Illusory dreams

Tranced

2011-07-23T14:20:00.000-04:00

Finally done with this one! Haven't done an oil painting in a long time. I started working on it in July last year, so it's taken me 10 months to complete it! The thing is, it's been sittin on my easel all that time simply because I had very little time to work on it. Too busy with commissions! But, I plan to work on more oil paintings, so let's just hope it won't take another 10 months to complete my next project!

Here are some close-up details (click the images for full view):

Brucee

2011-07-05T19:54:00.000-04:00

Caricature of Kung Fu Legend: Bruce Lee!

Here you can have a look at the picture I used as a reference. For this one, I didn't include text or any sort of joke; just a caricature, an exageration, while keeping the same colors and texture, to make it look almost if it was just a distorted photograph.

The Director's directives

2011-06-29T16:27:00.000-04:00

Here's another silly caricature, this one about my favourite director, Quentin Tarantino!

Four Foul Fiends

2011-06-26T11:28:00.000-04:00

This is my newest painting, just finished it today. This isn't a commission, I did it for the fun of it. I wanted to create different styles for each girl, costumes and crazy hairdos, lots of details, accessories, scenery and hidden meanings. The idea was to make a sort of family portrait with a touch of dark humor. There's all kind of satanic symbols here and there: inverted pentagrams, inverted crosses, Sigil of Baphomet, Sabbatic Goat, devil smiley, triquetra symbol (which represents 3 unterlocked "6"s), satanic "S" (representing a lightning bolt, which was aslo used for the SS Nazi soldiers. It can be found as well in the band "KISS" logo and "AC DC"). There's also a hidden meaning with the title of this illustration, "Four Foul Fiends", or "FFF", which is a coded way of saying "666", "F" being the 6th letter of the alphabet.

I'm not a specialist of occultism and satanism, I simply did some research for this painting, and I found out all this interesting info. For example, I didn't know about the "FFF" meaning. That made me realise there's a Megadeth song called "FFF"on their "Cryptic writings"album, which stands for "Fight For Freedom" in the lyrics. Trivia stuff.

I also designed a made-up tequila label that can't really be seen in the actual illustration because it's way too small, but I'll post it here at least. It's all written in Spanish, so I hope I didn't make any mistake. The name of the tequila, "Almas Podridas", means "Rotten Souls". Below, you can read: "A tradition since the Original Sin" and "Made in Hell".

Baladi show DVD cover art

2011-06-21T06:34:00.000-04:00

Hi! This is an illustration I did for a local amateur baladi show (that's bellydance) DVD. There were different groups of girls, some beginners, some more experienced and overall it was very good.

Dance me to Death!

2011-05-26T14:53:00.001-04:00

Iron Maiden fan art. Based on the concept for the Dance of Death album. I've always loved the idea for the cover, and the pictures inside are great, but the CG artwork they used is completely despicable! Anyway, this is my take on the concept!

4 experiences

2011-05-24T09:09:00.000-04:00

These are illustrations I made for the promotion of a new therapeutic care unit by Bain Ultra. It combines the effects of five integrated therapies—thermotherapy^®, light therapy^®, chromatherapy, sound therapy^®, and aromatherapy. There is 4 experiences to choose from to fit your needs and state of mind: clear your mind/ center yourself/ open up to wonder/ experience gratitude. You can find more info about the product on their website.

RIFT -Create a Colossus Contest

2011-05-20T13:04:00.000-04:00

This is my entry for the "RIFT- Create a colossus contest" held on deviantArt. Rift is a new massively multiplayer online role-playing game, and the idea is pretty simple really: create a colossus (or a boss) based on one of the 6 planar themes from the game (earth, fire, water, air, life and death). Mine is an earth-colossus. The contest is open for submissions until June 19. See details and rules of the contest here.

Who's the real Joker?

2011-05-16T15:36:00.002-04:00

I had fun doing the Adam West and Frank Gorshin caricature for The Googler image, so I came up with yet another Batman oriented image. So you have the Joker from the old TV show (Cesar Romero), Tim Burton's Batman (Jack Nicholson) and Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight (Heath Ledger). Just a fun comparison between the different looks the Joker has gone through.

