and another one

Krogan-rules football comic. I need to do more original stuff, but fanart is great to practice on :P

Skyrim comics

One of the things I like about games with independent moving parts is the way that a given encounter's timing and context come together to imply a story. Sometimes the actual scripted stuff is memorable, too X)

BWD launch

Well, I've been completely quiet here for some time now. To some degree, this is because I've been haunting Tumblr more these days with my sillier doodles. Another big timesink has been the Four Kingdoms webcomic, which incidentally launched today. Hence, this post.



The comic's official title is now "Beyond the Western Deep." It'll follow the adventures of Quinlan the squirrel (and his best buddy Dakkan the otter) as they're drawn into a political crisis in the already unstable world of the Four Kingdoms.

This is my first stab at doing a webcomic, so I hope to learn all kinds of awesome things along the way. It will update daily this week as a sort of launch party, and then settle into a weekly Saturday update schedule.

TMNT?! What a surprise!

I think there's something about ink that makes me want to draw ninja turtles.


I also found a cute way to draw 'em while I was sketching around, haha.

...It was a little while before I could get them out of my system.

"Rider" storyboard

Been working on my boarding - here's a short story!

Click on the link, then the SWF, and you can navigate with your arrow keys (or the buttons provided)!

Any and all critique y'all may have is welcome!

Cats and violence

It's what I do, right?

Sketchbook page of our 15-pound cat, Lily. I bought an inkbrush to try, and I'm loving it. Toned with watercolor and gouache.

The event log from my current game of Dwarf Fortress: adventure mode. I'm playing a dwarf covered in shields (not shown) and weapons, and yet I slew the leader of goblin bandits by throwing a giant cockroach I found in a cave.

This game is ridiculous and I love it.

Some random arts!

I realize it's been some time since I posted, so let's throw some drawings around!

A tribute to Mr. Brian Jacques, the man who shaped my childhood and taste in fiction. He died of a heart attack on the 5th.

In which I biff crocodilian anatomy. My excuse is I didn't have internet (and thus reference) at the time, but I guess it's kinda cool anyway.

Attempting to learn how to use watercolors again. This time I come armed with paints that are dark/rich enough to allow actual value contrast.

Aaand some more Mossflower boards, of a pretty short scene. It's a warmup for a much longer scene that will probably take me months to finish. >:)

bzzzzZZZZZ

Warning: Another stupid late-night drawing idea incoming!

So, yeah.

It's a dragon breathing BEES.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer...

...had a grandson with the same condition he did. Just in the hooves.

This is such a late-night drawing, but it made me chuckle enough to want to color it. Merry Christmas!

I wish I could draw airplanes the way this guy can. So much life and appeal in objects that are completely inorganic!

I also wish I could read French.

storyboardin' critters

Well, for a bit now I've been working with a group of Redwall fans who want to try to make a fan-created, feature-length version of Mossflower, which is hands-down my favorite book in the entire series. I do have lurking doubts at our ability to pull out a finished product, but right now this is the best side-project ever for me.

And why is that, you ask?

The answer is STORYBOARDS! :D

The group setting provides excellent motivation to do regular boards, which is helping me practice not-sucking. I also get to teach a lot, since pretty much everyone is younger than me and hasn't really done this before. So even though it's me drawing the stuff I always like to draw, it's been good for me on tons of levels.

Here is a scene I recently finished - the first real scene in the film. As with all "finished" things, I have located a bajillion flaws already. Perhaps my buddies who read this blog can help locate a few more, haha!

some scifi?!

I got Mass Effect as a birthday present, and enjoyed it quite a bit! Every time I saw a krogan, I wanted to draw it. This may very well be my first real attempt at scifi, haha. I discovered that guns are about the most unnatural thing for me to draw, especially futuristic ones. It kinda makes me want to practice and learn how.

Oh, and this fella has been around for a few weeks. It's another boreal owl design. I'm still derping around with drawings of some other species, so hopefully I can post those soon X)

some ssssSSSssSssewing fun!

I've been playing around with another cool game this summer, and that game is Minecraft. You might have heard of it - over the past month, it's virtually exploded with popularity as well-known gaming and Youtube sources have pimped it. And it is a pretty fun game, for reasons I'll let you look up yourself.

Because I've been doing a lot of freelance illustration work lately, I've been eager to find a project OFF the computer to tackle. Eventually I want to make my own stuffed Toothless from How to Train Your Dragon, but I haven't made a plush of any kind since I was about 10 years old. So I thought I'd practice on something simple.

