Creature Collection: Vampire

Another piece released for StarCityGames.com!

This one was a weird one. Initially, the plan was to have cute/whimsical pieces by me interspersed with more traditional fantasy fare by another artist. The other artist fell through, but deadlines are deadlines, so they asked me to step in- and out of my comfort zone!

This piece actually felt a bit like a throwback. Before I went to art school, I was a lot more interested in realism/concept art/etc, and I used to do paintings like this a lot.. mostly as World of Warcraft fanart. :P (You can see some here!)

It was pretty cool to do something so different and challengingl I learned a lot about how my workflow and preferences have changed over the years. :)

Lastly - this piece would not have been possible without my amazing model, Paul. :D <3 <3

Creature Collection: Penguin

Another piece that’s been waiting in limbo!!

This is the first of a series of illustrations I’ve done for my day job at StarCityGames.com. The illustrations are each being released as full lines of products for trading card game players :D (Sleeves, deckboxes, playmats, etc.)

The set with this illustration are now FOR SALE on their site, including in particular the playmat (which is like a giant mousepad) and the dicebag (which is actually a sunglasses case!)

It’s all been a very bewildering and wonderful experience. :) I hope you all enjoy what I’ve made and what’s yet to come!

The Pirates of Cape Cod

I’m so happy I can share this with you all!!!

A few months ago, I was asked by the lovely people at Mud Puddle to do an illustration for use on a wooden jigsaw puzzle. An illustration of little kids being pirates!! Two of my very favorite things to draw EVER.

Loved the assignment, loved the client, loved the result!

Knee Socks

 

Oh such tormenttt

Curvy Doodles

Just doodling around before bed!

Megaman Legends - Roll

I don't really do a ton of fanart, but I've been a little low on ideas lately but still REALLY driven to draw.. so here we are.

This is Roll from Megaman Legends. That series really influenced my aesthetic right when I really got excited about drawing in a way that I don't think I fully realized until I was working on my college thesis. :) Fun to do a little homage!

The Deadly Draugr at The Night of the Exquisite Corpse!

The amazing Night of the Exquisite Corpse show opened at the amazing Light Grey Art Lab last Friday! If you are anywhere near Minneapolis, you must absolutely check it out. A room full of hilarious undead paper toys with body parts you can swap! I am completely amazed by some of the creations these amazing artists came up with. For my toy, I started with a little bit of research about interesting undead creatures. I quickly came across the Draugr, a baddie from skyrim creature from Norse mythology. Basically, Draugr are undead vikings. Another chance to draw a goofy viking? SOLLLD.

So this sketch:

 

Turned into this dieline:

 

Which turned into this toy!

And the best part? You can buy the dieline and make one yourself!

You should also, definitely, definitely, check out the other work in the show. They even put together an interactive site where you can randomly assemble parts from different toys! It is incredible, and you should spend all day playing with it.

Thanks so much to Light Grey Art Lab for putting this together! Those guys are so amazing, watch out for all the other amazing shows they do!

10 Things I Learned at Illustration Boot Camp!

Life has been such a whirlwind! Big projects at work and outside of work, got sick for a while (blargh) and I went to ILLUSTRATION BOOT CAMP!

So. There's this fantastic place in Minneapolis called Light Grey Art Lab. They have super sweet gallery shows (like the recent Pokemon show, and the upcoming Night of the Exquisite Corpse paper toy show, which yours truly is participating in!) and run a lot of classes and workshops and so on. I heard from a friend that they were having a 2-day Illustration workshop led by none other than Meg Hunt! AAAND that a bunch of my friends from school were going! (Chelsey, Marisa, Abi, Kaycie. WHEE!) So.. I had to go.

And it was FANTASTIC! Trying to blog about every little minute would just be exhausting, but I did think up 10 things I learned at Illustration Boot Camp and made a little.. thing. I learned an 11th thing working on it - that no matter how much I admire hand lettering projects, I still hate doing it.

