Mouse Guard!

Again I am up late doodling around. But I have some words to say, too!

This week, Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard #2 came out. The Legends of the Guard series is a chance for some other artists and writers to get to play around in David Petersen's Mouse Guard world by doing some short stories. And it so happens that the first story in the #2 issue, "Potential," was written by my buddy Alex Kain, who happens to also be the writer for our Four Kingdoms project. The sweet art was done by Sean Rubin. So if you like Mouse Guard, I'd advise you check it out! Here's a site with some nice preview images.

Which brings me to the doodle, which is of Kenzie from the main series. :)

silly late-night painting time

Lately I've been doing some digital painting whenever I can't get to sleep. Just some fun playing around with light and pre-existing characters.

You should look up photos of sewers sometime. Apparently there's a whole group of people who like to explore and photograph them. It's surprisingly awesome.

This is actually a Redwall character, but one that only gets mentioned offhand as a long-dead ruler. With a name like Bluestripe, I figured he would be awesome. And a fan of warpaint.

main characters and thumbnails!

These two are going to be the main guys in my comic. Randy is a greenie fresh from flight training. He comes into conflict with "Red," who is pretty much the viewpoint character of the story. Red has lost his best friend in a recent mission, and when Randy gets assigned to his buddy's old bunk, he has a lot of trouble dealing with that. We're also going to see another (maybe both) of the other guys in their flight, who still need to be designed. I'll probably just grab 'em from the other concept sheet I drew; they don't figure into the story much.

I do have the whole thing thumbnailed out. For a "short" story, 19 pages is an awful lot. However, I'm going to be doing pretty simple coloring, so it should be manageable. Jury's still out on how much color will make it into the thing.

And for some more fanart derpiness, have a silly pinup I did of the black Heavy Weapons Guy I designed. Clearly I need to go back and study anatomy again, but the painting was fun. And retro-style propaganda is also fun.

Tally ho!

Lately I've been thinking about comics and stories in way too big'n'epic ways. While my griffin story has already been outlined and will indeed require tons of time to tell properly, I have some other ideas I've been throwing around. And I worry that I'm automatically trying to make THEM epic, long-format stories.

Which, ultimately, leads me to fear that I'll never get ANYTHING done.

So this WWII idea, I think I'll commit to getting a story *out.* Get some characters worked out, and throw them into the war. First mission, perhaps. And if I like it, I can always do more and think about story arcs and whatever. :d

Of course, I'll have to bang out some good characters/designs first. These guys are just an experiment in drawing different-looking dudes that fit the 1940s-military-flyer look. I'll be playing with some styles, too.

Let's do this thing.

*FACEPALM*

There have been talks of a live-action TMNT film reboot movie since Nickelodeon gained rights to the franchise last year. Now I hear they're thinking of a 2012 release... and Michael Bay is reportedly going to be involved.


That is all.

Thunderbolt!

And old artbug has resurfaced as of late - a desire to draw a comic about WWII fighter pilots. So my Memorial weekend was (appropriately) spent devouring the subject in text and Youtube form. Who knows if I'll get a story worked out before the bug goes dormant again, but at least I can gather resources and practice drawing difficult things like AIRPLANES.

These were referenced from photos, except when otherwise noted.

More nerdery, I'm afraid. :T

Recently I've been drawing some of my friends' original TF2 characters, because OpenCanvas is such a fun sketching/painting tool. The practice I'm getting out of this is rad and useful, even if the subject matter still makes me a hopeless nerd.

Michelle and I got to draw together the other night thanks to OC's networking feature. We gave each other shapes to turn into characters. This is some kinda of undersea volcano monster.

shameless fanart time!

Yep.

more griffin story!

Yup! Still working on this thing-that-might-hopefully-become-a-comic-or-something. I actually just had a major breakthrough on some huge story problems recently, which drove me to draw all kinds of concepty things for it. And then tonight I decided to have some me-time and play around in Photoshop with them. Here's a couple images - more to follow later (sketches are all scanned, I just want to splash some color on more of 'em!)

