Merry Christmas!

I go all of November, posting 30 new pieces of art, and all I can scrounge up for December is 1?  Love the holidays... really.   Anyways, one thing I DID do that was artistic this December was this little beauty here.  That's approx. 4 feet by 4 feet of Disney Christmas magic.

Let me backtrack a bit, last Christmas the girlfriend and I decided to check out the neighborhood nearby that is "known" for their Christmas displays.  Y'know the kind that goes all out?  So we check it out and walk around and I make the astute observation that most of the "characters" seen on people's houses and lawns are nothing more than painted things of wood (and some aren't drawn all that well, but I digress).  To which I say... "Hey, I could totally do that!"

She takes me up on the offer.  Lady and the Tramp is what we consider "our movie", so it became the natural choice for our balcony (cuz we live in an apartment, and can only go "all out" so much).   So we bought the wood, grabbed reference material and went to work.  I drew the characters out on pencil, we cut them out, painted them, glazed them and hung them up, and wah-la!

These took a lot longer to make than my cocky arrogance thought, so we only had time to finish the sign and the spaghetti eating dogs.  The chefs, Joe and Tony, remain pencil sketches on wood.  They will make their debut NEXT Christmas, joining these dogs.  It was quite fun to do, actually, and we easily have the best decorated apartment in the complex.  Yay!

30 Characters in 30 Days... MEGA POST! Part 3: The End

I successfully, completed the 30 Characters Challenge.  And a challenge it was.  But I'm glad I did, cuz it reinforced drawing whether I wanted to or not, and I grew a little bit artistically and learned a few new tricks and such in Photoshop. So all in all an excellent experience.  One thing I really tried to do during the challenge was to avoid humanoid characters.  I didn't want bi-peds with 2 eyes, 2 ears, a mouth and nose.  I wanted to... challenge myself.  So a lot of the characters (see previous 2 posts) were not humanoid.  It was fun.  As always, just the art will be here...  for the stories, go to my 30 Characters Author Page.

#26 - iKill

#27 - Deforester

#28 - Armah

#29 - Gloomy, the Skully Child

#30 - The Tired Artist... (Semi-Autobigographical)

30 Characters in 30 Days... MEGA POST! Part 2: Electric Boogaloo

Now that I'm older (I'M THIRTY!!!!  AAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!), and now that Turkey Day is over... I thought I'd give an update on my entries in the 30 Characters Challenge.  I haven't missed a day yet (though have cut it close MANY times).  Anyway, as the last post, I'm only going to post the art here, if you want to read the full stories on each character, check it out at my author page on the 30 characters site, located right here.

On to the characters....

#8 - Watchers

#9 - Ivan Schlingstein

#10 - Trixy, the Clown Prostitute

 #11 - Plusho

#12 - Thaddeus I. Turtle, Sr.

#13 - Nightmare

#14 - Salvador the Snail

#15 - P-Fin, the Rapping Penguin

#16 - Loch THIS!

#17 - Jerry

#18 - Chloallb

#19 - The Censor

#20 - 01

#21 - Steve the Coal Elf

#22 - Not-Sure-Of-Himself-Man

#23 - Fluffy

#24 - Flaming Turkey

#25 - No. 2, and Pearl, the Pink Wonder

My last five will be posted later!

30 Characters in 30 Days... MEGA POST!

It's been a while since I've posted on this blog... little bit of artist's block, combined with "day job" energy drain, equals... less drawing.   AND I HATE THAT!   But, I haven't been NOT drawing per se...  Infact... I recently began the 30 Characters Challenge!

 The 30 Characters challenge, is a bunch of creative types, artists, writers, etc.  To create 30 characters in 30 Days.  Nov. 1-30.  So... A character each day... there's no real prize, or penalty if you fail.  But it's just good artistic muscle exercise.  So far I've been able to keep up.  I told myself I'd post one character a day before midnight (in my time zone), and so far I've done that...   I plan to post them all on here (prolly in batches of 2-3 or so at a time).  But today, you get seven!  If you want to follow them on the actual 30 Characters site, you can find all my entries right here.  Or just come back here, where they will be re-posted.  However, to drive business/traffic to the 30 Characters, I'm only gonna post the name of the character and the picture here... if you want to read about them... read them at the 30 Characters site.  :D

#1 - Bob the Bowling Pin

#2 - Braaains

#3 - Chiang

#4 - Blarglflarp

#5 - Tigraax

#6 - Killjoy

#7 - Tiffany

Perry the Platypus... Doing the Spider-Man thing...

Okay, I know that proportionately there is a slight size issue between Dr. Doofenshrmitz and Perry the Platypus... but in order to the parody right, I only had so much I could work with...  I'll blame it on some Size-Proportion-Change-inator or something... those things are always faulty.   Anyway, here's Perry the Platypus striking the iconic pose from Amazing Fantasy #15 (the first appearnce of Spider-Man).  It was fun to do.


I was originally gonna do a different Perry/Doofenshrmitz drawing, but I inked it using a standard Sharpie marker, and it looked all childish and lame.  So a week or two later, I took another crack at it, but this time used the much thinner Sharpie PEN, and the line weight worked much better.  Then I colored it in Photoshop, as per usual.

