Commissions from San Diego Comic-Con

Okay, I know this post is LATE... but I've been busy.  Anyway, above is a bunch (but not all) of the artwork I did from my Artists Alley table at San Diego Comic-Con 2015!  It was so awesome to have a table there, I look forward to doing it again, if the Comic-Con Gods see fit to bring me back!

Sadly, I did not taking any pictures of the commissions I did from So Cal Comic Con in October.  I don't know why.  But if any of you reading this, got artwork from me from that show, or from San Diego Comic-Con and you don't see it above... shoot me an email, and I'll include it in a future post!

Batmax 2.0, now wearable!

Just got back from the Comic-Con... I'll be posting an update about my experience, and some pics of some of the artwork made while there in a later post (have to go through all the pics!).

Right now, however, I'm posting to announce that the most successful print from the Comic-Con is now WEARABLE as a t-shirt, tank, hoodie, or crewneck.  From my TeePublic store!  This is also the first design I've made available as a print that you can order from the TeePublic store as well.  It can be ordered anywhere from a 9"x9" paper print, to a 30"x30" print on CANVAS!   I have no idea why all the sizes are square... but, it'll do until I open my own online store... COMING SOON!

#inktober - Days 25-28

So these were all drawn on the 28th... but... they were posted the 29th... So I'm still down by one.  And have til Friday to finish the last 3.  I think it'll be done.  Again, mostly done with PITT... didn't get to experiment too much.  Though the Maleficent uses the White Sharpie Paint Marker, and regular Sharpie for the eyes.   The Freddy Krueger is a bit of a disappointment.

The animals turned out pretty cool though.  More to come!

#inktober - Days 14-17

Playing some catch-up today.  4 new entries, puts me at presently down by 4.  I'm pretty sure I'll make it to 31 on/before the 31st.  Though I think, I might cancel the 30 Characters Challenge in November this year.  We shall see.

These entries show another media swap-up.  I hit up the art supply store this morning and picked up two different sizes of Faber-Castell PITT Artists Brush Pens.  It still uses india ink, but it handles a bit more like a marker... so there's some more control, and less bleeding.  I also bought some better india ink, cuz the stuff I bought earlier this month I feel is not as opaque as it could be... and while that has some advantages, it isn't what I wanted it to be.  So I'll experiment with that later.  I also bought a Sharpie Water-Based White Marker, which I thought I would experiemnt with, but haven't really got the results I was hoping for... again having to do with opaque-ness.  I've had better luck with White-Out in the past (and it was cheaper).

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!

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.

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.

APE-ril: Terk

Disney fun again... TWICE in one day?  WOW!   Anywho... Terk, Tarzan's gorilla sidekick.  Did anybody else think it was odd that this BOY monkey was voiced by Rosie O' Donnel?

APE-ril: Rafiki

This one really helped re-energize me at the zero hour... leave it to Disney to pick you up when you're feeling down...  This ones was fun, loose, and free to draw (with a ballpoint pen, no less!), and it's just kinda... well "free" is the only word that comes to mind.  I really like the way it came out.

APE-ril: King Louie

There are two "Kings" in this APE-ril challenge of mine... Yesterday we saw King Kong, today we see King Louie... King Louie always kinda reminded me of Steven Tyler... both crazy looking monkeys... In hindsight, mayhaps I should have drawn King Louie as a judge on American Idol.

APE-ril: Jack

Everybody's favorite undead monkey!  JACK!  A lot of people think it was Johnny Depp that made the "Pirates" films so successful... nope, it was Jack the monkey!

I had some trouble drawing Jack.  I think that's because I was trying too hard to go for "Realism" initially, when I boiled him down and simplified the character in a cartoony fashion I think better captured this little monkey rascal.

