Portfolio 1 - Michael Dashow

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Michael Dashow

Page last updated on
May 11th, 2008

Welcome! This is the good stuff.... or at least as good as it gets for me, anyhow! This is my portfolio, the best of the art I have to show. Some pieces have been nominated for or even won awards. Others are perpetually overlooked but for me represent a strong achievement in rendering or at the very least indicate the sort of works I'd like to continue doing. So page through and enjoy. I hope you like what you see.

Wandering Monsters
This piece was done for a competition over at CGSociety, the theme for which was "Strange Behavior." So there's a lot of strange behavior going on in this piece: If you ask the girls, they'd tell you that all the nerds engrossed in their role-playing games were the strange ones. But to me, it's the girls themselves, so judgemental and scornful of anyone with different interests, beliefs, or priorities who are the strange ones to be judging others.

Click here to see the larger version and details.

Troll Crossing
This piece started off as just a personal illustration, a sample of how I would illustrate a tween-aged fantasy adventure book. Many such books feature the central characters front and center ina very symmetrical character-centric composition, so I went with that established format. Somewhere along the way, it turned into an article for ImagineFX magazine on how I use Photoshop to create my color comps, and on the language of color in general. The article appears in the December, 2007, issue of the magazine, issue number 024.

Click here to see some close-ups.

The Rhinoceros who Quoted Nietzsche
This is the cover from a collection of short stories by fantasy legend Peter S. Beagle, author of The Last Unicorn and The Folk of the Air. The collection is entitled The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances and is available from Tachyon Publications. Peter really liked this cover a lot, and said that I could quote him: "The best cover I've ever had. The cover realizes the story perfectly. It's exactly the way I'd imagined it." (Thanks, Peter!) This piece also won the 1997 Chesley Award for best science fiction / fantasy paperback book cover of the year, and was shown in the Spectrum 5 fantasy art show book.

I got the antique yellowed look by painting over a yellow background instead of the usual white, and by superimposing my line art in a medium brown instead of black. A few elements, like the rug and the sky outside the window, were added in to balance out the browns. You can see more of the watercolor and pencil details in a larger version of this image. You can also get a print (or a mousepad) of this pic here.

Wage Slave
Every few months, the wonderful web site CGTalk holds a large Challenge, an art contest open to computer artists worldwide. There are two categories - 2D and 3D - and a theme, and artist are invited to not only come up with a great image for the theme but to also post their progress every step of the way. So we post our work and everyone comments on it and gives us advice, hopefully strengthening the art along the way. It truly is a multinational effort, with illustrators from literally all over the world, as well as skill-lvels across the board, too. The mid-2005 Challenge had the theme of 'Master and Servant,' and attracted entires including overtly dominant/submissive images, pieces about substance addiction, as well as genies, Frankenstein monsters, robots, and more sexy women with giant beasts than you can shake a stick at. I opted for a workplace theme, which many could relate to. However, I intermingled it with a bunch of H.P. Lovecraft overtones. This is the result, which was awarded an Honourable Mention in the contest.

You can also get a poster (or a mousepad or mug) of this pic here.

Prehistoric Fireworks
The next contest over at CGTalk had the theme of 'Spectacular.' I figured that the Great Cretaceous Extinction and the asteroid that caused it probably would have been pretty spectacular for those who were around to witness it. So here they are.

You can also see the entire process through which this piece was developed and renderred here at CGTalk.

Or just see a larger version of this image here on this site.

Adorable Alien
Another painting done for a 2008 CGSociety Challenge, the theme for this one was "Alien/Human Interaction." Sometimes it's hard to come up with something new to say on the topic which doesn't seem tread upon dozens or hundreds of times by other artists and authors. I think Impromptu First Contact, below, manages to. I hope this one does too. Well, either way, it's a very "me" piece and I'm happy with how it came out. This too has a larger version.

Impromptu First Contact
Despite its proportions, the the evidence of a whole story going on here, it's not a book cover at all. Just a personal piece, the idea for which I've had floating around for something like six years. What do you do if you come across and alien race that doesn't recognize as sentient anything that doesn't look like themselves? Well, if you're smart like Mercy, you improvise: Here, a sock puppet forms the perfect bridge with which to communicate with this new intelligent race. Thus, this piece is alternately known as 'Sock Puppet Aliens.' It's a big watercolor panting, and you can see the details here.

Mercy in Space
Mercy and her pals are a portfolio piece for the kind of book I'd love to do a cover for, the sort of humorous science fiction that Robert Asprin and Douglas Adams write. I have to say that this is one of my favorite pieces of all of my works, and the only piece of mine adorning our living room. To me it has just the right combination or humor and realism and science fiction. There is, in fact, a whole back-story to the piece, a whole concept I have for a series of Mercy books which I will never write because, frankly, I'm and artist and not a writer. The stories involve Mercy doing numerous odd jobs around the galaxy in order to make enough money to continue her explorations and eventually make it back to Earth.

I'm really happy with how Mercy's face came out. An important rule for working digitally: Work large and then you can shrink it down later. Mercy's face alone was created at 8x11 inches at 300dpi (which is the final size of the entire image!)

Mercy and Rustbucket
It's Mercy again, this time with her metallic friend Rustbucket. One of the reasons for doing this piece was to show that I could do a series, more than one illustration with the same character throughout (a helpful skill for getting book illustration jobs.) I decided to let this piece serve the dual purpose of showing off Mercy again and also acting as my holiday greeting card for 1997.

The textures for Rustbucket the robot came from scanning old chunks of rusty metal on my flatbed scanner. Those textures were layered over the grayscale painting or Rustbucket, and then painted over more. I use Photoshop brushes set to Wet Edges for a lot of grime and oil effects. I used KPT Bryce for help laying out the background, but did a lot of painting over it in Photoshop and Painter to add the mesa cities and the sky and get everything to work the way I wanted it to.

Alien Wedding Portrait
When my wife Talia and I were planning our wedding, one of the ideas we'd had was for me to do one of my typical science fiction images for the invitations, a portrait of an alien couple being married. The idea was abandoned for a better one, but a year later I did this painting for her as an anniversary present. The couple isn't just a random pair of aliens, they're also caricatures of Talia and myself, dressed as we were on our wedding day!
This piece represents a big leap for me in that it's not done digitally. I did a color mockup of it in photoshop first, but then painted the entire thing in watercolors. So we have the only copy in the world hanging on our wall! (Okay, so this is a novel concept to a digital artist such as myself!)

Continue on to part 2 of the portfolio...