This is an illustration for an article in the upcoming August 2009 issue of In Touch magazine. I had a lot of fun doing it. I wanted to take a more rugged approach to Abraham than most of the illustrations and paintings I’ve seen. The base illustration was done with a Bic ballpoint pen, with color and additional background texture added in Photoshop.
Tags: Abraham, art, artist, ballpoint pen, ballpoint pen illustration, Bible, Christianity, crosshatching, drawing, facial expression, illustration, illustrator, inspiration, jaggedsmile, Judaism, Old Testament, pen and ink, portraits
Jaggedsmile 
May 15, 2009 at 11:44 am |
The detail is amazing. I see your point of view and it makes perfect sense. Congrats!
May 17, 2009 at 9:30 am |
amazing im a big fan of your awsome work i had to reply after ive seen this one it made me wonder if you are jewish its always nice to find out that an artist you loke have the same fate in one god
September 1, 2009 at 12:13 pm |
Wow, dude! How long did Omar Sharif sit still for that?! Very nice!
September 1, 2009 at 7:54 pm |
I have just recently found your website and, I have to say your drawings along with your sense of humor, are nothing less than great. I am also a doodler, but have never taken it any further than pencil and paper. Could I bother by asking for more details as to how you created and colored this? Do you ever use a graphics tablet? If done in traditional media, how do you get such good quality duplicating or reformatting to digital? Thanks for any advice!
September 1, 2009 at 8:09 pm |
Thanks for the compliment, Neal. On this particular piece, I did the “headshot” of Abraham using a black Bic ballpoint pen (the actual size of his head is app. 5″x8″). I then scanned that grayscale (NOT black and white) at 600dpi. The slower the scanner pass, and the more dpi you can get, the better. You can always scale it down later, as I usually do since most publications work at 300dpi.
I pulled the scan into Photoshop, worked the curves and levels to get the right contrast and balance, and made the image layer a “multiply” layer. I then added background texture (old paper, a photo of the Milky Way, etc.) on layers BENEATH the image layer. On a new top layer I added the Bible passage.
Abraham’s color layer was added immediately below the main image layer, and I used a Wacom tablet to paint in the color. I then tweak the overall hue and saturation to get it exactly like I wanted.
Hope this helped. Good luck with your art.
September 3, 2009 at 6:09 pm |
Thank you for your time. The info is truly appreciated. And, once again, great picture, as are all your doodles. Later!