he is needing me, leaving close to no time for art. However, I think I have improved some. I keep working hard in improving values, composition and have a more interesting palette, I also am trying to improve anatomy and skin tones, and have interesting backgrounds too (as in, look, there actually is a background!).

This year I really want to put more time into my work. Ignacio is sleeping rather well (when he is not teething) up until midnight, so I can fit in a couple of hours of work each evening, I would love to consistently take advantage of them. Also I would like to expand my rather lonely Zazzle store, and I have signed a contract to license my work to PSP TubeStop, I wouldn’t mind having a small but predictable income from smaller venues like those. It would be great to take up on some commission work too, but I have so little time that I feel I need to get paid more than what I was asking for, especially since my time with my husband has become precious, if I am going to take time away from him and my baby, it should be better paid. One more thing I would love to do is to work really hard to help one or two charities I have in mind, I would love to have a sort of ongoing art for charity thing going on, where I could sell or auction my work and donate all the proceedings to them… in that case I don’t mind to work for free, it is my way of thanking God for my life to be blessed with health and love.

Here is a toast to 2012 and the year of the Dragon! I hope it is a wonderful one for all of you!

So thrilled! I am normally the one asking questions, so this was a nice change!

One of the challenges I always face is “What do I draw!?” so this year I just faced it differently: If I was to give a card to the love of my life, what would it be? And this is what I would give him, and this is what it would say:

This year's Valentine's card.

Both my husband and I can be really goofy, but we also have this deep serious vein, and I liked this more sober approach. Inside the card there is a fragment of one of the readings from our wedding: 1 Corinthians, which is lovely and powerful.

This card is up for sale in my zazzle store, so if you like it you can buy it!

Some of my tubes that are up for the giveaway!

Lisa and the artists are just go go go go go at PSP TubeStop! And all about keeping this site growing! Expect great news from me in the near future (hint: one of them includes an amazing scrapkit designed especially for V day by all of us!)

In the meanwhile you can win a free tube by me! Just vote for your favourite tube, which one would be the one of your choice by commenting in our Facebook page and a winner will be selected randomly! Head over there and let the fun begin!

Some time ago I told to myself that I was not going to license my art for tubes. Why do that? Why put your art at risk when it is perfectly safe with the copyright label screaming “don’t reuse me!!”?  Well, yeah… I am doing that right now Soon you should be able to find my art in Lisa Cree’s PSP Tubes Stop page. Thing is, I really trust Lisa. She is a friend and she is a very hard-working woman. I trust she will not take my work and rape me with commission prices or redistribute it illegally… or unethically. There are other great artist friends there now, as Jenny Heidewald and Katerina Koukiotis, and I will be happy to share that space with them.

For some time now I have been wanting to diversify a bit and make some income from items not as expensive as commissions but with a more constant flow, and when Lisa contacted me and sent me the contract to review it made sense to give it a try. So, soon my art will be available as a resource for people who feel that they cannot draw themselves but that want to do the right thing and reward the artist for their work instead of ripping it off of the internet, and I respect that so much!

I also wanted to let you all know that Lisa will have two new and unpublished pieces in PSP Tubes Stop, I will publish them later here, but for right now, I am giving her that privilege! If you are curious, go take a look!

I miss you all, I am working hard in some commissions that I cannot show yet, but I am dying to showcase. Till then not much around here!

Take care!!!

Remember that post about Pixie, the chihuahua? Nora Blansett found that Pixie had tumors and heart problems and she needed to bring her dog to surgery, Pixie is more than just a dog for her, so she was heart-broken thinking that she could not afford the expensive surgery plus medications to save Pixie. She started an auction on her Facebook page, but because artists are a very nice community with a great sense of camaraderie, soon Lisa Cree had opened another Facebook Page and artists started to pour donating their work for auctions.

The response was fantastic, people were buying pieces so fast that in less than a week the money was gathered for Pixie’s surgery and during the next subsequent days more money was gathered for medications and vet bills. There was such a sense of love and companionship that people spontaneously started to send more that what the buyers bid for! I sent two cards when one was purchased, and was gladly surprised when I bought one bracelet and received two! Somehow we all were feeling that we just wanted to give more to those that were pushing together for Pixie to live and Nora be happy. I sent a thank you note to the artisan that sent me the bracelets (one is going to my sister, she is going to love it!) and a few days later I got a thank you card from another person that got art cards from me.

I am happy to conclude this little story saying that Pixie got her surgery and is recovering really well. I hope she continues to do so and that both Pixie and Nora know now how much they mean for a bunch of friends, colleagues and strangers, that pulled together in times of adversity to make a little miracle happen.

