Moved Blogs

Hey everyone, I wanted to let you know that I moved my blogs to tumblr. This is because of the cleaner format, easier posting, consistent scaling, and ease of sharing. There is a lot of new stuff I haven't posted on this page. Anyway I hope you all will follow me there. You can find the link below.

http://zachmontoya.tumblr.com/

something during lunch today

messed around with some landscapes during lunch today

Violet

Finally here is a personal piece I've been working on for a little while, I've been sick of my use of color lately and wanted to try out a few new colors I'm uncomfortable with using. A lot of my work lately started out with violets and it's starting to become my new favorite colors. I also like experimenting with the interaction of rendered vs. graphic.

Also, I am on twitter now! Would be cool if you give me a follow right here https://twitter.com/Zachrmontoya

Francoise Hardy Portrait

This is a portrait of one of my favorite singers Francoise Hardy, her popular music from the 60's have been a new discovery for me and ever since I've fallen in love with the music. I'm always very reluctant to do portraits since I feel like it's very easy to do extremely safe compositions and fall back on it as a result. It was interesting finding ways to make a simple portrait more narrative and interesting to look at. The process was surprisingly laborious, but because I'm looking for different stylistic choices along my breadth of work, a language was learned and will hopefully continue to develop. I'm not sure how well the likeness came through after the 'Zach Filter' but I like how the piece came out none the less.

Eel

I've been working a lot on some new work ever since graduation, most of my time was spent on video game work but I've finally had a lot of time to build my body of work. I have a slew of new work on the way and am reformatting nearly everything from my website to my portfolio.

Trying out some quicker, more traditional based work that can fit in the editorial world. But there will be some heavy digital work on the way too!

Style Practice

I've been in the middle of working on my final thesis paintings, which is are going a bit better than I had anticipated. But I've been looking back at my older more stylistic practices and since my internship at Zynga, have been enjoying working in different methods. I really envy people who can cartoon naturally, it is something that I struggle with, but I really enjoy doing it. Anyway here is a more recent attempt. If you look at my star wars poster and some of my older cartoony work you can see how it has evolved for better or for worse. I'm going to keep practicing this method and figure some things out as well as painting. I'll try to post more of these things to keep myself motivated.

My website is live!

Hey! My website is up and you can check it out at www.zachmontoya.com

Other than that here is a new piece that you can also find on my website. Go take a look!

Bottled Up and No Exit

The first illustration is about having bottle up feelings, the second is fake book cover for the play "No Exit" and is ultimately the direction I want to take my illustrations in. I really want to change the format of my blog but it will have to wait for later since I don't really have the time. Anyway hope you guys enjoy.

A little late

UPDATE: I added a high res version of the top piece, as well as a close up shot per my biggest fan's request.

Thinking about it, it's strange that I haven't uploaded a piece I've been done with for about 5 months now and has gotten into 3 Society of Illustrators shows. There is a third image that I wanted to upload with these two as a set of 3 but I have had very little time to finish that image up. I'm still pretty fond of how these images turned out, and after working on them I have learn to become much more patient. The first image still needs to be finished up but it's all nit-picky stuff in the back of my head. I hope y'all like them.

Fake Book Cover

Image I made that is of a fake book cover. The concept is about being attached to something that has abandoned you, I guess it's my way of trying to empathize with people who are born on soil that they call home, yet their country abandons them. Printing out dark images is the hardest thing to do, with the cost and the hell of going to the print lab is probably the worst thing on Earth. Hope sall good.

Halloween In December!

This was my submission for the MICA halloween poster contest. It wasn't chosen likely due to my stubbornness of not actually having any Star Wars characters in the image. All of the characters I drew were implied from the characters I drew, I just didn't want to have another Star Wars fan art thing circulating out there. I remember being really frustrated as I worked on this piece. Anyway hope you like it.

Digital Painting Sketch

Since I'm too lazy to upload any real illustrations to this blog, here is a half hour sketch in photoshop. I've been doing a lot of linear drawings in my sketchbooks and wanted to repeat this in the way I paint. It's interested limiting my colors and using the pressure sensitivity sparingly.

More Good Stuff!

I got the scholarship to the illustration master class this summer and really I can't say much besides thanks to Cathy and Arnie Fenner for offering this scholarship. I'm incredibly excited to have the opportunity to study under so many amazing illustrators and painters. I still can't believe that this happened.

As far as illustration goes. There are new things coming up next week after finals are over.

Updates Pretty Soon

Good things have been happening! Turns out I didn't throw $90 down the drain. I have a lot of work I've been sitting on that I'm not quite ready to show, and I want to make my blogger more accessible like y's. But that also means I'm going to be going through lots of yelling at my laptop for not accepting the coding and whatnot.

Also I'm going on the Mary Kate and Ashley Dream Vacation™ in Iceland this week and I can't wait. I'm working on a booklet and an accordion foldout as promotional material that is probably going to feature icelandic landscapes in them.

Hour long concept sketch

I had a really long weekend of working on this poster and my body is physically drained. I took a break of doing serious illustration to see if I can draw the figure from my head and draw some futuristic soldiers and robots. It was a nice hour long break of drawing stuff for fun, I might turn this into something real one day.