Did a quick paintup of a major location in the story, as well as a tiny little map of the island/small continent/whatever the story all takes place on. There are also tons of little notes everywhere, but the fog is covering up some of 'em.

Some further notes on the city and its inhabitants.

Olympics III

And here's the last of 'em! I ran out of steam near the end so I only watched the very last events, though I did draw Dakkan playing hockey on some printer paper for kicks. Otter playing hockey, it almost works. :V

Olympics II

Part two!

Olympics I

I make it no secret - I LOVE the Olympics. I love watching almost every single event I can, and I love rooting for American (and my other pet favorite countries') athletes as they strive for medals. This is something I can't adequately explain, but I love 'em anyway.

On the list of "why the Olympics are awesome" are the opportunities it presents for gesture sketching. Like in life, you don't have a pause button. Sometimes you have replays and can cheat a little, but you've got all these great dynamic things going on and it's great.

So I'm going to put my Olympic sketchbook pages over the next few posts, uncensored for suckitude. How exciting. :P

Pink Tiger Loves You

The original idea was something along the lines of "Hey, let's combine Valentine's Day with the Chinese New Year! It's the Year of the Tiger after all, which is awesome."

I ended up drawing diabetes instead.

Oh well.

When life gives me blizzards...

...I make snow tigers.

Snow is really hard to work with! At least, with heavy gloves and a little garden shovel.

This next one is just a pretty tree in pretty lighting. For Ohio, anyway.

Gonna get some sketch-type arts up here soon.

Long Time No See!

I've been pretty awful about updating this thing lately, huh?

Well, let's change this.

Improvement!

I'm still working on that comic, but I made a breakthrough in coloring and thought maybe y'all would want to see.


The top panel was done earlier this year. Somehow I thought it was looking pretty good. Can't imagine why - it's overwhelmingly Pure Green, flat, boring, what have you. Even the character's costume and fur color seem doomed to blend into the background.

Several months of practicing digital painting in my personal work later, we get this second attempt on the bottom. I'm much happier with it - it implies an actual mood and time of day, while doing it with a much more appealing and realistic color scheme.

Yay practice! Maybe someday I will be good at this, after all. :)


* Want to see the full pages, with a more detailed explanation? Check out my corresponding post at the production blog for our comic!

more summer sketchbook!

My last bishopric was fun to draw.

FHE trip to the Bean - live reptile show!

stupid fanart time!

Team Fortress 2 + Lackadaisy. What is wrong with me. :|

Especially since I have seen "furry" versions of TF2 characters in fanart before and they invariably freak me out. They just look wrong as wolves or tigers or whatever. Perhaps it's because I'm seeing the character crossover more than the species change here?

On the other hand, I had all kinds of fun painting this. :B

sketchbook update!

I'll start off with this drawing I made of the Hinckley building while waiting for the fireworks on July 4. Yay... not avoiding drawing architecture!


The rest of these are my favorites from the two zoo trips I took in August. They have FOSSA (pronounced "foosa") as the temp exhibit now, you guys. They are like a mix between cougars and weasels and they are AWESOME.

fossa

baby giraffe and cheetah

birds and a sloth

The little jubilant "me" in there is happy because I'd never seen the red panda awake before.

This tiger knows he is a fine beast.

100th post?

That's a lot of posts! It's so crazy!

And it's been forever since my last post, geez. Wanna see the holdup?

It's my storyboard from Ryan's class this past semester! 8|

It took so freakin' long to post because as I timed it out in video form, I noticed more and more things that were wrong with it. Which made me less and less motivated to finish, but eventually I decided I'd just post it and move on. I'll have to suck less on my next one, though I did do better at pulling out the camera this time. *sigh*

Also I have a sketch page of the little hurt snail I took in a week or so ago. His shell is thickening back up, actually, so I can release him before I leave for Ohio on Sunday. And stop snickering, Jake and Anthony, I can hear you from here. >:|

That's all for now, though I do tend to catch up on all my summer sketching now that I've finally thrown out that storyboard as promised. Looks like all my dA links broke too somehow, dagnabbit.