A gift for "Coach" and the Slovenski family for all their awesomeness during my summer at Cape Cod Sea Camps.

This is a portrait piece commissioned by Peter Strong of his two daughters Laurie and Jackie. It was painted from a picture taken from Laurie's 16th birthday returning from Block Island. This is my first painting in over half a year. Hopefully I'll continue my dedication to it this time.

On my wushu training trip to China, I brought along a journal to record some of my memories. I did this drawing of Tiffany during a really boring Chinese language class.

My cat Marco. The funny thing about this painting is that i ran out of canvas, so i was wondering if i could paint on another fabric without any problems. I tore up an old flannel shirt and stretched it on the stretcher bars and primed it with some gesso. Blimey! It worked!

This is the first painting after I took a long 2 year hiatus. I was busy with work, wushu, friends, and my exploration of digital art. However, the truth is that I had been over saturated with art for the past 8 years, i was getting bored and stagnant. A break was necessary clear my mind and start fresh, like starting with a clean palette. One week in February, my friend Marco was away on a trip to Florida and I didn't feel like playing Halo 2 alone, so I spent some time cleaning my basement and dusted off all my old art supplies. The chill of winter compelled me to paint something that reminded me of warmer times, so I painted a scene from a photo I took in San Diego during my road trip in 2004.

The best thing about substituting for an art teacher is that i can genuinely help out students in class. The second best reason is that after i demonstrate some techniques for the students, i'll just continue working on my piece while they are busy with theirs. This was an self portrait assignment looking in a mirror.

This is a blind contour drawing i did as a demonstration while substituting in a basic drawing class at the high school.

Advanced drawing class during the last semester wasn't taken very seriously. By then, most of the people in the class were good friends, and we'd spend most of our time enjoying our last moments together in college, thinking about our senior projects and the rest of our lives. My drawings that semester deviated from anything traditional, instead focusing on diagrams of wushu motions. Not the specific motion of one part of the body; nothing calculated or measured, but a mental diagram. What do I visualize when I think about a the essence of a movement? The challenge was to take something that occured in 4 dimensions and create a 2 dimensional experience of it.

My concept for the aquamedia final was to let the natural flow of the paint on paper dictate what my subject will be. I'd layer the paper with washes of paint and let it drip and puddle naturally. I then tried to experience the paper in a zen-like moment and visualize an image from the patterns of paint. The final step was to paint the monochromatic images. For this one, I looked at the luscious orange and all I could think about were creamsicles.

He didn't catch it.

The assignment here was to find two unrelated pictures in the newspaper, but create a narrative through their juxtaposition. I related this painting of an old man and a young black child wearing a jersey with one of a football player attempting to catch a ball. Everyone always thinks it's the boy grown up catching the ball, but how could he be wearing the same number? Really, it's the old football player of glories past having an intimate moment with a fan of his. The reason he's wearing scary Freddy Krueger colors, I don't know.

This was a self portrait assignment where I had to include objects that identify me. First semester of senior year was all about wushu, new music courtesy of John, and my daily lemonade from the vending machine. My painting was selected for the atrium gallery show at the end of the year, though i didn't receive any prize money for it because i was a senior. Bastards!

One assignment was to make a series of paintings with a common theme. My theme was desperation, so i painted a guy being tangled up in a web of organic looking fibers. The other paintings were of a guy crawling through broken glass and another guy drowning.

A drawing i did of John during watercolor class. I didn't get lazy with his hair, it really was blonde because he dyed it.

My aquamedia class was extremely lame, the grad student that taught the class thought everything I did was wonderful when I knew it was not. I pretty much discredited the class, and considered it an easy A. It was really fun though because me and my friends John and Lena would just fool around all class. While i was supposed to be listening, i did this drawing of John in my sketchbook.

The assignment here was to take a painting from earlier in the semester and incorporate another posed figure in it. I took a perfectly innocent monochromatic painting of a female laying down, and painted a standing male wrapped in a pink bath towel over it. The dagger and blood was to leave no question as to what just happened, though they never really occupied the same space.

When I tell people that you draw and paint figures from life in college, a common reaction is "naked people?! totally naked, like, do you draw naked chicks?". Then i go, it's not really as glamorous as it sounds, and if i had my portfolio on hand, I'd show them this drawing to put any of their unfounded interest to rest.