Artists Nora Blansett has a dear chihuahua, Pixie, who is in need of surgery to remove cancerous tumors. Because the economy is rough the surgery is not possible at the moment so she reached out by putting up for auction several of her pieces and crafts. This generated an incredible response from the art community, people started to donate their own pieces to Save Pixie prompted by the ever generous Lisa Cree. So, if you are in search of art, crafts, prints, holiday cards, one of a kind jewelry, etc. pass by the Facebook auction and consider buying something original, unique and know it will make someone and her dog very, very happy.

Argentinean politicians are trying to make abortion legal. So far it is only legal under certain circumstances, but there is a push for making it legal and free for all. Because the law is being treated right now I went to check the news and browsed until I got to their blog… and I found this:

Banner for legalization of abortion in Argentina. Seriously...?

Now, is there any need for me to mention that this is the Starbucks Mermaid? This looks like someone liked Starbucks’ logo, I and slapped arms and very clumsily hips, then copied and pasted and voila! Insta-banner! f you are not familiar with the Starbucks logo, here it is for you:

The new (and more modest) Starbucks mermaid.

I was rather dismayed… or maybe I should not have been. After all, the whole abortion issue is a mess because Argentina has signed the Pacto de San Jose de Costa Rica, in which the adhering countries are committed to defend life from conception. And I am not giving my opinion on abortion yay or nay  (this is not the right place) but there is a right way of doing things and that is to *first* rectify this situation and opt out of the pact, then you can have a law for abortion. As it stands, if this law is passed it will be non constitutional because international agreements are above national laws.
Why do I mention this? Because if they so nonchalantly violate an international agreement… why not another one? Argentina *is* part of the Berne Convention, which protects artistic works.

If I was Starbucks, or any business, I would be dismayed to find the logo of my company used for such a controversial cause, especially in a country that is mostly Catholic.

A message to the abortion project campaign was not immediately returned, but I really am eager to know what they have to say.

My family lives in Argentina so I promised that I was going to send them photos of the baby every day, consequently, I am taking a crap load of photos. During my last photoshot I had the luck to witness what we always read about in the books, but in real life is hard to see.

In theory, the shadow cast by an object is the complementary color of the light that bathes that object, and when light bounces off of an object the color of said object is reflected in another surface. The problem is that rarely light is one color (white light being the sum of all colors) so the shadows are not the complementary too obviously, and we perceive them rather gray. However, in art, a gray shadow makes things look flat and boring. Additionally, there is usually so much noise that the reflections of colors is not quite clearly seen most of the times.

Well, I had a Dr. Seuss book on my coffee table, a party edition of One Fish Two Fish Blue Fish Red Fish (yes, my readings have turned very cultural!) and the cover is a metallic yellow, the sun was coming in, bouncing off of the book, projecting the light onto the ceiling. This was perfect to generate the purple shadow that in theory should be there:

Yellow light casts a purple shadow (pay attention to the translucent edges).

I was so excited that I had to take a photo!

Later, while shooting photos of Ignacio I saw that one of his toys was reflecting beautifully on him!

Ignacio in his Charlie Banana Blackbeary photoshot.

If you notice the light is coming from the left, it bounces on the vertical face of the cubes (the one we barely see) and it is reflected onto his skin. Notice that the reflection happens only in this direction because of the path of light, and also because of the texture of the surfaces. If instead of his skin we would have a shiny surface (like metal) the light might bounce off again in the opposite direction.

In light blue I have represented the beams of light.

Look at the first photo and notice how saturated the reflected light is! This is always important to keep in mind to make your paintings vibrant and life-like.

Image (c) Pascal Campion

First, let me congratulate you on the arrival of your new twin boys!
Thank you.

Pascal, could you give us a summary of your artistic background?
Sure.
I have been drawing since I was little  and I guess I  never stopped. I went to art school in France, at a place called Ecole des Arts Decoratifs and was in the illustration section, from which I graduated in 2000.
Right after graduation , I packed my bags and came to the states, where I still am now.
When I got here, I almost immediately got a job in the animation industry and never really got out of it. It was a little strange to me because I always thought I’d be an illustrator working freelance in France, but I was now animating art a company in Portland Oregon.
I didn’t like what I was doing though… It was flash animation and all I had to do was to move symbols (cut out pieces of different parts of the characters) around. There was no drawing involved, and I was bored to death…
Luckily, the main story board artist for the company left, and they were asking around if we knew anybody who could do boards, so I volunteered, and soon became the main story artist in the company. That was an extremely fun job.