New Illusory Dreams!

2011-05-11T10:25:00.005-04:00

Well I'm finally done with the new revamped and improved Illusory Dreams. Fonts and colors have been changed, directory and structure of the site have been modified as well (so I had to change every single page and link on my web site) and of course there's my new interactive menu for my homepage!

By the way, I'm now officially doing at-home-freelance-illustration full-time (since 3 weeks), so I am very much opened to commissions!

:-)

The Googler

2011-05-06T14:07:00.001-04:00

This is a quick one I did. I don't very often do cartoons and caricatures, but this is a silly idea that popped into my head and I just had to do it.

Based on Frank Gorshin and Adam West.

Yeah! New homepage coming!

2011-03-28T17:10:00.000-04:00

I'm really happy to post this because I've had this idea in mind for years, really, and for reasons or others, it took forever before I actually started working on this, and now it's done and I'm pretty happy with the results. It was an arduous task, but well worth it. So basically, this is what we could call I guess an interactive digital painting. Not sure if others have done that before, but I don't recall any.

So the idea's really simple; the woman is standing in darkness, surrounded by hands coming out of the dark, holding bulbs. Each bulb lights up on mouseover -which is the interactive part of it, you see- and is clickable to access the different sections of my web site.

Below is a link for it. For now this is just a test, so the bulbs aren't clickable, I just wanted to test the bulbs lighting effect first. Some other changes will come all over my website as well, so I'll do it all at once when it's ready:

http/illusorydreams.com/homepage_test.html

Spectral Incursion

2011-02-06T17:26:00.000-05:00

This has just been released. I did the illustration for this anthology CD of a band called Spectral Incursion, released by Stormspell Records. You can check their Myspace here.

New Years Eve at the Soapbox

2010-12-23T21:47:00.000-05:00

If you're lucky enough to be Downtown Wilmington one week from now and want to start 2011 with a blast of good Ol' Rock N' Roll, The Soapbox's the place to groove baby!

Well, actually I've never heard most of these bands, but they sure got one hell of a kick ass poster, man! Ha! Ha! Well it was a fun little piece to do anyway. And I'll have more stuff I did for Salvacion to show soon, cause they're already preparing their next album. I got a bunch of other things I had been working on as well that I can't show for now, but I'll post everything as soon as I can!

Oh yeah, and while I'm at it, be sure to have one Hell of a Merry Christmas and may 2011 be a pretty friggin good year for all of you guys out there! God bless you all! And don't drink and drive! And come back next year please, continue to follow me, I'll get better I swear!

Peace!

Fatal Portrait (remake)

2010-09-28T23:19:00.002-04:00

I've been really busy with commissions lately, but I had some time to finish this little personal project I did just for the fun of it. This is my own version of King Diamond's first solo album artwork: Fatal Portrait.

And below is the original:

Heavy Metal -Featured artist!

2010-09-28T21:25:00.004-04:00

At last! I finally got my hands on the latest issue of Heavy Metal magazine! If I was so eager to have it -as the title of this entry explicitly suggest- it's that I was chosen to be the featured artist (the November 2010 issue, that is).

I sent them my portfolio some time ago, and last summer they emailed me to offer me to be the featured artist. They suggested 3 of my paintings to put in the magazine from which I had to choose one. I decided on "Borrowed Memories". I made that painting in 2008; that is one of my early full digital painting. Although I really liked that painting, being an older one, I thought it didn't represent very well what I can do now, for I think I have improved my technique quite a lot. As a matter of fact, the original was made almost completely using Painter, while I work exclusively with Photoshop now. So I reworked the painting a bit to give it more details, and I really like how it came out. Looks pretty cool in the magazine I must say, and so I'd like to give a many thanks to Heavy Metal for featuring me in their magazine!

