Aaron Robbins

Merry Christmas Chalkboard

Aaron Robbins — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 08:43:54 +0000

I’ve been doing a lot a chalk art lately. We have these event and menu chalkboards at work which I get to update every week. I think the ones at work generally look ok, but I really want to turn them into more seasonal pieces witch much higher quality illustrations on them. Basically, I want people to stop and look at the art first and then notice the message second. Anyway, in my free time I’d been messing around with various chalking styles and colors. I decided to do a quick drop shadow test on a chalkboard we got from Ikea for our house. The process went pretty well and I like the classic all white chalk look of this board, even though there is some black and green mixed in there.

Haunted Mansion Hitchhiking Ghosts 3

Aaron Robbins — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 23:32:38 +0000

Here is the 3rd and final Hitchhiking Ghost I painted for Halloween this year. The last ghost, like the first two, was painted with Golden Open Acrylics on a medium grade canvas. This guy is the shorter ghost and the only one to sport a ZZ Top style beard. After finishing this ghost I had been painting for about 8 hours over three nights. It was a super fun project and I was glad to be able to hang all three ghosts above the fireplace for Halloween but I was also really tired and had never really washed all the paint off my hands. I totally planned on making some distressed black wooden frames for each of the ghosts but Halloween came to quick this year so framing will have to wait for Halloween 2011.

Hitchhiking Ghost 1

Hitchhiking Ghost 2

Hitchhiking Ghost 3

Haunted Mansion Hitchhiking Ghosts 2

Aaron Robbins — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 23:25:57 +0000

On the second night of my Hitchhiking ghosts painting spree I did the taller skinnier ghost. All of the ghosts were done using Golden’s Open Acrylics. They have a slightly longer drying time then normal acrylics but not nearly long enough to use the next day. I know there a products that will keeps Acrylics workable for days but I don’t have any of those wet pallets, so, each night I had to remix the colors for the ghosts. Being color blind it was a real challenge to get the hue of the paint to match what I did the night before. I could of written down the amount of each color I used, but honestly that sounds like a lot of work for something that is supposed to be relaxing and fun. Anyway, I got my wife to help me get the colors in the ballpark and then I had at it. The second hitchhiking ghost took about 2 hours, which was about an hour faster than the first one. You can see the first ghost here: Haunted Mansion Hitchhiking Ghost 1 – Acrylic on Canvas

Hitchhiking Ghost 1

Hitchhiking Ghost 2

Hitchhiking Ghost 3

Haunted Mansion Hitchhiking Ghosts 1

Aaron Robbins — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 23:25:30 +0000

In early October the wife started decorating the house for Halloween. Watching her and the kids setup the Mickey pumpkins and other decorations got me in the mood to paint something fun for Halloween. Right away I knew I wanted to paint something from the Disneyland Haunted Mansion but I wasn’t quite sure what. After a little research online I stumbled across some awesome do-it-yourself Hitchhiking Ghost masks. Perfect. The masks were not quite ready for painting. The mouth and eyes were missing and the rendering was pretty flat. So, I redrew each of the masks from scratch in Adobe Illustrator and added my own shading and eyes. The paintings are in the 20×26 range so I know it was going to be a time commitment to get all three of the ghosts done by Halloween. My goal was one a night and I was able to pull it off with minimal damage. I did the shorter heavier set guy on night one. It’s acrylic on medium grade canvas. Took about 3 hours total.

Who Made Campfires? HD Makes it to the App Store

Aaron Robbins — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 08:49:25 +0000

My first iPad App, Who Made Campfires? HD was released on the App store this weekend. This new app is a re-release of my first kids book app which was first released on the iPhone back in July 2010. Who Made Campfires is a story about God and the great outdoors. It follows the adventures . . .and questions of one young boy on a summer camping trip. Those familiar with Yosemite may notice that many of the scenes in Who Made Campfires are inspired from classic Yosemite locations. This being the case, I thought it was kind of cool that Who Made Campfires HD went live on the app store while we were actually in Yosemite. Oddly, the iPhone version went live the day before a previous trip to the valley. Anyway, there is no lady bug catching game in the iPad version, instead there is a day/night wheel which tracks the location of the sun and moon through out the story.

Check it out here: Who Made Campfires? HD

Arky Arky iPhone Game Now Avialable on App Store.

Aaron Robbins — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 02:00:24 +0000

My second iPhone app and first full fledged game was just released on the App Store. Help Noah load the Ark by arranging groups of animals in matching pairs. Earn special awards and fill your rainbow meter to unlock each of the 5 Rainbow Fun Facts. Hurry! A storm is coming. Arky Arky features nearly endless levels of animal matching fun. Start off by matching two groups of animals and as your skills increase so will the number of animals you need to match and load onto the ark. Other features include background music, sound effects, achievement system and “easy mode” setting.

Download Arky Arky Here

Little Fishy

Aaron Robbins — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 01:03:14 +0000

Sketched this guy out in the ol’ moleskin one night and thought it was kinda cool looking for a small piece. I redrew it on a higher end canvas and then busted the oils out. I was totally planning on making a deep blue oceany type color for the background but at the last minute I mixed up some green’ish hue color and went for it. I really like the way that part came out. The kelp and other fish were also done last minute with out an undersketch. Whole thing took maybe an hour or so.

Ray Gun

Aaron Robbins — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 20:26:54 +0000

This is the ray gun inspired from the Toy Stoy movies and Disneyland’s Astro Blasters ride. It differs from the the ray gun used on the Disneyland ride in that this gun has scooped dish and antenna for the barrel where as the ride gun just has a cone. It’s acrylic on canvas and took about 4 hours to sketch, paint, background and touch up. This is the first painting where I used the pretty common pop-acrylic art technique of outlining the piece using a Sharpie Magnum, in this case a blue’ish one. I’m more a fan of lineless rendering style in my own work and I haven’t really done any sharpie work since this piece, but I think it seemed to work ok for the ray gun.

iPhone vs Android

Aaron Robbins — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 00:48:08 +0000

These two guys were sketched and painted on a Wacom 1200WX for a now abandoned comic series I was working on. I don’t remember the punch line but it had something to do with the number of apps and bugs on the android versus the iphone. Anyway, I have a sort of long history with web comics and have been involved as an illustrator, writer and software developer on various web comic projects over the last five years. I still love the medium and outlet and would love to get in on another series at some point. I illustrated this quite a while ago and it’s hard to tell from my illustration who is the iphone guy and who is the android guy, but looking at it now I just assume the bald guy with the black eye is the android guy, is there something wrong with that?

Kids Giraffe

Aaron Robbins — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 00:30:35 +0000

This giraffe was the third acrylic painting I ever attempted and the first where I didn’t try to lay down layers and layers of under-painting. It was also the first where I put a sketch onto the painting canvas. For some reason I always had this idea that with painting it was against the law to sketch on the canvas itself. Some art store was having a great sale on canvases so this painting and the one that goes with it “Kids Elephant” are both done on very high quality canvases. Took about 2 hours over one night and was spray varnished about a week later. Both the giraffe and elephant now hang in our kids bathroom.