raccoon house

So long, 2009! Maybe I'll post more stuff next year.

the crimson spotted owlmoose

I've been kinda busy lately, but I every once in a while I need to get a monster painting done.

It's puzzdog!

Over on The Independant Gaming Source forums, someone started a thread called DRAW PUZZDOG. Puzzdog is apparently a game character that fights evil cats with magnets and hair dryers? What?



I drew this one a couple days after watching/being subjected to "Flash Gordon". CAN YOU TELL??????



And here's a decidedly different take, a work in progress - after I decided I wanted to work on my perspective and backgrounds a little more. I'm thinking of replacing puzzdog altogether since he's just STANDING there.

Goodness me, it's time for a blog post!

This post is all about BACKGROUNDS, for once. I've been somewhat remiss* about my attention to surroundings and environments for most of my artistic career: most of the time when I want a background for something I'll just haphazardly slap some trees or vague hints of vegetation wherever it seems appropriate. If I'm feeling particularly slothful, the subject of the drawing will be left idling in a plain stretch of landish stuff, with a cloud filled sky to suggest that I'm not totally phoning it in.

So I'm trying some (sorta) different stuff, for once!

This first doodle (which, by the way, is even tinier than the scan might lead you to believe) is of, believe it or not, a cockpit! It's kind of hard to tell, but there's a chair and a windshield (what the hell would you call that in space? CRUSHING BLACK VOID SHIELD?) and a dashboard of sorts. It's incomprehensible and probably completely covered in unlabeled buttons. Which I didn't draw.

NEXT UP: The pilot of the ship is mucking about in a cavern made of trash. How irresponsible! This is a start but hey, I really only have the middle and foreground plotted out. Buh.

This last one WOULD fall into the "I just drew some stupid trees" category but I really like these trees. It's also the rough drawing for a watercolor painting, which I've traced off onto a sheet of paper (directly off the computer screen) to refine before I... trace it off onto watercolor paper. It's kind of fussy about erasers!

* okay, no, I've pretty much ignored them for the most part.

spaAAAAaaaAAAAAAAAACCCCE!

Ever so often I am struck by the urge to draw SPACE ANIMALS. Tryin' out a mix of underrendering and overrendering.

princess tomato and the PEEPING TOM kingdom

Whoah hey it's NES fanart. I am entertaining the idea that this picture is a work in progress, even though in reality I have absolutely no idea when I'm going to finish it!

some more watercolor stuff!

Jeez! I keep forgetting to post here. ANYWAY: I've got quite a bit of a backlog of stuff to post here - mostly watercolors, since I've been making semi-regular posts at inspirimint.com about my work process* (okay, mostly WHINING about my work process, but that's what I do BEST) and that's where some of these are from.

After these I'll probably be using paper that's actually MEANT to be painted on, because this stuff, while some of it is nice, isn't cutting it anymore.

There is a story behind this one, sort of. Just aching to be told! You can pretend that in addition to being a cowboy mummy, he's also capable of turning invisible because that seems to be what's happening to his other hand there. Whoops!


This one is kind of old by now but I still like it! I like giving things irregular frames but euuuggh this would probably be better if I just cut it out of the surrounding paper and placed it on top of a darker piece of paper. (instead of simulating the effect in photoshop)
This is pretty new! From a couple of weekends ago, even. Both one of my best friends and my mom have the same birthday, so I cranked out a couple of cards featuring what else, dinosaurs and monsters. There's a bit of colored pencil on this sucker too.
Oh man. I really like how this one turned out, ignoring the atrociously shoddy text at the top of the card. Textured cardstock = THE BEST. Don't be sad, horrible chimera! YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL ON THE INSIDE (maybe)


*this is a subtle cue for you, the reader, to check out inspirimint dot com. There are a couple of other people who post there more regularly and are much better at writing about art than I am, so uh. Yeah. Go there?

MATINEE MANATEE

HO HO!

COLORS

I drew this on my DS because homebrew is awesome. Colors is a surprisingly robust little application.

some recent photoshop doodley stuff

A hag! I think she's consulting the mousy thing on her shoulder, probably.
Oh god I don't even know what this is going to turn into when it is finished.

portrait: smiley

she's doing neck stretching exercises.

portrait: acrobat

Or a clown? Or someone going to the beach in a stripey leotard? I don't know anymore.

portrait: dog

This isn't a new development or anything, but I really like to draw characters that look like they're made of melting dough.

federal birdy of investigation

A drawing of a friend's cockatiel as an FBI agent.

watercolor moleskine doodles

I guess some of these technically aren't doodles! I try to alternate between doing tight detailed paintings and looser sketchy ones. (the latter usually don't work out that great)

page o' gators

2008 sketchbook stuff (part four)

Creepy colored pencil doodles, a couple of sketchcrawl pages (which you might take as an indication that there is an astonishing number of cartoon animals crawling around Union Station) doodles of people from a Starbucks, and the adventures of Jimmy Olsen (as a ghost). And uh I guess there's a chimp saying he's going to eat Jane Goodall's baby.

2008 sketchbook stuff (part three)

Zoo sketches. My special man friend and I took a trip to the Brookfield Zoo sometime in August or September, but we hadn't anticipated the heat. Or the throngs of incredibly bad-mannered children! Oh well.

2008 sketchbook stuff (part two)

More MST3K doodles, my dog as a hobo, and a couple of pages of sketches from a trip to Brookfield Zoo.

2008 sketchbook stuff (part one)

Some stuff from earlier last year, doodles and colored pencil tinkering.

DETECTIVE BULLDOG (semi-recent WIP)

French bulldog, that is. Colors for the background photoreferenced from google image search (I think).