lightsail design

Kristin a new model was doing some testing with me and here are a couple of images I’d like to share. I like the pose but on both I dropped in a background add interest to the image.

Reflections is part of an ongoing series of post apocalypse images I am working on.

I had recently moved from Chicago to the bucolic community of Woodlake Ct. This story was excerpted from a letter I had written to a friend back home.

Hey Bob, you’re going to love this. I am currently working on two illustrations, Intruder in the Wind and Bounty Hunter Blues. For Intruder, I needed a couple models, a crazy militia type dressed in camo gear and a baby. The most difficult one to get was of course the baby. Now as you know I’ve only lived in Woodbury a few months. This is not NYC and I don’t have an extensive model file here and as always I’m under a deadline, so, in a panic.
I’ve called everyone I know for leads on a baby three to four months old. It didn’t take to long to figure out I was on my own with this one. I asked the girls at the art supply store and at the Woodlake office, I even asked the woman who cleaned my rug if she knew of any cute babies.
After having no luck for several days I found myself at an outdoor fair. A Taste of Woodbury, that featured antiques, roast beef sandwiches and a collection of classic cars. As I wondered through the fair it dawned on me, “Gee there are lots of mothers with babies here.”
For women or couples you can go around staring at babies all you like. But a single guy, your going to get yourself noticed. Moms and dads really have their antennas out for suspicious people.
There I was. Surreptitiously trying to glance at the babies in their strollers and in their mother’s arms. Trying to decide if they were cute, too fat, or just plug ugly. A few times I walked up to the moms and asked them how old their babies were, standing there, using the time to get a better look at the little buggers, feeling stupid and uncomfortable. There had been one that I had seen a couple of times that I thought might be acceptable. I kept trying to get a better look, but I really didn’t want to get arrested. I decided that the direct approach was going to be the most credible.
I introduced myself trying my best to seem professional and disarmingly charming. I know that was a stretch but I was desperate. After telling them where I lived and given them my phone number and who the publisher was and what the story was about and offering $100 for an hours work. They decided to put away their misgiving and we made an appointment for four the next day. But my day was hardly done I had scheduled a photo shoot for 4:00 and that was just a couple of hours away.
One of the props I needed for the shoot was a gun. Realism is always best, so I had arranged to borrow one from a friend who was a collector.
Lee my model arrived on time and we got right down to business. I had the lights set up and a black backdrop. After a while I decided that I was going to take advantage of the natural light so we moved outside to the back porch. Lee was posed with his back to the house as if standing guard.
While we were shooting I had forgot that I was boiling water for coffee until I heard the shrill scream of my teakettle. What I didn’t know was that I had visitors and that’s what they heard as well. Wood lake as the name suggests was a development build in a wood on rolling hills overlooking the Lake. The condo I was living in was set on sloping land with a steep muddy path that winds around the house to the back porch. Apparently while I was running upstairs to turn off the boiling water the father of the baby I was scheduled to shoot the next day was knocking at my door. While I was upstairs he was making his way around to the back porch to see if any body was home.
What he found of course was a strange guy wearing my Miami Vice jacket holding a 45 caliber semi-automatic hand gun trying to look like a hit man. Now I wasn’t there, but I would have given anything to see the look on his face. After all he was checking me out to see if I was legit. It must have been in one moment the culmination of all of his worst fears. When I came down the two of them were frozen in a puzzled tableau. The baby’s father had the face of a deer staring into the headlight of an oncoming car. He struggled to regain his composure and explained his visit. I did my best to assuage his fears and regain my flagging credibility.
I dragged him into the basement studio just off my porch and desperately pointed to the drawing board, art supplies, and photography equipment scattered about the room. I got a brilliant Idea. I looked around the room and for a book cover I’d worked on. With a feeling of triumph I leafed through the book to find the credits. I shoved it under his nose, see, I did that see…. There’s my name David Loew. But it wasn’t there, someone else’s name was. The book cover had somehow been credited to another artist.
He had the look of someone trapped in a conversation with a devil worshipper.
I got a call a couple hours after he left. It seems he had decided to take a pass at the wonderful opportunity of having his daughter grace the cover of a mystery novel. Apparently he had come to the conclusion that I was speaking a little to literally when I told him I wanted to shoot his daughter.
The story did have a happy ending because Lee my hit man had a friend, who had a perfectly lovely baby, available the very next day. So that’s my story of the baby and the hit man, hope you liked it.

This summer I had an opportunity to shoot a fashion show. I didn’t have control of the lighting and once it got started there was no time to do anything but shoot. But the girls were lovely and the lighting added some drama I hadn’t expected. Since, the shoot I’ve experimented around with some subtle backgrounds. Here are a couple works in progress.

I have been trying to decide what image I’d like to post next. I’ve decided to go back a bit and show of one of my early paintings.

I’ve chosen the The Oxford Pub aproximately 48″x48″. This was one of my favorite watering holes and the most successful in a series of paintings I did of the Chicago nightlife.

