Happy Birthday Jewel!

Imagine that a precocious and weird, quirky kid, just on the cusp of adolescence, jumps over your fence and is heading for your front door. There's a younger, even weirder kid waiting behind the fence with a guy that looks suspiciously like Bill Murray.

As he gets nearer, you see that he's wearing a green corduroy sport jacket with leather patches on the elbows, a red vintage Italian scooter helmet, plaid dress shirt, and orange pants. He has a battered valise covered in travel stickers in one hand and a dark pink box with a bow around it in the other.

He puts the box on your front doorstep and periodically turns to look for signs of life at your window before leaving.

Inside the box there's a bulky pink velum envelope wrapped with a red ribbon, and inside that, there is a folded old gig poster wrapped in pink onion skin. This is that poster.

Happy birthday Jewel, don't overdose on whimsy!

Also there's some delightful French music playing in the background.
EXTREMELY delightful.

Happy Birthday Bob!

2015 is the year of the gig poster for me. While I knew that I was going to be doing illustrations for people's birthdays again this year, it was during a fit of sleeplessness that my tortured brain decided to go with this format. Don't bother looking up any of these fake bands on the internet...but feel free to steal any of the names for your fake garage bands.

So happy birthday Bob! Pile into the van for your gig with all those other bands. House gets a cut of the door and the t-shirt sales...if you don't like it, hit the bricks kid.

This piece's main figure is based on this figure drawing sketch by John Singer Sargent for his 'Joyful Mysteries' mural at the Boston City Public Library.

As this seems to be my way these days, this poster is accompanied by my obsessive need to record my artistic process. Music by Spin Day.

Orc Sketch 1.20.15

I decided to practice putting some polish on this orc dame. This piece took me about 4.5 hours all told. The main thing I learned from this piece is that I really suck at designing tattoos.

Time lapse process vid here:

New 2015 Orc Sketch

Ah well, it's been a while, but I finally made it back with this lovely orc dude. One of the first images I've made while learning how to use Manga Studio 5. More work will be posted at the end of this week.

View the short process here:

Wasteland 2 Lemmy Character Portrait - Time Lapse

Who's the baddest mofo on the planet? Lemmy Kilmister of course! 

In honor of the long-awaited release of Wasteland 2, this is a character portrait for in-game use that looks somewhat like Lemmy if you nearly close your eyes and use your imagination. Better luck next time.

Daily Spitpaint - Triangle Robot

I joined the Daily Spitpaint (a group in which members do sketches in 30 minutes or less,) and this was my first embarrassing effort. Thirty minutes is not a lot of time when you're not a speedy type.

Time lapse video available on my YouTube page.

Time lapse - For Whom The Bell Gnolls

This hideous beast is finally as finished as it's going to get.

Free to good home, needs shots.

First Orc Twitch Paint - Speed x 900%

This is a much shorter version of my first Twitch stream, and is easier to watch and listen to.  Edited down with Lightworks, which is a great free movie editor. Thanks for watching!

Orc Stream

So, so pretty...

Orc done on my very first Twitch.tv stream today...

New Orc Sketches

Tuesday's Orc

Better Than Yesterday's

Monday's Orc

I had a bit of client work today so I wasn't able to draw much more than this. Same drill, Photoshop CS3, etc.

Batman Black & White

"Gooooood for yoooooooooooooou!"

30 minute value sketch from a movie still from The Dark Knight Rises. Christian Bale thinks it's good for you.

Friday's Orc

"Don't call me 'jolly'..."

Here's a full-size piece that I just concentrated on the face area for practice. The drawing was done in SP6 and colors in PS3 as usual. Perhaps some day when my pace is a little faster than a snail, I'll paint up the whole dude.

For this piece, I experimented with a stripped down pack of brushes from fantastic-artist-man Mister Dan LuVisi. I thank him for sharing his brushes and techniques with the rest of us.

Italian Mountain

Arg

Back to brief landscape studies since I have such difficulty with them. This one was pretty quickly thrown together in PS3 with a standard, hard round brush.

Thursday's Orc

Handsome Devil

Pencils done in SP6 yesterday, finished with PS3.

Tuesday's Orc

Wants to go to Tosche Station to pick up some power converters...

Sketched the pencil in SP6, colors done in PS3. Made a bit of progress with the color blending and the hair.

Edit: Fixed for Star Wars nerds like myself.

Figger Drawrins

I drew these during recess after I got hurt playing kickball.

Monday's Orc

Hungry

I just picked up Sketchbook Pro 6 for dirt cheap on Amazon, so I've been fiddlin' around with it a bit. All the pencils and "ink" were done in SP6 and then imported to Photoshop where I vomited some really fast color onto it.

The drawing tools are much better suited to doing inked comic style work, and the program itself is much lighter on its feet than Photoshop. From what I've seen, it's possible to do very sophisticated finished work with it, but I haven't delved into the color tools much.

Dwarf

2 hour dorf