Welcome to Adam's Blog-Portfolio-Gallery Thing! Adam Celeban is a well respected, prize-winning Artist, Illustrator and Designer, based in Sydney. Get in touch to have something unique created just for you!
September 2012. Digital Painting (Photoshop).
This piece is a sample spread for the Childrens' Book, currently titled "High Tea at the Top End". I'll post some of the character development drawings for this piece soon. The idea for it came to me suddenly simply as the thought: Crocodiles in duck fascinators. I used this project to particularly as a vehicle to develop my recent visual ideas of Australian landscapes and colours, and further hone my own individual style.
20 July 2012. Character Design. Working sketches in marker, final painting in Photoshop.
The brief called for a pirate-character on the search for treasure, using a mech to travel, search-for and obtain the booty.
To make a mech plausible to be made by someone in the time of pirates I figured it would either have to be man-powered, or would be built by someone a little ahead of their time, and powered by steam. This instantly conjured an image of a pirate reminiscent of the "steam-punk" genre. So I looked to pirate ships, carriages, steam boats and trains for inspiration. I began designs with carriage and srong-hold-like walkers, and even walking boats and ships. Looking at the character designs I had come up with, I inspected them, wondering which of them would have the means or inclination to make such a machine in a time when man power was clearly easier and cheaper, and came to the conclusion that he is an adventurer first and formost. A little odd, but immensely brilliant. Not someone who commissioned a machine, but the same person who invented it. This pirate was going to be a cross between Captain Hook, Captain Cook, and Dr. Who. A character with an insouciant swagger atop his "bow-legged metallic treasure huntin' stallion!".
20 June 2012 - Pencil on paper.
I was fortunate enough to be a part of One Word, One Day. It's an event organised by the ASA for illustrators around Australia to come together to raise money for the Indigenous Literacy Fund by auctioning off their works. The event moves around the each state's capital city, each having a word that is revealed as the topic for the day's illustrations. Sydney's word was "Teeter".
My entry is a portrait of sorts, of the incomparable Frankie Manning. A legend of Swing Dancing. As an afterthought it seemed apt to have one of the first "lindy-hoppers" conveyed as a frog. The illustration shows "Frankie the Frog, Falling off the Log", which happens to be well-known jazz step he most likely invented.
It was so inspiring being able to work alongside so many artists, who's work I have long admired. The illustrators I had the pleasure of working with were the likes of Bruce Whatley, Ben Wood, Serena Geddes, Alison-Jane Rice, Anthony Flowers, Alex Hammond, Pete Fairfax, Sadami Konchi, Brian Brown<, PJ Magalhaes and Jill Carter Hansen.
27th January 2012 - acrylic on canvas.
In January 2012, I organised to go painting in the bush with my artist and friend, Arto Heino. It seemed like Sydney's non-stop raining summers had finally finished, but we still needed to cover our easels and run to the trees for cover every so often… and just wait it out. Arto managed to make a start on a few paintings, but I was determined to completely finish this one painting.
I've been observing the Australian landscape a lot recently, and this painting gave me an opportunity to express a more stylistic and slightly "Seussian" interpretation, especially of the trees' wavy trunks and branches, and the cloud-like canopies of leaves.
3-5 November 2011 - Acrylics on Canvas.
Duration: each approx 3-6 hours.
I was privileged enough to be offered the opportunity to attend a 3-day "en plein air" painting workshop. It was the first workshop to be held at the The Outlook Artist's Residence in Austinmer (1 hour south of sydney).
The workshop was held by artist and friend, Rudy Kistler
(who is an excellent teacher too, by the way).
Featured here are my paintings from the workshop. To the left is the first day's study, looking out from a headland at Austinmer beach. Above-left is a costal landscape painted from the vantage point of the old, run-down Headland Hotel.
And above is a painting of a creek flowing under a shady spot on a little bridge by Austinmer train station.
6-9 October 2011 - Chalk on Canvas (2x3m). Duration: 3½ days.
My entry to The Chalk Urban Art Festival, this year, won a prize! The theme for this year's competition was "food", and it seems as though each year of the competition just keeps getting bigger and better. Congratulations to all of the other prize winners, and to everyone else who competed.
My work (an appropriation of Grant Wood's American Gothic) tells the tale of an old migrant couple, from a bygone era,
Mr Zucchino and his wife, Melanzana. They plead that their taste never be forgotten. Their only hope for the future is that their kind never die out - that they are eaten, and their descendants flourish once more.