Birthday Boy

I took my boyfriend to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for his birthday earlier this month and drew him and a couple other folks when we stopped for coffee in the rooftop garden.

Below is a page from a drink and draw session with some fellow Kabam artists.

charlenefleming.com is GO

My new website is live, which means I can get back to spending my free time creating art. Be sure to update your bookmarks and links to www.charlenefleming.com.

So as not to make this an artless post, here's a page I did last month from a drink-and-draw session with some Kabam coworkers.

Oldies of Young'uns

Nothing much new to post, I'm afraid, but I found these oldies from 2009 when I was fishing through some old files looking for things for my new website. I never got the official go-ahead to show these but I'm going to assume it's alright until I hear otherwise. The company folded this year and my designs were never used anyway. These were for a childrens' game.

I'm still chipping away at the new website but it's pretty closed to completion.

Saturday Brunch

An explanation for the slow going-ons around here…

I’m in the midst of redesigning my website into something more functional and less embarrassing. I’ll be re-launching it within the next few weeks. Contained within will be an integrated blog but I will, in all likelihood, continue to post identical entries here. For a while, anyway. Regardless of whether or not I choose to continue my Blogspot blog, however, it will remain here for posterity. I’ve already imported this entire blog over to my new site, so my archives will be available there too.

Here’s a sketch I drew while sitting in the window of a café on last Saturday.

Below: Here's a sketch I almost like. It's one of my favorite houses in my neighborhood. I'd been meaning to draw it for almost three years by the time I got around to doing it last November. When I finished it, I hated the drawing for the way I got overly tight and detailed in the upper left corner (where I started) and the wonkiness of the ellipses. I actually like the wonky now but still regret the excess details. It's a reminder of the power of simplicity. I'd still like to go back and do a proper drawing and painting of it this year, though.

Hope to update again sooner rather than later. With the new website in hand.

Godfather: Five Families [First Neighborhood, Pt. 1]

Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting some of the work I did on Godfather: Five Families. My niche on our team is environment art. I did all the landmarks and almost all of the racket buildings.

I painted the front of most of our buildings facing the light, but the Fat Cat Club was an exception. The Fat Cat is a night club but our game view is late afternoon so I put the entrance and signs on the shadow side so I could exaggerate the lights and still give it that night club feeling.

I went ahead and named the theater after myself. Because how often does one get the opportunity to do something like that? Forgive me this one vanity. And for those who play the game, here's a related factoid: Capelli Steel is named after our art director, Ken Capelli.

Coworkers

Above: Jason Courtney and Greg Eichholzer.
Below: Sabrina Cecchini.

Above: Karla Ortiz and Thomas Denmark.

Fragments

The house drawing was originally intended to be a painted sketch but the only time this house is lit in a way that I like is in the morning. I don't like working from photographs or making up lighting for drawings done on actual location and I'm not a morning person so it follows that it may be a long time before I make it over the hill to go paint this.