HULK-du-ken!

So I started doodling this Hulk drawing...  and right before I started drawing it, I realised he was trying to summon up a fireball like Ryu in Street Fighter.  *shrug*  Weird...

Birthday Portrait Aarrrrrr-t

Holy crap, I haven't posted here in over a month!  Which is odd, cuz I have been drawing in the past month.  I need to post more here.

Anywho, the above is a portrait I did for a co-worker for her birthday (which is today... Everybody sing!  Happy Birthady to yo.... no?  Nobody wants to sing?  Fine!).  She's really into pirates, so I drew her as a pirate.  Which is very odd, cuz I'm not a fan of doing portrait work.  I hate drawing portraits actually.  I really do.  But I did it, here it is.  She liked it.  So yay!

It was kinda helpful that she has dark hair, I would of hated drawing all that hair had she been a blonde... cuz it was a dark I could hide a lot with the blacks, which was immensely helpful.

This is how my "day job" makes me feel...

Like and old, fat, ugly man...   Rendered in ballpoint pen.  'Nuff said.

Commissions, Submissions, and other work drawn for others...

Okay, PART of the reason (besides laziness) that this blog didn't see much newness in June was that I've been whoring my talents out for others lately... here's 3 such prostitutions of my talent...

First up is Peter Pan as a doctor... This might take some explanation.  This was a commission from a former co-worker of mine, actually a SECOND commission, so I guess that makes her officially a "collector"?  Anywho, her fiance was gonna graduate from college and start on the road to being a doctor.  Kudos for him. He either like Peter Pan a lot, or he's her Peter Pan, either way they're associated, so she hired me to draw up Peter Pan as a doctor for a graduation gift.  When I went to have this printed, somebody suggested to me that Tinkerbell should have been standing on his shoulder in a nurse's outfit.  That was an awesome idea, but I had already been paid for the art, so... it didn't happen.  This image was also transferred to the face of a watch, and also given to the hubby to be.  When I get a picture of said watch, I will post that here, too.

Second, also requires some explanation.... Some mutual friends of my girlfriend and I are having a baby, due in like a month.  And they were gonna decorate the baby's room with a bunch of store bought art and such, but they have a lot of talented artist type friends, so they decided instead to turn to their artist friends to come up with art for the newborn's walls.  The father is a Jungle Cruise skipper at Disneyland, and the theme for the art was something jungle related, or Jungle Cruise related, or tiki, etc.  Not much else.  I was having some issues coming up with an idea I liked and wanted to pursue.  So my beautiful girlfriend came up with the idea you see above.  We call it "Playtime with Daddy", and it shows the father re-creating the jungle cruise experience at home with their daughter aged 4-6'ish.  I really got behind the idea, and made some changes and altered it a bit for my artistic sensibilities, and drew the above image.  Which I then handed back to my girlfriend, and she colored it in Photoshop.  The expectant couple LOVED the end result.  Hopefully the baby will too!

Lastly.  My "day job" is I work in the Photo Lab at a Target store.  In the break rooms at Targets all over this nation is "RED: The Team Member" magazine, and it's really just a magazine about Target, for Target, by Target.  But every month, it comes out and comes with stories about Target and team members and such.  It kills 15 minutes of time when you're on a break.  Anywho, for their upcoming issue in October, they are doing a story about the "Art of Target" and turned it over to the current team members to design the cover using that theme.  Above is what I came up with.  I kinda dig it.  Wish I had done maybe another parody or two of famous artworks, but... I think it works.  It was also a minor challenge leaving enough room at the top for the magazine logo and such... but all and all a fun project to work on.

A look back at June...

Wow... how much do I suck?  ONE entry for an entire month?   I need to get back into the game!

ToCATo

Wow, June is half over, and this is my first post.  So much for being a "daily" blog.  Actually, I plan to rectify that, and post more frequently... was just doing some inner thinking and what not...  Trying to figure out what I want to do with the blog, and as an artist, etc.  Still thinking, but yes, more art to come!

So this is a tomato/cat hybrid.  I didn't come up with it... I felt like leaving today's post up to fate, so I logged on to my Facebook account and posted "My "Drawsiness" art blog has gone 2 weeks with no new posts... I need to draw something and post it there... What should I draw?  First response I like, gets drawn... Go!"   And after the ball got rolling and people were sharing thoughts, one friend posted "a hybrid of a cat and a tomato", and my creative juices were a flowing....   and the above image is what my mind gave birth to.  Enjoy.

A look back at May...

I always thought it would be kinda cool to see my artwork on a billboard in Hollyweird or New York.  So this is prolly what it would look like.  Kinda cool.

May was the worst month in Drawsiness's 5-month history.  One of the drawings was even technically drawn in April.  But, that did work in my favor for the billboard thing... because I had a hard time finding a decent enough picutres of Hollywood billboards to accomodate even the 6 pictures I had... let alone a more healthy 20-something assortment of pictures.

On to JUNE!!!

Robin

I've been doodling Robin a lot in the past week or so... Don't really know why... just have... so, I figured why not post one here... so here's my warm up drawing of the day...   Robin.