A study of a young man laying face down on a blanket

A study of a young man's back. At this point, i really feel like I've developed understanding of color.

A figure painting becomes more than just about the figure once you add a few props. What narrative can you come up with here?

A study of a female in a dress.

Rough painting of a nude male.

We had to make a painting that told a story. This is a detail of a painting i never really finished, retracing the places we went on the China trip that past summer. The characters in the painting are recognizable, and some of the more obscure imagery have a lot symbolism, with meaning only to the people who know the inside jokes behind them.

The focus of the second intermediate painting class with Kathryn Myers was pattern and abstraction. She had just come back from India and really wanted to share her interests in things like mandalas, tapestries, and folk art. Can you see the pattern?

With this one painting, I absolutely changed the way i saw paint. In the other version of this painting, I continually added white to all the pigment, and dulling down the painting. I decided to just use paint straight from the tube, I figured it's not a realistic painting anyway, so anything goes. I realized that even though the colors were too saturated, the application too messy, i was more interested in it. What i learned here became important in how i approached figure painting.

A painting where i had to take still life objects and flatten the space they occupied.

Chukido was a play on the Japanese word part "ido" which i take to mean way of, so Chukido was "the way of Chuck". For a while as a joke, when somebody asked what martial art i did, i'd say Chukido, and they really were convinced there was such a thing. This is an oil on paper painting. The reason it doesn't have the qualities of a usual oil is that i painted really lean, very little oil, essentially a stain.

An assignment in my illustration class was to investigate the theme of "dreams" for possible submission into a juried show. I had a really vivid nightmare of human-like figures being chopped up on stage. The nightmare wasn't that the man was being chopped up, but that i was part of an audience that was passively watching the event without any empathy for the man on stage. Maybe this was my reaction to how ridiculous reality TV had become.

A pre assignment to this was to make a costume, wear it, get photographed in it, and use it as reference for the illustration. My theme for my costume was torture, so i designed a really weird upside down head, torn shirt, missing limb costume, that was quite uncomfortable to wear. I then composited poses from the reference photo to have an intertwining chaotic effect.

An amprairie dog is a hybrid of a radio and prairie dog. It lives underground and disturbs the farmer by playing loud rock music al light.

Since the image was cut on a linoleum block, i made different versions with different colored inks and various papers. This was the most interesting one because i pressed the block on gift wrapping tissue. It was vary delicate to work with.

I learned that one great material to oil paint on was vellum. It held the paint well without needing to be primed, and the paints dried pretty fast on it. Also, since it's translucent, you can get interesting layered effects by stacking paintings on top of each other.

A painting of a jar containing yellow liquid. The usual reaction to it was "is that a jar of piss?".

This is a painting commemorating a day in the foster farm corn maze with scotty, brian, and emma. Symbols are abound.

A quick study in charcoal washes on paper of a fat man and a briefcase.

It's funny how when I draw a nude figure, the model loses all identity as a person. They literally become just an object, and just become a series of lines and relationships of proportions and value, not any more emotional than a landscape or a still life. When i step back though, and return to reality, it still excites me that i drew a life-like form.

I took the charcoal technique of applying a light ground on the paper first then refining the image through additive and subtractive techniques.

This girl took 3 different poses and the task was to draw them all occupying the same space.

My friend Nathan said the drawing was cool because it looked like he was dust being blown away. Actually, it's just me not finishing a drawing, which I don't mind, I've never been one to finish my work anyway. But it also makes me wish that we had more opportunity to do more creative things with our drawings.

The task here was to draw a quick sketch of the seated figure, then when time was up, draw a more in depth version using what you learned from the first attempt. Unfortunately during the semester, we did not get have many models, so we didn't have experiences with drawing different body types.

I like charcoal because to some extent you can apply it has a painterly quality. Ground into a powder, you can apply it using a piece of paper towel or tortillon.

This was a pretty long term drawing, taking 2 class periods to complete. The guys did not actually sit in there positions at the same time. That would have been really awkward.

Probably my biggest accomplishment in figure drawing class having a good grasp of the structure of feet. Before that, i always placed feet inside of shoes to cheat.

Peter was our grad student teacher for the figure drawing class.

I like how using quick contours gives a good sense of volume in this figure.

A simple drawing modeled by a couple of the grad students that year.

This is an experiment with washes of charcoal on paper. When charcoal is ground up and mixed with water, it works somewhat like ink.

