Autographed "Eli's Escape" For Sale

I'm also selling my "Eli's Escape" painting, with a fresh, new autograph from Super Bowl 42 MVP Eli Manning hisself. Eli was another Giant that I was lucky enough to run into @ the Super Show and he was nice enough to sign this for me. The painting is 36"x24" acrylic on canvas, and the autograph has been certified authentic by In The Game Collectibles. For more info, shoot an e-mail to cm@craigmahoney.com

Eli's Escape pt. 4

Finally making progress on this MF'er. I'm really looking forward to finishing this and moving on to something where I won't be spending hours with a tiny detailing brush on 5 different guys. It's gonna be such a relief just to be able to paint a guy's face again instead of a facemask. By the way, I already have a few people that have expressed interest in buying this, if you want to be added to that list, just e-mail me or leave a comment.

New Projects - Jeter, A-Rod

I am feverishly at work building up my portfoilio right now. Not only am I trying to become an exhibiting member of the Shrewsbury Creative Arts Guild here in NJ, but I'm also on a mission to develop some sort of working relationship with the major sports leagues and memorabilia distributors and manufacturers. It's time to make the jump to full-time professional sports artist and move my desk and easel out of my bedroom and into a studio. My ultimate dream right now is to have at least one of my pieces hanging in the new Yankee Stadium and the new Giant/Jet Stadium.

So, I'm jumping back and forth from one project to the next to keep each one (and myself) fresh, but I'll post updates on each as I go along. Here are some pastel sketches of what will become acrylic paintings. The first is a 36'x24" canvas of A-Rod hitting his 500th home run. The second is a 16"x20" canvas of Capt. Jeter doing his trademark "Veni, Vidi, Vici" fist-pump.

Eli's Escape pt. 3

After blocking the colors out for the figures, I went in today to block out most of the line work so that when I start going into the serious detail tonight and this weekend it'll all hang together. I want to make sure everything lines up where it's supposed to and that it all works together, so I don't get burned when I put in the fine detail work.

Eli's Escape pt. 2

I've been working on my website for the past two days (you can see most of it now), but I finally got a chance to get back to work on the Eli Manning painting. The background is finished, and I got the first layer of color down on the players. Now, comes the hard part: all the meticulous, goddamned details.

Eli's Escape Update

I was hoping to make a little more progress on this yesterday than I did, but I got caught up in cleaning and re-organizing the studio for most of the day. I'm just about done on the background, though.

For those of you that remember the Roethlisberger piece I did earlier this year, I'm going for that same muted tone, and rough look to the background in order to clash with the Hi-Def color and detail of the main figures. Hopefully, I'll be able to finish the right side of the background up when I get back from my nephew's little league game today. Then, I'm hoping to log some serious hours this week to finally finish the bastard. I'll post updates as I go.