Whimsical Coastal Illustrations

Whimsical coastal illustrations include watercolor, gouache and digital illustrations. Many include pen and ink and colored pencil highlights. The artist live in the Nye Beach neighborhood in Newport, Oregon.

Nye Beach is the hub of the art scene in Newport. There are galleries, coffee shops, bookstores, and the inspiring Sylvia Beach Hotel.

The artist walks the beach daily, and often includes found objects in his work. You’ll find beach grass, limpet shells, bones, razor sharp fish teeth, and other shell fragments in his work.

He has two types of sculpture stories:

Driftwood Sprites: Remember Ariel, in Shakespeare’s  Tempest? She was a wood sprite. What would happen if woods sprites were carried out to sea?  How would they survive?

Tidepool Guardians: Those driftwood sprites who survived, evolved to guard tidepools. They wear armor and carry weapons found on the beach. They protect delicate tide creatures, and sometimes fight with each other.

The artist has been inspired by the designers who did the plans for Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean. In a guidebook published in the late 1960’s, there we watercolor sketches developed to plan the ride. The artist loves that style (see Octopus Pirates illustration).

When developing the ride, the artists sculpted small versions of  the sets and characters. This inspired the artist to start sculpting the characters in his illustrations.

The artist is inspired the the background painter from Scooby Doo. That artist has a command of painting scenes at night, The colors lean toward purple, green and dark yet vibrant blues.

With this background, and the inspiration of the Nye Beach area, whimsical coastal illustrations naturally come to life.