DRAGONS!

One day I might post something of actual artistic relevance, but for now y'all get this guy: In my mind his name is Larry Sunshine and he's a glass half full kind of guy. Like, the kind who slips encouraging post-its into the lunchboxes of coworkers and holds eye contact a little too long and wears socks that match his sweater on days he's feeling kicky.

Progress!

Workin more on skintones, here's a progress dump of someone diabolical that I've been working on today.

Life Drawing

So I moved to New York City a few months ago. This is not immediately related to the image posted above, but I think it's going to meander back to relevance in a little while:

I moved here for a new job and to live with my sweet, handsome nerdy boyfriend Michael who is a cinematographer which means he can basically either live here in NYC or Los Angeles. Having just spent four years in Savannah, Georgia, the most magically, confusingly beautiful city in the whole world, it came as a bit of a shock to see piles of garbage ten feet high on all the street corners, brave and savage rat colonies and people urinating in subway stations.

I was elaborately unhappy. And it took about two months of probably unhealthily vivid daydreams of living in a squat little cottage all alone in a flowery, lush, rat-free meadow with not a single Starbucks in sight and multiple instances in the subway where I nearly witnessed small toddlers being lifted away by the King of Rats, I began to figure the whole city thing out:

Sure, New York City is a vile, festering cesspool of neverending filth and constant unwelcome full-body contact with unwashed strangers on any given street corner or bus or subway train or burrito restaurant, but you never ever have to be bored. There's always something to do, and millions of really cool people to do things with! This alone has more or less won me over and I think I'm about a third of the way to earning myself a metaphorical I <3 NY tshirt.

There's stuff to do all the time. Instead of having to drive for 25 minutes to Pankake Palace to eat greasy ham biscuits after everything in downtown Savannah closed at 5 PM, I can walk out my front door, blindfolded and hobbled, turn 45 degrees in any direction and literally run face first into a dining establishment of some kind. And in this city there's a fair chance that they'd be totally into the blindfold and hobbles.

But other than food, one of my favorite things in the whole world is my life drawing sessions every Thursday. Life drawing was a total punishment for me through most of college (breathing charcoal dust in a hot, cramped room drawing a dimply model who makes occasional, uncomfortably long eye contact) but this one is swank, man. It's at a fine establishment called the Society of Illustrators which is bedecked with Leyendeckers and Rockwells and a well-equipped wet bar.

Aside from the crippling inferiority complex which rears its head every time I look at the gorgeous paintings hung on the walls, it's a really nice way to relax. There's always some kind of live band and the models wear cool costumes and they don't even carry toy swords or get half-boners while gazing smolderingly at the misplaced fashion student in the front row!

So anyway, I feel like I've made progress in my sketches, but my favorite ones always come from when I get bored with the real models and start drawing random people in the crowd. This is one of those, onto which I attempted to paint some skin. I will probably get around to scanning some of the real sketches one day, but have not yet due to laziness.

Stanley Does Dinner

Tryin' to animate all subtle-like.

The Wombat King, Again!

And here's the wombat king which I'm calling done for right now because I'm sick of working on it after a year of horrendous missteps and redos. In all of its tangenty, strangely composed, questionably-perspectived glory! I really do like this piece, and it taught me a bunch about photoshop and layer types and different surface treatments and whatnot.

Also I think all my superhuman struggles with this piece paid off because I got that dumb platypus painting below this done in like a day. And that feels pretty good, even if it is just a goofy sketch I painted over. Hurrah and good day :)

Rupert, the Reluctant Platypus

So at my new job my mighty ignorance of even the most basic Photoshop tasks became glaringly apparent. But my awesome patient coworkers have taught me about masks! And keyboard shortcuts! And basic organizational skills! It's been a wild ride and I think it deserves its own blog post pretty soon someday when it's not midnight but for now here's this platypus I painted yesterday:

Blog on the Range

I spent seven years in a place called Dripping Springs, Texas. We had goats that lived in a barn at our high school, there was a barbecue smoker directly outside the biology hall, and the Ag. teacher had students shoot and bring in dead squirrels for the annual taxidermy fiesta. It was a colorful time in my life, and although it goes against everything I believed when I was actually living there, I sort of miss it from time to time and a faint, mesquite-scented poof of longing emits from the nostalgia lobe of my brain. This sometimes manifests itself in an insatiable desire to draw armadillos. So that's pretty much what I did.

Ancestry!

This guy is the predecessor of the little gargoyle Bertram from a couple of posts back. Although it was fun to paint this on a piece of wood, I realized that it would be an almost complete nightmare to animate all this... stuff! He needed a good dressing down, but I still keep this little piece of board on my bookshelf for company.

Sketches!

A couple of recent sketches that I wanted to preserve for posterity! I like how diabolical the old man looks. In high school I had this unshakable curse where everything I drew, even when it was supposed to be dark or scary, always ended up turning out cute. I guess I'm proud that I can draw things now that don't look like they're about to give you hugs. Oh, you know, except for the little dragon guy, there. He looks like a hugger.

Vectors are Awesome.

I really like playing around with vectors in Photoshop because you can get that Toon Shader look without having to go anywhere near Maya! Also, the pen tool is very zenlike. No particular significance to the dog other than how I think he's cute.

Bertram!

This little guy is the main character of the film I'm currently working on. He's lived in hermitlike seclusion on the top of a tower for hundreds or so years and has a good deal of misunderstanding with a pretty likely nemesis.

Blogchanted

So years ago my friend Annelise and I were in this strange competition thing where we tried to come up with an idea for an animated pilot that the Disney Channel might think about funding. Our idea was called 1001 Simple Spells, and followed the lives of two excruciatingly average children in their hilarious journey to become the Greatest Wizards Ever. Their guide and mentor along this journey is Mrs. Euphegenia Crenshaw, a feisty, ancient half-senile old witch and her anthropomorphic spellbook. We didn't win, probably for excellent reasons, but the idea's always stuck with me and I kind of want to keep going with it.

Here's Euphie's kitchen, a mix of the modern and the completely archaic. The electric cauldron is the glue that holds any wizarding home together and the mismatched cabinets add a hint of lopsided whimsy to any shindig, hootenanny, or box social, magical or otherwise.