This video shows the process of illustrating John Prine, a great American song writer singer, and guitarist. For Prine's portrait I thought it was absolutely required to show him playing his Martin flat-top guitar and singing, and it was also important to work in some of the key lines from his song lyrics. For the narration I used part of an interview he did at The Library of Congress (interview is in the public domain). In the narration, John talks about his creative process in writing "Hello in There."

The finished scratchboard illustration

The preliminary pencil sketch for the John Prine portrait. The design changed during the rendering oo the final scratchboard.

The finished scan of the portrait. One of Prine's biggest hits is called "Paradise." The song is about a small town near where he grew up that was bought up by a mining company and torn down to make room for strip mining. You can see that represented in the lower right. Also in the lower right are some loons. John seemed to like referring to loons and old tree in his songs as he did so frequently. His last album was called, "The Tree of Forgiveness."

Video showing the process of doing a scratchboard portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The narration is fro an interview of Justice Ginsburg at The Library of Congress (in public domain). She speaks about her opinion on Citizens United.

The preliminary sketch.

The finished scratchboard portrait of Justice Ginsburg.

A detail showing the scratching for the leaf shapes.

Here's the high resolution scan of the finished drawing. The text was set in Photoshop and the Liquefy filter was used to put a subtle waviness into the letters. The whole section of the robe with the text was screen-printed onto the scratchboard and further handwork was then done to it to and more texture and believable lighting effects.

This video shows the process of illustrating a scratchboard portrait of Senator John Lewis. For this video, I do a narration to describe my steps in doing the drawing. However, the voice is not my real voice but rather a voice created with text to speech software. The very end of the video has the voice of Lewis as the talks about what he calls "good trouble." That sound clip of John Lewis is from an interview at The Library of Congress and is in the public domain.

My first pencil sketch of Lewis. I rendered this sketch with more detail than I normally use because I was making some changes to the lighting, and I wanted to work that out before starting the scratchboard drawing.

This is the sketch that I transferred to the scratchboard.I like for the sketch that is transferred to the scratchboard to be in outline form because graphite is hard to erase from the clay surface of scratchboard.

Here's the finished portrait on scratchboard.