I had the unfortunate fate of being stuck with Peter the grad student for both figure drawing and figure drawing two. It's nice to get different points of view sometimes, better yet, get advice from more experienced faculty. Regardless, with my headphones on raging in my head, i made the most of that drawing class. We did a whole lot of quick gesture drawing in the class, here's just one example.

In the story, a lot of characters reluctantly go to war, not really understanding their purpose for fighting. It's a little eerie that the same issue is dividing out nation at this moment.

Idiaido tries saving a passenger of the royal vessel even though he couldn't swim, silly fellow.

Idiaido's up to no good, he's been caught crossing the border and is being held prisoner in a West Gamizan plains outpost. Standing guard is his future comrade Junx Tartarus.

For my final in printmaking, i decided to work with intaglio and make a book of illustrations from my last patriot story, 8 images total. Since print is a reproductive process, i actually made 3 identical books. This was a very memorable time for me, the nights of hanging out at the print shop well past midnight, snacking on dp dough and subway, just to get the final done of time. This is a print of Idiaido as a boy, who's older brother dies in his arms.

This is still the same plate as the earlier pieces in the series. There were probably a dozen states in between, with different images being the focus at different stages. By now the plate has been really overworked and over stressed, but i find it fun looking for all the hidden images layered underneath.

In intaglio printing, you can rework a plate by burnishing out an image and drawing over it, this left a history of what was there, which i now found beautiful (i wouldn't have thought the same in high school).

The intaglio print process is the one medium I really wish I had more time to explore in college. It was a good medium to accentuate my sketchy freehand drawing style. For this assignment, very random still life objects (including fresh fish, yes, fresh) were laid out on the table for us to composite together. The etching process was just like drawing, except that you couldn't really see what you were drawing, so when it came time to press the image, it was always a surprise.

Some of the pieces we did in Gus' basic print shop were woodblock prints. The assignment here was to make a print look like a line drawing. I was mildly successful.

My friend Nathan and I came to the conclusion that as long as there are nice folds of cloth in an image, you can consider it art.

A drawing i did for a homework assignment. It brings be back to freshman year, doing artwork out in the hallway or stairwell because my roommate would be absolutely obnoxious in the room.

An exercise in material interaction.

I like how we were taught to draw all sides of objects, even the sides we did not see, to have a better sense of space and volume.

When drawing 2 class started, we graduated from drawing boxes, and began drawing more varied objects like chairs, barrels, and shoes. By now, the idea that a good drawing didn't have to be a beautiful, perfect rendering made more sense.

This is one of the first paintings i made in the basic studio painting course at Uconn.

A pair of illustrations from the last patriot book.

An illustration from the last patriot book.

In my 2D design class, I learned how to put together a handmade book and I wanted to make something extragavent. That year I was still a fan of anime, and especially Hayao Miyazaki. So I wanted to create an epic story with an epic plot and epic characters. I also wanted to explore acrylic paints which I'd only briefly used before. What I ended up with was a book with almost 40 acrylic paintings and the birth of last patriot, which obviously became the name of my site. I still need to revisit my original idea eventually.

This is a sculpture I created of a playstation control. After being used as a pillow for over 6 years, it has lost a bit of its form. This was made for a 3D foundation class and is probably the only notable 3d project I worked on in all of college. It took almost 60 hours to complete, because every single stitch was done by hand... it was a labor of love. It payed off in the end though, because I won a $350 scholarship at the award show at the end of the year for it. And yes, I made a 16 foot cord with plug for it.

The title of this drawing doesn't have anything to do with the subject, a pair of jeans that look like they've just been taken off. It was part of the final assignment, and we were given more freedom than we had during the whole semester, so i decided to incorporate value into the drawing. During the critique, the class praised the drawing for its realism. But Clint, who had been pushing the importance of good line work all semester, told us that although we will be moving beyond simple boxes and line drawings in college, not to be seduced by value. I think i finally understand now.

The assignment here was to draw with permanent ink a highly contrasted rendition of an arrangement of objects in the drawing room. it really brings me back to the art building as i remember it.

Boxes... oh... boxes. Imagine my shock when i started my first college level drawing course, and i was told we would be drawing boxes all semester. Clint, the student teacher, wasn't kidding. "Charles, how are you're classes?", my friend Alison would call up and ask. "Ughhh... boxes, day in and day out", i would say. Now i appreciate that semester when i look back because somewhere along the way, i became comfortable with charcoals, messy drawings, and working big. And when a drawing consists of only straight lines, you make sure those lines are pretty darn confident.