Which is where Minecraft comes in.

If Minecraft has a poster child, it is this thing:

It may look like the most terrifying cactus you've ever seen, but this is one of the game's monsters. Known as a Creeper, it makes absolutely no sound until it's RIGHT next to you, which is when you hear a "*tch* sssSSSsssSSS...", followed by a BOOM if you don't get out of the blast radius fast enough. This is very good at hurting you and damaging things you've built.

How cute! Let's make a stuffed animal out of it! :V

Many fans of the game like to joke that the Creeper only wants a hug, but when it comes over to you it realizes it has no arms and explodes out of frustration. I'd love to get a picture of a small child hugging this plush, but I'm worried that all children will probably be terrified of him. X)

boreal owls!

Something I've been itching to do lately is play with designing owls. There are some really different, interesting kinds begging to be caricatured. So, I started off with the Boreal Owl and its bumpy head.

Hooters gotta hoot!

Not long ago, I stumbled unexpectedly into the fact that owls are awesome and amazing amounts of fun to draw.

Check out the Striped Owl. They are gorgeous birds. I went kinda nuts and drew a whole ton of them.

And barn owls. I like how their silhouettes looks headless when they fly.

Now I suppose it's time to play around in some other styles for these critters. What fun! X)

vacation snippets

I've been trying something new lately - since I'm so bad at keeping written journals, I got a nice blank whitepaper book and have been attempting a sketch journal. Results are mixed so far, but I kept a pretty close travel journal during my family's recent vacation. Here are a couple of my favorites from the trip:

Them dorfs!

Lately I've been filling the little cracks in my time with a fun little game called Dwarf Fortress. It's an ASCII game *kinda* like Sim City, but a lot grittier and Fun (which is the fanbase's code word for losing). You manage a group of alcohol-soaked dwarves as they strike the earth and try to carve a fortress out of the landscape. Wildlife and enemy sieges provide opposition for your dwarves, and traps and levers allow for really creative mechanisms in the game (some people have actually built computers and calculators within the game).

The game is ridiculously detailed - it generates a world and simulates erosion and some history before it even gets to your dwarves and their adventure. It tracks battle damage down to individual fingers and toes (and further in later versions than the one I play). It also has a very steep learning curve (a big step is getting past where all you see is alphabet soup!)

Here we have "Jim Craig" the dwarf in sorry shape. The attacking hydra (green H) is dead, but Jim is now missing his right arm at the shoulder. Fortunately all his other bits are white (healthy) rather than yellow (broken) or red (mangled).

Anyways, because of the limited graphics, I almost think the game encourages you to look deeper to find a story, which is why I love it so much. These are some doodles I've done lately, inspired by dwarfy shenanigans.

My Captain of the Guard is an awesome she-dwarf who runs around with two swords and leaves goblins in many pieces when they cross her. And no, her name is not a Ninja Turtles reference. X)

Miners make great temporary military dwarves when a problem arises, because their mining skill determines how deadly their pick is in battle.

One of the staples of the dwarven diet is the "plump helmet," a purple mushroom of some kind. You can brew booze out of it, eat it raw, or stew 'em up.

The game also has a roguelike mode called Adventure Mode, where you take a single dwarf/human/elf and travel the full world that's been generated. Having fantastic weaponry like this fella's ☼adamantine battle axe☼ helps... though often a wielded wolf corpse is just as deadly. People have one-hit KO'd enemies by throwing mud in this game. It's awesome.

best of zoo - July 2010

Finally got to the zoo, after far too long. This time, the Columbus Zoo!

I'd forgotten how much bigger this zoo was than Hogle - we were rushing at the end just to get to all the animals we wanted to draw!

I did the whole thing with a brush pen, except at the end where I switched to a chisel-tipped pen. The watercolors were all added after we got home, because I felt like experimenting.

black swans and a parrot-like bird, from the (South Asian) "Islands" area.

Komodo dragon, from the same area.

Okapi, from the African Forest area.

A big lazy lion. There were also some half-grown cubs, with spots still on their legs and bellies.

And at long last, the brand-new Polar Frontier exhibit. This is the first time I've been able to see polar bears live. The filtration system had some minor glitch, so the underwater viewing area wasn't open, but the two bears in there gave me plenty of sketching material.

Good ol' brown bears and a couple bison. Such awesome animals.

This I found amusing because these fish are completely native to the area, and yet, during a zoo trip, I took some of our precious time to sketch them. Oh well.