Paper:

Kevin’s one-off’s, as he calls them, are typically delivered on 20-40mil sheet stock using airbrushed acrylic paint, color pencil, and ink pen.  He generally begins by forming an idea in his head of the mood to be conveyed and then sets about assembling a series of photographs of the various picture elements.  He sometimes uses digital cameras and photo editing software to form a draft composite digital image.  Sometimes he uses live models and at other times, uses portions of ads or magazines (but nothing that would violate a copyright) as a reference.  He’ll assemble a head here, a body there, and invent clothing and some sort of background context to fit them in.  The composite digital image is generally ghastly in appearance, but provides context for a proportional framework.  From there he uses a Line Art drawing program equipped with Bezier Curve technology and manually renders a line drawing, which becomes the sketch basis for the painting, and the composite image is tossed.

He then transfers the sketch to 1mil adhesive stencils and cuts the stencils by hand using an Exact-O knife.  Precision is paramount to a quality outcome.  Kevin then transfers only the facial element sketches directly to the final paper and sets about manually committing those objects with high resolution pen and ink.

The slightest mistake in facial elements (eyes, brows, mouth, or nose) is grounds for a complete reject, which is why the facial elements are the first to commit to paper.  This is because Kevin has noted in his scientific research that facial recognition occurs at sub-second speeds and that researchers believe that a dedicated brain center is used to assess the friendliness (or dangerousness) of the facial patterns.  It is widely believed that such fundamental brain circuitry was crucial to human evolution.  Researchers have isolated specific brain wave patterns involved in the identification of pleasing facial elements versus those which are not; the effect in the wave forms is dramatic.  Therefore Kevin believes that certain facial characteristics and component placement ratios are absolutely crucial in shaping the brain waves that contribute to the human emotion of attraction.

After the ink facial elements have been applied, Kevin moves to a myriad of colored pencils to create the detailed eyes and lips, which can easily involve over 30 shaded pencil colors.  The facial elements alone account for nearly one third of the total body of work.  With only facial elements on a completely white surface, Kevin looks at the rendering in a mirror to assess symmetry.  If the face is compelling from both views, the work continues.

One at a time, Kevin applies the adhesive side of the next stencil to the progressively-layered image.  The stencil acts as a positive image and masks everything that is not to receive the color.  He then applies media by hand using an airbrush and compressor.  This may require 3 to 5 coats, depending on the color.  When the media has dried on the surface, the stencil is removed.  The process repeats until all base colors have been applied.  The final step involves detailing and shading.

The piece is signed and immediately framed.

The total effort expended can reach 100 hours, with roughly one third of that time spent in composition, one third spent in drawing the face, and the remainder for the rest of the painting process.  At a modest $20 per hour labor rate for a new-to-market artist, such a rendering suggests an initial cost of between $700 and $2,100.

Canvas:

Kevin has discovered that stencils are of no practical value in a Jesso canvas situation because of the porous nature of the canvas itself.  Rather than defile the canvas with a smoothing base coat, Kevin chooses to paint by hand using brushes and acrylic media.  The same early parts of the Paper process still apply, up to the part where a line art (only) draft is generated.  From there, the same process is used to transfer the entire line art diagram to canvas (instead of multiple stencils), thus fixing the sketch to the canvas.  Recognizing that color pencil does not transfer well to canvas, Kevin transfers the facial elements using ink pen and manually-applied paint in layers to simulate some of the detail possible with colored pencil.  Again, the face is quality checked in a mirror before proceeding.

The remainder of the piece is painted by brush manually, including the razor-thin black lines that adjoin the picture elements.  Tedium can be extreme.

The total effort expended can easily exceed 100 hours with up to half that time being spent solely on composition of the sketch and drawing the final face.  At a modest $20 per hour labor rate for a new-to-market artist, such a rendering suggests an initial cost of between $1,700 and $2,500.

Digital:

Digital art is the new frontier.  An artist can choose to create a master in whatever media best captures the work, and have it scanned as a monster graphic image (using a $100,000 scanner!) to create an “original image”, -or- can create the work digitally using computer software that simulates the painting and/or drawing process.  In either case, the original image can be reproduced to extreme resolution (many times beyond human perception) and in all practical regards generate exact copies.  Just for giggles, we’re talking about thousands of dots per inch, producing any of over four billion discrete colors.

Digital reproductions (or in some cases, originals) still have the characteristics of classic Limited Editions by virtue of the author destroying the digital original after the limited production run.  Each limited copy is hand signed and numbered using the traditional lithograph or serigraph standard operating procedure.

The Giclee [zjee’-clay] process generally involves the use of a very high-tech image scanner, a manual color correction process, and a very high-tech pigmented jet technology to paint and layer millions of dots.

Rather than depending upon scanning technology to “read” a master image, Kevin produces his digital images from within the computer itself, thus his digital renderings are all original works and loses absolutely nothing to a scanning process.