My cat marco has always been a favorite subject for me. It isn't hard to find him catnapping in the corner or sitting on a chair staring intently outside. This is a charcoal drawing of Marco which i submitted to Metamorphosis, an Asian American literary and art magazine, where it was made the cover design.

In graphic design foundation class, we began learning that images are nothing without the an idea, or concept behind them. We also learned that the computer is merely a tool, a means, not an ends. This was always a conflicting issue, because the computer could sometimes churn out results that are unimaginable, and therefore is an integral part of the process. Still, in this foundations course, we were told to complete as much of the process as possible on paper first. This design piece, though it looks computer generated, was never realized on a computer. I took an altoids tin and photocopied it at different sizes. Then with an exacto knife and good old fashion glue, i carefully laid out a design arrangement. It was selected for the end of year atrium gallery show, and i received a $300 scholarship for it.

Senior year of high school... ahhh yes. It was one of the hectic times in memory. A full workload at school (I still don't know why i took honors physics), wushu, working two part time jobs, and of course, my art. I recall sunday evening being the only down time in the entire week. This one drawing brings back all those memories. The things that represent where i have been in my life... and nothing that will hint at where i'm going.

The assignment here was to illustrate an event in a story using pen and ink. I chose to revisit a drawing I made in the 5th grade by depicting Hades capturing Persephone. The original drawing was for a presentation i did on Greek mythology in the PROBE program for "gifted" students. (yeah right)

My senior of high school, I went on my first of 3 trips to China. I became fascinated with Chinese art and bought nice calligraphy brush and ink sets there, thinking I'd like to study Oriental art in college. Like all things though, that was a fickle phase, and i realized that one has to be immersed in that culture to understand and truly appreciate the subtleties of it.

By senior year i had, i had exhausted all the 2D art course at MHS, so i signed up for a portfolio class which was offered in lieu of AP art (there weren't enough students interested in that time). This is just one of the self assigned drawing i did in the green house at the school.

One time, there was a substitute for Mrs. Simon's advanced drawing class, and the assignment she gave us was to draw a birds eye view our bedrooms. We all balked at this assignment because we wanted to draw something creative from out heads. Funny thing though, i really got into this drawing, and even today, the arrangement and size proportions of the things in the room are really convincing to me, even it was drawn from memory.

My first trip out of the country was after my junior year. What makes it more sad is that the "other country" is Canada. However, it was a memorable trip because my family drove there for the Pan-Am Wushu Championships, my first tournament. On our way back, we stopped by Niagara Falls and took a lot of pictures, and this is my painting from one of them. I was quite inexperienced with watercolor and didn't realize that water based inks will bleed when you paint over them. I "fixed" this by using pastel over it. Interestingly enough, i really liked the effect. This was the first time i used the term "happy mistake" to mean something desirable coming out of something unexpected.

A basic still life in watecolor.

For some reason, I was obsessed with shafts of light in highschool.

I worked on this independently during 10th grade when i was doing a lot of art at home. I wasn't working at the time and didn't have any after school activities. The process was to assemble little pieces of cut magazine paper into an image of the path behind my apartments. My art teacher, Mrs. Balukas urged me to submit it to the Scholastic Arts Awards show where it won a Gold Key Award.

This was another piece in my sketch book that the art teachers tore out and submitted to the Scholastic Arts Competition. Of course it didn't win anything, it was just a practice drawing.

This was a drawing in my sketch book from when i was into doing nice drawings in it. Colored pencil was by far my favorite medium in high school. I remember in the first drawing class showing classmates at my table how to blend using the white colored pencil, they were amazed.

Mrs. Balukas demonstrated a collage technique where we colored an image with scraps of colored paper instead of using traditional medium. The art teachers selected this piece to be considered for the Scholastic Arts Award where it won a in the Connecticut show.

One of the first lessons in basic drawing was contour drawing. It's still one of my favorite techniques today, because i gives a really good feel for the organic nature of things.

This is the first long term drawing assignment I did in high school, a still life of gourds and kitchen items in graphite. The MHS art teachers submitted this piece for consideration in the Scholastic Arts Awards, but i don't think it won anything.