Add folder for Bain Ultra

2010-09-14T18:51:00.001-04:00

This an illustration project for an advertising folder for a company called Bain Ultra. They sell air jet baths, home spas, air massage tubs and such. This was made to promote four specific items from their new products. The idea was to present those products in a forest, to represent well-being and calmness obviously, as well as their ecological awareness. The actual forest and products rendering weren't actually made by me, a company called Lanterne Digitale took care of that part. I was asked to illustrate the lady -the Muse- for a touch of fantasy, and to make it a bit more eye-catchy I guess. So I made her in two different poses; the first one is for the full image on the front page of the ad folder:

And the second is shown as a close-up on the back of the folder:

Artworks for "Ritual" album

2010-09-05T07:44:00.000-04:00

These artworks were made for a reissue of a band from New Jersey called Ritual, released by Heaven and Hell Records. The title of the album is "The ancient tome" and is a retrospective of the band's meterial from 1985 to 1992.

This is the image for the front cover:

And the second image is for the tray card:

The Bride's bloody vengeance!

2010-06-09T18:11:00.000-04:00

Hi there! I've been neglecting my blog for the past few months, but it's not because I've been couch potatoing. As a matter of fact, I've been quite busy. I started working on this Kill Bill artwork in April -I've been wanting to do one for a long time since this is my favourite movie- but I had to put it to rest for some time because I had a lot of other things to do. Finally got around to finish it and here it is! I've got also a couple of details for you to see. As usual, all done on Photoshop; screenshots and promo pics were used for reference.

Autodidact

2010-03-28T20:56:00.001-04:00

Just finished this painting. The whole idea comes from the clothes she's wearing; I saw that Chinese dress at a used clothing store ( that's when I was looking for a white dress to soil with ink for my painting "Kill me please... pretty baby") and I thought it was so pretty, of such fine quality and really not expensive at all -so I had to buy it cause I knew I'd want to use it in a painting; all I had to do was to find an interesting concept to go with the dress :)

It didn't take long to come up with an idea -I find Asian esthetics to be very inspirational, and it's not my only Asian-themed painting either, but I'm really fond of this one I must say. Hope you like it too!

And below is the pencil drawing outline of the dragon. This drawing can still be seen in the finished painting as a layer with screen effect at 29% oppacity that lays on top of a few other layers with different effects. The desired final result was inspired by glowing jellyfish. I also wanted it to look a bit like fire.

More T-shirts!

2010-03-21T20:58:00.004-04:00

Well, the guys from Salvación are sure keeping me busy. I made two more T-shirts design for them. The first one is a Western concept, so on the front you have this:

...and the back is a zombie Pancho Villa Wanted poster. They also wanted a colored version of the zombie Pancho Villa:

The second T-shirt idea was a pretty funny and original concept. It's a pastiche of a Mexican hot sauce label called Cholula. I replaced the Cholula logo by Salvación's logo -that I modified to look like the Cholula logo- and instead of having a girl on the label is one of the band member:

A misty morning (and her tears shattered like splintered glass)

2010-03-06T17:17:00.000-05:00

This is my latest painting that I just finished now! I started that one a while back, way in late October I think, just after finishing "Concerto" (the mermaid one), but I kept starting new projects and putting this one aside (because of the Wacom contest, then some commissions, and also because I didn't feel the strength to finish it yet). I finally managed to complete it and I'm pretty glad I did. The idea for this one was to make a portrait, a close-up of a face with as much details as I could, for skin texture in particular. The see-through veil was a patience-tester as well, but it came out nicely!

Zombie T-shirt!

2010-03-03T20:50:00.008-05:00

Here's another commission I did for Salvacion. They wanted a design for T-shirts, whith a pretty simple, yet fun idea, of a conquistador zombie. I presented two variations of this concept, one with the zombie holding a flag with the band's logo on it, and another one with a bloody halberd (sort of an axe blade mounted on a long stick), and they asked me to do both as they loved both and couldn't really decide which to choose, so here they

This is an ink drawing. The flag and halberd were done separately, then the montage and coloring were done with Photoshop.

Going to Hell!

2010-02-20T12:13:00.006-05:00

Here's a commissioned artwork I've made for a heavy metal band from North Carolina named Salvación. This is for their first album: "Going to Hell". You can check their Myspace here. It was a fun little piece of artwork to create. The car was a bit of a challenge as I've never done one and normally I'm more into organic elements, while a car's design and texture is all but natural, but it came out pretty well and I was happy with it. It's a Firebird 1973.