Mermaids a'la Chalkin

So an artist friend of mine, said that mermaids are supposed to be the next big thing... so I thought.. what's better than a mermaid?   TWO mermaids...  And what's better than two mermaids?   TWO MERMAIDS MAKING OUT!

Alright, sex sells, I was hoping that maybe 2 mermaids making out would help traffic to this blog...  And it doesn't hurt that certain Hollywood blockbuster opened this weekend, happens to have mermaids.  But what I did decide to do was do an "homage."

Every generation has an iconic poster or image that adorns the walls of it's youth.  It was the Sailor kissing a Nurse, or a Bettie Page pin-up, or that famous Farrah Fawcett poster.  Well my generation growing up, the image every boy wished to have on their wall was the "Kiss" photograph, by Tanya Chalkin.

So "Kiss" was the big wall image thing growing up... Mermaids are apparently gonna be a big thing... so I mixed the two, old and new, and wah-lah... you have art!  Or sleeze.  I dunno, you be the judge.

Ch-ch-ch... Ah-Ah-Ah....

Welp, it's Friday the 13th... So how could I NOT draw Jason Voorhees?  C'mon, it was the most obvious choice!

This was actually kinda fun, I don't usually draw stuff so dark, and morbid.  Or at least not often, so it was good to experiment and try new things.  I also don't usually work with a muted palette too often.  With the exception of the nighttime sky, this could be black and white and not really look all that different from the color version.

Anywho, if you're at camp in the woods... don't go fornicating... or this guy will chop you up!  RUUUUUUUNNNNN!!!!!

Dire Troll Bomber

My best friend likes to paint miniature figures (many, I believe, are made by Privateer Press), and then plays role-playing games with them... I don't know all the details, not really my cup of tea.  However, he is quite talented at painting things that are so incredibly tiny (most of them are rarely more than 2 or 3 inches tall).  The amount of detail and intricacy I see him put into some of the figures just blows my mind... because I paint, but no way could I pull it off on the micro scale.

Anyway, the above image is a drawing I did, based off a figure that he painted.  I really wanted to break away and just go all out nuts on something weird and detailed (you try drawing monkeys for a month, and tell me you don't want to draw something completely different!), and this guy struck my artistic fancy... so there ya have it, one rampaging Dire Troll Bomber, with sidekick (who I believe lights the kegs?).

On an unrelated side note, I have finally got around to listing "Other Artisit's Blogs" on my page.  You can see them along the ride side of this blog.  These are just blogs of artists that I enjoy looking at their work (and a few peers).  If you're an artist, and have a blog and it's not listed, let me know.  I'll check it out, and if I dig your work, I'll add you to the list.  If you know of another artist's blog and you don't see it listed, and you think I might dig it, then also, let me know.

May the FIFTH be with you... Get it? No... Oh, right... I was late...

So, I was trying to get this drawing done yesterday, May the 4th, for "Star Wars Day", but life got in the way, and I failed to do so... so now, I am posting it today, a day late.  Also delaying it was some really bad proportions... I haven't really drawn any "sexy" ladies for a while, so I'm a bit rusty at the proportions and curves needed to titillate people.  Hopefully I fixed up enough of them that it doesn't distract those who want to appreciate Leia's... assets?

Comic-Con 2011 Souvenir Book Submission

So those of you not familiar with the incredible awesomeness that is the San Diego Comic-Con International, let me give a brief summary....

IT'S AMAZING! YOU SHOULD GO!

But seriously... it's pretty sweet, 4 days of just geek culture and win.  Sure, it's become a bit too commercialized lately, but it's still an awesome place to be.  LOVE IT.  Anywho, if you're fortunate to attend you get a bag of free crap right when you get your pass.  Inside the bag is.. well mostly crap.  But there are usually to books.  One is the schedule of events, which I affectionately refer to as "The Con Bible".  But the other book, is the souvenir book.

In this souvenir book is a bunch of articles and art, relating to themes going on in the comic book industry for that year.  And these articles and art come from people, fans and pros alike.  Well...  one of this years themes was the 50th Anniversary of the Fantastic Four.  And they were taking submissions, and I'm artistically inclined so I entered this one in (minus my blog's watermark, of course!).  Click here to see the other choices.

Kinda dangerous choice, as I'm sure it'll be the bulk of their submissions, but I started working on it before they added more topics... I might of done a piece for Jeff Smith's iconic character, Bone, had it been available when I started.  Spy VS. Spy, also could have been fun.  I stuck with the Fantastic Four however.  I decided to be clever about it... the easiest way to not make into the book would have been to do a splashy pin-up (like everybody else).  Also, since they just killed the Human Torch in the comics, there likely would have been many "Rest in Peace" art for Johnny Storm, so i didn't want to go that road.  So I was like... I need to show the strength of the family bond, and still be bold and simple.  So, I decided to go for each of them grabbing each others arms, and formed the above art.  On a side note, this why I did the hand study back in January.  Then it was just simple Photoshop'ing of color, as per usual, and BAM!  My submission was ready.

Now I just have to wait and see if I'm fortunate enough to get published in the 2011 Comic-Con International Souvenir Book!