Abu and "Ape" Welcome you to APE-ril

My buddy and art-peer, Stephen Wittmaak (whose work can be found at PORTCITY UNDERGROUND) is doing an "Ape a day" drawing challenge for the month of April, thus making it "APE-ril" (get it?).  Anywho, I was thinking about it and thought, that's not a bad idea... so... in the words of Barney Stinson, "Challenge Accepted!"  I sat down for about 2 hours and made a list of apes (and monkeys, PLEASE don't debate me on the difference of monkeys and Apes, let's just let bygones be bygones) that I wanted to draw.  That list goes to 30 (one for each day).  As I was at Disneyland all day yesterday, I did not have time to doodle an ape yesterday, so today is TWO apes.  I really want to do all 30 in the month of APE-ril.

First up is Abu, everybody's favorite little rascal monkey from Disney's Aladdin.  See the connection to yesterday's Disneyland trip?  Or is it just cuz his name comes first on the list of monkeys?  It's technically, both!  Ha-HA!

Second up is, "Ape Named Ape" from the ORIGINAL (not the lame animated remake or the gawd-awful Brendan Fraser film) George of the Jungle.  My mental image of Ape differs a lot from what I found when I was looking up reference material for this drawing.  I really don't remember him looking anything like this at all.  But apparently he did.  Kinda weird how my mind remembers something else.  But I'll take it.

Pascal (Progressed?)

Yeesh, almost 2 weeks of no posts...  for shame Bob!   SHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAME!

Anywho, I started this Pascal drawing back in January cuz I was aching to do some shading/coloring with my Crayola's, and with Tangled coming out on BluRay yesterday, I was like "Hrmm, I should finish that drawing".  So here it is... Pascal in his fully colored glory!  I started the drawing in Crayola colored pencil (mostly the head) or see the Pascal in Progress (PIP?) post from January 5th, but I had left my Crayolas at work, so I pulled out my Prismacolors to finish this guy up.  So the head, Crayloa.  Everything else, Prisma.  Can you see the difference?

It all started with a mouse... (and a work schedule)...

I'm headed to Disneyland this weekend, so new Drawsiness until Sunday night (and probably Monday morning).  But I had to throw up something before heading off to work, so I was figured, why not the mouse?  I wanted to do something that would show the progress of the character though the years, but it fell short.  I don't want to say it's the overlapping black.. cuz I wanted that.  It was intentional.  But i definitely shouldn't have used Sharpie to outline the full bodied mouse.  Too thick, and loss some detail and beauty of the line work.

Live and learn.

Let the painting begin!

Okay, technically this painting began...  FEBRUARY of 2009!!!   Nearly 2 years ago.  But I've been busy, I moved, and the painting was buried in the "studio" for the past year and some change.  My girlfriend had me start this to get me to be more artsy, but it fell by the wayside.

But in an effort to get more creative, we finally got around to get the "studio" to be more studio-esque, and less like Matt Paxton's day job, so now I can attempt to get it done!  She's requested I finish it by her birthday, April 1st.  So we shall see.  The important thing is that it's now on an easel, and not buried under other art projects shoved behind boxes, behind a door, and then barricaded.   Now I can begin painting!

Pascal in Progress (PIP?)

I do a lot of drawing that then gets scanned, and I usually finish it, color it, and polish it off in Photoshop.  But every now and then I like to color things by hand.  While you can mimic and do many things in the computer there's something aesthetically pleasing about crafting by hand.  That's why I enjoy to paint (hopefully I'll post some this year), you can't truly paint digitally in my opinion.  You can do things that look LIKE painting.  But a painting is a painting and digital art is digital art.  Call me old, but that's my belief.  They're different media with different tools.

Anyway, I had the itch to bust out some colored pencils (Crayola, specifically), and do some layering with them and developing up the form.  So I picked the ever lovable Pascal from Disney's Tangled.  If you have not yet seen this flick, go out to a theater and see it.  And if you can find a theater still showing it in 3D (though many have moved on to Tron and other 3D fare), go see it in 3D!  The scene in the boat, is stunning in 3D, and the story as a whole is handled very much in the classic Disney model, while still being very fresh and modern!  Go!.  Movie critique aside, I figured all the different greens (with some accents of yellow and blue) would be the perfect creature to build up in colored pencils. So far it's working, but it's time consuming (that's an advantage to computer coloring, time!)  Hopefully I'll finish it up later today or tomorrow, and post the finished thing soon.