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.

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.