Kill me please... pretty baby

2010-01-24T17:18:00.006-05:00

This is not an actual request, just the title of my latest painting. So it's been some time since I've last submitted a new painting. I was a bit disapointed about not making it to the semi-finalists for the Wacom contest last month, I trully believed my entry should have get at least in the semi, but obviously the judges thought differently. I wasn't really impressed either by their choices, but they clearly wanted something more ludic and colorful and happy-happy, while I did something more insightful and profound.

I had another painting in progress before, but I put it aside to work on my entry for the contest, and after that, well I was in the mood for something with less details, something a bit different and fun, so I did this:

The girl is all made digitally and the ink splatters on the background are real ink splatters I made on paper and that I scanned. That was fun to do, I like to splash paint on a canvas -that's my little Pollock side :)

But what was even more fun was splashing all that ink on my girl friend :D

Yes 'cause you see, I always work with photo references, so for this one I bought a white dress especially to spoil it with ink, and my poor model had a hard time getting that ink out of her pores. Yep, sure sucks to be my girl friend! At least I enjoyed it!

I have more projects coming, so see ya soon!

Wacom Contest: Take two!

2009-12-07T19:27:00.004-05:00

Hi there!

Ok, so Wacom and DeviantArt are helding a second contest and I just had to give it a try again. The first contest was in May, the theme was "Good vs Evil" and you can find my entry here.

I didn't win but I made it to 50 semi-finalists, which isn't so bad considering there was over 9500 submissions! Anyways, this is not what I want to talk about! Of course I want to talk about my entry for the second contest, which is about "Dreams", that you find HERE.

You can also read my "artist's comments" on my entry page on the link above if you're interested to know about the painting's meaning. And if you want to see the reference pictures I used for this painting, work in progress and details, head this way!

Oh yeah! And for those of you who have a DA account, I need your support! You can vote for my entry by "favoring" it between December 16 and December 22! The entry with the most votes for that period of time will be the Community Choice Winner!

Cheers!

:-)

Concerto

2009-11-01T13:47:00.004-05:00

Well here is my latest painting. This is me at my most... masochistic. Sometimes I feel I'm really putting way too much detail into this, details that can't be seen here, even on the full size version. But the advantage of it is that the image can be printed on a large scale and it's then that one can really see the aweful amount of details, and I must say that if only the final result counts -which is the case- well I'm pretty happy with this one!

Again, completely digital, made with Photoshop and my fateful Wacom tablet. This is based on a photo I took something like two years ago. Back then, I knew I'd use that photograph as a reference for a future painting, even though I had no idea what it would be. I just loved the composition, the colors and of course the textures. I tried to recreate all that -and almost went crazy doing so- but it came out nicely I think. Hope you like it as well. Detail can be seen here:

http://illusorydreams.com/concertodetail.html

Early Christmas!

2009-10-07T22:14:00.008-04:00

Hi there! Long time no see. Well I haven't been painting very much during the summer, but now I'm back in business. So here's my latest work. It was made for the Iron Maiden fan club Christmas card competition that they have every year. It's opened to anybody, and the winner gets his artwork used to illustrate the fan club Christmas card, and some other goodies. I won this contest in 2001 and I've participated a couple more times after that, but I've never won again. This year, I really wanted to do a kick-ass painting, so I started working on it early, before they even announced the contest on their web site. Well, they're having the same contest every year anyway, so I just thought that I'd have more time to work on it and I could do something real nice, BUT! But but -how ironic- this year they decided to have a theme -beside the Christmas theme of course- and as I didn't know that of course, for as far as I know, it's the first time they have a theme, well my illustration has nothing to do with the theme! So now I know I won't win, but heck, what can I do know?

Well I've done a little tutorial/ work in progress thingy, so if anyone's interested, here it is. Hope it will be helpful to at least somebody, so I won't have done this in vain.