The company hit some hard times with the dot com crash, and I left for Hawaii where I got a job in an educational non profit company. I stayed there a little over a year and came back to Portland after that to work at a place called Bent Image Lab.

Bent Image Lab is a commercial production company. They do almost only commercials, and a lot of them used to be in stop motion. Now it’s a bit of everything. but when I started there, the company was just beginning. There were only the three partners, myself and two other kids that left very early. It was a start up mentality and I credit working there for teaching me almost everything I know about being professional, efficient and fast.
We were working around the clock, just about everyday on commercials and pitches. My main job there was to create animatics, that turned out to be fully animated commercials, in rough form, to pitch to clients. I was doing one full commercial in a day or two (in rough form) … and that’s what made me become so much faster.
Eventually, I started directing spots myself and become a director with Bent.

After a few years, I left to come to San Francisco to be with my girlfriend, who is now my wife. When I got here, I started working at Leapfrog as a lead animator. Leapfrog is a toy company that also does video games for younger kids. I was doing design and a little tiny bit of animation there, but mostly, I was managing people, and being managed. It wasn’t a great experience, but not a bad one either…it just wasn’t for me. What it did help me with though was that it introduced me to a bunch of extremely talented artists from the bay area, and helped me establish myself as an artist here as well.

While at Leapfrog, I felt the need  to be creative somehow because my job just didn’t let me do that, so I started something called sketch of the day. I decided that everyday of the week I would start a sketch that I would send to a few friends. It’s nothing incredibly original in the sense that a lot of people do sketch everyday, but it was something fairly new to me since I hadn’t really been drawing for the past five or six years..I had only  been animating
I honestly thought I was not going to be able to keep it up, but it’s been five years now, and I’m still doing sketches of the day. At the time, when I started, I didn’t realize how great of a training it would be. Not just because it would make me better at drawing, but because everyday of the week I would generate a new idea that I would take from the beginning to the end, it made me so much more self assured when it came to dealing with freelance work.
All of a sudden, doing commissioned work was so easy, because, in essence, I was doing that everyday already. It was also good for discipline. I wouldn’t let myself NOT do a sketch because I was tired or not in the mood.. or because I couldn’t find an idea… I kept pushing myself and every time I would come up with something. Of course, sometimes the sketches are not very good, but after a while, with the experience, I was able to create a similar quality everyday, and that level of quality kept going  up …and, hopefully, will keep going up!

Eventually, I left Leapfrog to be a full time freelancer, and that’s what I still do.
I work in commercials as well as tv, features, some print work and am always doing my personal projects.

Image (c) Pascal Campion

How do you think having studied in France has shaped your art?
Growing up in France, I was exposed to all  these different types of art, from american comics to Japanese art and french graphic novels. Plus, I was always interested in paintings. I used to look at reproductions of Bruegel’s work in my textbooks, and dream about being in those paintings. I think the simple fact of being exposed to so many different ways of doing art helped me realize that there is no one way of creating.

The school I went to didn’t force us to draw or impose any technique on us. Their philosophy was that we needed to come up with our own way of representing the world around us, to develop our own graphic grammar in a way. The illustration section was not about nice drawings, but about telling stories through our images. Some of the students could barely draw, and would use different methods to create their illustrations…. modeling scenes in clay or paper, cutting out pictures from magazines to recreate characters and stories… etc. etc.
A lot of us drew of course, because we were interested in drawing, but being around people who didn’t and didn’t care for it while still wanting to be illustrators really helped me shape my outlook on drawing and it’s true importance in illustration. By this I mean that It is important for me to be able to draw what I need to say, but I don’t necessarily need to “know” how to draw a centaur or an elf if it’s not something I am talking about in my art.
If I was asked to do a piece that related to centaurs or elves, I’d find a way to represent them, but I don’t “know” how to draw them… does that make sense? I’ll develop a visual for them based on the mood, the story , the goal of the piece. That’s how I approach all of my work actually. I try and figure out what I want to say and find a way to say it through my images.

How did you find yourself working for companies such as Disney and Dreamworks?
When I do sketches of the day, I post them on my blog, on facebook and a bunch of different places. People see them, and because I update them so often, my work gets around. That was the best marketing tool for me.
After doing sketch of the day for about six months, I got an email from Disney TV telling me they’d seen my work on some blogs, and liked it and asked me If I wanted to do some work for them. That job crumbled as I was working on it, but what I had pleased someone higher up at Disney and I started doing other jobs with Disney… and I still work with them here and there.
It’s pretty much the same for Nick jr,  and all the other major companies I am working with. They see my work on the internet, and send me an email.

