Illustration Friday-Muddy

I finished my little pig painting for Illustration Friday. My scanner is working again but now I'm having trouble getting the scan to match the original artwork. Ah well, one step at a time!

Most pigs love playing in the mud, but not this guy. At least he has his boots.

WIP - Muddy

I want to try and do my Illustration Friday entires for the next few weeks using traditional media. This week the theme is "muddy" so I came up with a sad little pig that hates walking in the rain (again sorry for the pictures - the scanner is still out of commission!):

I start by sketching out the drawing in my notebook. At this stage I do probably 20 or so quick doodles exploring the pose or feeling that I'm trying to create before I settle on one that I feel most accurately captures my original idea...

Illustration Friday - Focused

I finished my painting this weekend and if definitely fits within the Illustration Friday theme this week! Unfortunately my scanner is broken so I had to take a photo and the colors just aren't as vivid as they are in life. Hopefully I'll get that fixed soon!

Anyone who's seen my animated Div III will recognize the little girl character here as Margot. I've been thinking of starting an all-ages comic featuring Margot and her adventures (including a retelling of her encounter with the Goblin featured in the original film). This would be a long way off (I still have Robots! to get to first!) but I've been having a good time thinking of situations that she'd have to find her way out of. I imagine the comic as somewhat similar to Uncle Scrooge comics by Carl Barks and Don Rosa. Each issue would be a stand-alone story. We'll see what happens. But until then, look forward to more of my experiments in painting!

WIP - Roadblock

One of my goals for this year is to really start experimenting with a watercolor painting style. I've never really done it before and I think it's a medium that works really well for picture book illustration. I don't actually have watercolor paints, but I remembered that I have these really nice calligraphy inks that my aunt gave me one year for my birthday (probably back in high school) that I never really used. They ended up working wonderfully!

I only have one sized paint brush that works with watercolors, so things are starting to get a little muddy, but I'm happy with the direction this is going - especially for a first attempt with the medium! I still have a little more work to do before I'll feel like it's really finished. Pictures coming soon!

Winter - Final

Here's the final version of the second print in my seasons Glicee print series: Winter. The biggest change from my original sketches was to make the foggy breath curl into an ice crystal/icicle formation. I've been limiting myself to 6 colors in each design which gives me a nice design challenge to work with. I really loved the rough shading that I had in the original sketches, but to keep it visually similar to the first in the series, I went with a flatter coloring method. I'm going to wait to have this printed until I have the other two images in the series complete, but hopefully that will be pretty soon!

Winter WIP - Color blocking

Trying to figure out some quick color blocking on my Winter illustration. I think I'm going to go with the middle option.

"Winter" print -WIP

I've finally started to finish up the series of Mucha-inspired prints that I started with this illustration!

This is my initial rough sketch for "Winter." I wanted her to have a 1920's sort of style to offset the very nymph-y look of the original drawing (I also wanter her to feel very cold, while Autumn was very earthy). My inspiration for her outfit comes from all of the really creative street fashion blogs that I've been browsing lately. I'm still planning on doing a small run of Glicee prints for this illustration once I finish, and once I finish the entire series I'll do a collection of all of the four images together.

Viking Cat

My kitty loves to chew on my legs. I can only imagine why....

Drawn as a warm-up exercise in Photoshop. I realized that I've actually drawn a number of Vikings in the past 6 months. Strange...

Robots! Preview - Possum edition

I've been a busy little doodler this past week working on cranking out pages for the 3d web comic that Adam and I are preparing to launch in early February. I wanted to give a preview of the work I've been doing without showing off too much of the pages, so for now, enjoy this fine selection of possum drawings (taken from page 2 and 3 of the comic)!


I love drawing ugly little critters

Illustration Friday- Renewal

This week's Illustration Friday theme is "Renewal." Because I was home last week for Christmas, I thought it would be fun to "renew" an illustration that I did when I was a kid. During pretty much all of my elementary school years I was obsessed with hamsters. I had them as pets, I played make-believe that I was one, and I would draw them all the time. Strangely enough, the hamsters that I would draw all had a few common features: they had giant heads, incredibly blood-shot eyes, and they all wore propellor beanies (I chalk this up to watching too many Looney Toons). I tried to find an example of an old hamster drawing, but the only one around the house appears sans beanie. The color scheme is a bit atypical as well since this particular hamster was drawn for an art class assignment where we had to use magic doodle markers, but you get the idea. So we have:

Creepy polka-dot hamster circa mid 90's

And my new, beanie bearing (and still incredibly creepy) hamster from January 5th, 2010