And here's my winning entry for the 2001 Xmas contest. It's a small 9 x 10 1/4 oil painting done on cardboard. This is around the time I started working with oil :-)

Quick portrait

2009-07-05T21:42:00.009-04:00

This is a quick portrait I made today. I did this as a sort of test. I started with a pencil drawing and the idea was to add color to it, trying to do something quick and nice, but I couldn't get the results I was hoping for. I thought the drawing looked better without the color, and just adding colors digitally to pencil just didn't fit. But I thought, "might as well make a full color painting out of this just for fun"; so I did! I must say it looks pretty nice, especially that it only took me a few hours.

I used a pic of actress Alison Lohman as a reference, although the intention wasn't really to make a portrait as lifelike as possible to the actress. I even changed her hair; normally she's blonde.

...aaaaand she's gorgeous too!

Los cronocrímenes

2009-06-07T19:58:00.005-04:00

As I mentionned already, I really like movies. But one thing I don't want to do is transform this blog into a personnal everyday chronicle of my every thoughts, feelings and actions. And I'm not going to analyse and dissect every movie that I see, like or dislike. I'm not a movie critic, there's people much better than me that are paid to do that, so I'll leave that to them. Besides, I hate it when your next door Joblo thinks his opinion matters to anyone and that his tastes and statements about any particular subject is a fact and anybody not sharing them is a shit*!

BUT! What I am going to do is let you know when I see a real good movie and suggest it to whoever might be interested. So the movie I just saw is Los cronocrímenes (Timecrimes) by Spanish director and actor Nacho Vigalondo. This is one of the most interesting and original movie I've seen since Oldboy. I don't want to reveal too much about the plot, as it is really interesting to just watch the movie, not knowing at first where it is going to take you, and letting the story lead you into its puzzling and twisted time travelling mystery. It involves a regular man who's life turns upside down after searching for a naked woman in the forest and his encounter with a pink-bandage-covered-face maniac. This movie is brilliant and shows it's not necessary to have big hollywood names and a big budget to make a fantastic film.

* see IMDb's forum, you'll know what I mean...

Just a quick note

2009-06-03T18:24:00.004-04:00

Hi! I added two illustrations on my site. I made these paintings back in Autumn last year for a contest, the L. Ron Hubbard Illustrators of the future contest. I was one of five semi-finalists for the first quarter of the 2009 contest, but I didn't make it to the top 3. This is life!

But for those interested, it's a really interesting contest. They have the contest every year, they choose 3 winners each quarters and at the end of the year they have another contest with all winners of all quarters for a grand prize. They also have a parallel contest for writers!

Bring your vision to life

2009-05-29T23:07:00.004-04:00

Well good news here! Just found out that I am one of 50 semi-finalists for the "Wacom- Bring your vision to life contest" held on DeviantART! The contest theme is Good vs Evil. You can check my entry here.

So far I've received really nice comments and positive feedbacks from the comunity, and it feels really nice and warm in my little heart! I'll keep you posted and let you know if I make it in the top 3! Who knows?!

Hello!

2009-05-26T22:13:00.003-04:00

Well hello everyone! My name is Yannick and this is my first blog. I'll have to get use a little bit to this at first, but it shouldn't be too bad.

I'm an artist and I want more people to get in touch with my work, so I thought having my own Blog could help a little. You can check my artworks on my website: illusorydreams.com

To introduce myself a little, well I'm 26 years old and I live in Québec city, Canada. As I said, I'm an artist; what I do is an amalgam of surrealism, fantasy art, symbolism, and erotic art, and sometimes a touch of dark art. I am not a professional artist, at least not yet, but I really want to concentrate as much as possible my efforts to become a full time illustrator.

I'll use this Blog mostly to post news about my website, to let eveyone know whenever I have new paintings added to my gallery and such. I'll also post exclusive things like work in progress for example.

I'll probably post some random stuff about myself once in a while as well, and comment movies I'm going to see, things like that. I especcially like old movies, stuff from the 80s, Kung Fu flicks or horror movies, B-movies, or weird movies so bad they're good!

By the way, I'm a French speaking Canadian, but I'll be blogging in English because I think unfortunately that the web in French is a bit limited, and my goal being to reach as many people as possible, that's why I'll be posting in English!

That's it for the introduction I guess. Hope to see you around! Cheers! :-)