The Oxford Pub a.k.a., The Last Chance Saloon, was painted over a series of months. I started sketching the individual characters most of whom where friends of mine. Needless to say this was many years ago and I was a much more colorful character than I am today. Most of my friends where artists, actors, musicians and madmen without portfolio and I myself drove a cab from six in the evening till three in the morning.

I lived and worked in a rough loft very my unfinished studio on Grand and Ohio. I knew the owner of the Oxford Pub Marty Sinclair and even got him to loan me a set of table and chairs that ultimately gave authenticity to the painting.

It was my Moulin Rouge. In my minds eye it’s almost easier to remember that period of my life as a series of paintings, a warm mix of color, light and shadow then the more crisp reality.

<

I’m working on a series of post apocalypse pieces. The different elements are being created using a combination of images created in a 3d program and photography that gives a crisp sense of realism to the fantasy.

On Friday I shot a performance by Deeply Rooted Dance Company. I was shooting with a Cannon 30 D and 28-80 lense under theatrical lighting.

The challenge of course was to get the best shots under low light with a lot of movement.

I pushed the ISO all the way to 1600, pulled back the aperture setting to 4 to 5.6 depending on the focal length. The shutter speed varied from 25-100 with the image stabilization on.

The result was a series of photographs that captures the flavor of the performance here are few of my favorites.

In my last few posts I’ve written about my recent work so today I thought I’d talk a little about one of my older pieces. Anna’s Book by Ruth Rendell, writing as Barbara Vine, published by New American Library in 1994.

The art director was George Cornell, I believe he’s retired, his place has been taken by Richard Hasselberger. One of the great things about George was that he gave me projects to work on in styles that weren’t represented in my portfolio.

Anna’s Book is a perfect example of this. My original layout was a photorealistic montage of images from the book. George looked at this and decided we needed to go in a new direction. In my former life as a fine artist my medium of choice was oils. At the time I had gotten the assignment I hadn’t worked on an oil painting in 10 years.

The background was created using photos of old London as reference and the foreground figure of the woman with baby carriage was shot with a model in a studio in New York. A lot of attention was paid to the detail of the costume so that it was historically accurate.

The painting was finished fairly quickly in about a week, and I haven’t done another oil painting since. I worked on several other books by Ruth Rendell including “king Solomon’s Carpet” and “No Night is Too Long” which was done a couple years later, in the style of “Anna’s Book, but all done using Photoshop and Painter.

From Publishers Weekly

From the pen of Edgar-winner Ruth Rendell’s suspense-writing doppleganger Vine ( A Dark-Adapted Eye ) comes a sixth adroitly fashioned novel of insidious psychological dimensions. Anna, an uncompromising Danish wife stranded by her husband in 1905 London, slyly scribbles tales of her hateful neighbors, boorish servant and absentee spouse while awaiting the birth of a baby. Half a century later, prompted by a poison pen letter, Anna tells her favorite daughter Swanny a half-riddle about her true parentage, but refuses to reveal the whole story, which is entangled with the murder of two women and the disappearance of a toddler. After frantically searching Anna’s many diaries for clues to no avail, Swanny publishes them to great acclaim; after Swanny dies, her niece Ann picks up the thread binding three generations and families and follows it to a neatly executed conclusion. Vine skillfully braids the lives of the three women, but it is Anna’s voice–puckish, angry, mysterious–that commands attention as fat red herrings are dangled, then tossed. While not as taut and chilling as Vine’s–or Rendell’s–best books, a mordant eye and textured accounts of turn-of-the-century London lend this novel a sharp edge.

Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

The most difficult part of this assignment was finding the right model. The instructions were very simple but very specific.

The main character is a 14-year-old girl. She has short, spiky brown hair, blue eyes, and pale skin. She should be attractive, but not model-perfect.

Sounds simple enough, I thought this was going to be a breeze. I’m in Chicago and there are plenty of modeling agencies around. Apparently what there is not a lot of is 14 year old girls with short hair.

I literally went through all the major agencies in Chicago, started at the top working my way down the list. It soon became clear to me that finding this quirky girl was going to pose more of a problem then I originally had assumed.

I even went around some suburban malls handing out flyers and offering a finders fee. I sent in photos of a number of potential girls and I thought I got close.

Craigs list saved the day. One of the many emails I got was actually from the mother of a fifteen year old girl who fit the bill and was 0ultimately approved.

The shoot itself went well. The only real challenge was to get 4 distinct looks that would be appropriate for 4 different covers. With this I go help from my hair and makeup stylist Ashley Vest.

Here is one the covers with post work done by the art director Tim Hall at Scholastic. Here are some of the shots I presented.

Chasing Yesterday Awakening

by Robin Wasserman ,

(Mass Market Paperback)

Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

Cover art David Loew

Art Direction: Tim Hall

The Best Teen Books in ‘07–Part 2