Posting and showing your work as much as you can is not only a great way to grow as an artist, it’s a phenomenal way to market yourself, which is primordial if you want to be a commercial artist. It doesn’t matter how good you think you might be if no one sees your work!

There is a mild fantastic element in many of your illustrations. Do you think that fantasy art can be achieved without pointy ears?
I think what people call Fantasy IS the whole Tolkien universe. I like seeing good fantasy art but I’m not really into doing it.
That said… I like taking everyday situations and pushing them just so slighty out of the real world… and make them bigger than life. I usually use lighting to create this push…and that’ s where the “fantastic” portion of my work comes from… it’s this slight push beyond what is usually there.
I don’t always do it though. A lot of times, I’ll just focus on capturing a perfect moment, one of these instant that you see all the time, but never stop to really look at.

I did this drawing a couple of days ago of my daughter giving one of my new born sons a kiss on the cheek. She actually does that and it’s really cute. But seeing that moment in the drawing made it even MORE special, to me… Capturing those moments and trying to not just show them but make the viewer FEEL them is what I try to do… and I sometimes cheat it a bit to make the emotion more “present”.

Image (c) Pascal Campion

Your style is very unique, saturated colors, beautiful palettes, whimsical even when depicting more adult situations… what where the factors that helped you develop such a style?
When I was in college, at the very beginning, I wanted to be the BEST artist in the world.
I wanted to be able to paint, draw like the greatest… and I started doing gouache paintings. I had it in my mind that I would “master” academic drawing before I could do something else so I was into fairly realistic things.
Then one day, I started doing this gouache painting of an actor’s portrait…and it took me a week to finish it because I wanted it to be perfect. By the end, it looked OK but I was drained, and hated what I had done. I realized then that I liked art and paintings a lot, but that I didn’t want to DO it. At the same time, I really liked a certain type of comic book art… more specifically, I liked the mickey mouse and donald duck comic books that we had in France.

They were all drawn in Italy, and you could see they were done very fast, but they were all impeccable and you could always tell what was going on in the images, and even follow the stories without having to read. When I saw that, I made it a goal to develop a way of drawing that would be fast and efficient… that I was NOT going to go for the best looking art in the world, but for something that could tell a story in the simplest form possible.
And that’s still what I try to do today.

I do have  a few years of experience on me now, so my drawings are a little more complex than what I set out to do, but they are still fairly fast and simple. In short.. it was a conscious decision to prioritize readability and message over graphic “prettyness” that made me develop this style.

A funny thing I realized along the way though…is that you will really only remember what you can understand, and that if you like the content of an image, you will tend to like the way it looks as well.!

Tell us about how you work with light and why it has such a predominant role in your artwork.
Light is mainly predominant in my work because I like it a lot. I’ll be driving or biking, or even walking down the street here, in San Francisco, and see incredible lighting schemes all over the city… in winter, in summer, in fall or spring, anytime of the day.
Since I like to let myself be inspired by what is around me, it was only natural that I start exploring light in my art. That said… it’s  not very easy, at least not for me, so I work with light a lot in order to understand it  better. It’s a whole subject matter all to itself.

Your family seems to be very important for you. Does the fact of being a freelancer allows you for a better interaction and more time with them?
Yes and no. Being a freelancer allows me to go home at 4 to play with my daughter and hang out with my wife, but it also makes have to work odd hours, and sometimes on the weekends in order to complete jobs.
It’s a give and take situation if you compare it to a full time job. I don’t have the same regularity, but I have so much more freedom, and creative challenges that come out from my situation. As for my family… whether I’d be a full time or a freelancer, they always come first

Image (c) Pascal Campion

How do you balance a healthy work life and a healthy family life? Please, tell us the secret!!
It’s easy. I love my family and I love my work.
I love my family so much more, so they always come first, but I need to work to make sure I can enjoy them… when you see it like that,  it’s easier to make balanced decisions.

What do you think is your best asset in your work? And what would be an area you would love to improve?
My family.
They ground me, they stop me from working too much, and they inspire me as well.
Also  the fact that my life is not rooted in art..by this I mean that a lot of artist that I know, especially the younger ones, live for art and only art.
I don’t… I did when I was younger and that was a mistake. I feel like I love life, and use art to express that love.
That’s why I say my biggest asset is my family…seeing all my work through them makes me put back in perspective what I do and why I do it!

Image (c) Pascal Campion