There will be more to come re: bootcamp! We made a super sweet zine and I'll post some pictures and link to all the fantastic people I met!

Love Means #5

I had so much fun drawing this it was even worth not playing Diablo 3 long enough to do it. :P

Love Means #4

Late late late I knooow.. other artwork came up, and maybe a little Diablo 3.

SO. This one was inspired by something a coworker said, but I drew my friend Chelsey saying it because.. that just seemed funnier to me. :P And I know I may have her appear in other comics, so this lets me have more consistency.

Love Means #3

I don't know if this one will be funny to anyone else, but I do this all the time. I guess I figure, if I get myself a drink, all I get is a drink. If CJ gets me a drink, I get a drink and a nice feeling! And vice versa. BONUS NICE FEELINGS!

Love Means #2

Had to do a quickie comic today because I spent most of today working on art I can't show you! Oh no!

But still.. this one = truth. I have now perfected what I call "muffinchops", where I shave everything but right where my inner thighs meet my torso, because fuck that.

Love Means #1

Thought up a little comic series this morning! I have a few more planned that I'll try and post over the next few weeks or something like that. We'll see. :)

Note on this one: This actually never happens, because CJ hates fun. But at least he doesn't make fun of me for having it!

Pirates Process Post: Sky Pirate Lookout

Wow! This one went fast!

Another pirate- this one a sky pirate. After how long it took me to get the Zombie Cook done, I really wanted something easy and straightforward. I had no idea just how easy this one would be!

I had the design of this character worked out months ago (I'll get sketches on here later.) I even had a pose idea, but I wound up changing it to something a bit more dynamic.

And.. that's it! I really like this one, despite its utter simplicity. Nice, clean, clear image.

Pirates Process Post: Snackie Snotbubble!

Check it ouuuttttt! Brand spanking new art for Pirates Vs Pirates!

This here is the cook for the zombie pirates. I'm not totally sure about her name yet, but for now I've dubbed her Snackie Snotbubble. I really wasn't sure how this illustration was going to go for a while, but I must say I am pretty damn pleased!

I don't have a lot of sketches to show you (read: any) because.. I didn't do any. Actually, I did one maybe 20 second sketch that I didn't even bother to scan in before starting. Honestly sometimes without deadlines, I'll sketch and sketch forever and never think it's the BEST it could be.. so I just kinda ran into things headlong. Truth be told I do that fairly often with paintings, because I often don't know what it's going to need until it's halfway done. You can see just how VERY little I started out with by checking out the progression below:

Pretty bare bones sketch, huh? I.. don't like drawing. I like to dig in and get the forms with shapes and colors.

For me the turning point was between 3 and 4. Detailing the soup and the face made SUCH a huge difference in how much I liked the image. Initially I wasn't planning on doing much more with the face than what was in 3, but it just .. didn't look right to me. I couldn't figure it out. I talked to some friends from MIAD and they said (among many other fantastic critiques and suggestions) that she just seemed to be lacking character. So I went in and played with adding just a little more dimension to the face with highlights on her cheeks and brows and suddenly - WOW - she had so much more character. What a difference a few minutes of careful thought and work can make!

Once I have the card together I'll post it here as well, I just have to decide for certain on her name..

*WHOLE BRAIN MUFFINS.. that's what is in the lower right corner.

A Year of Rosies: Hatshepsut

This is the second piece for my A Year of Rosies calendar. To be honest, I think I could have found a cooler "ruler" than Hatshepsut, but she was pretty awesome and I was working on a tight deadline. Besides, I wanted the chance to draw a non-white person.

I'll take this opportunity to discuss a little bit the visuals of the calendar. What I want to do is have each figure referencing both the red and white polkadot kercheif as well as the classic Rosie pose. Ada's arm was up in a stylized depiction of writing, Hatshepsut here.. well. It was too good a joke to miss. :)

I've gotten some great suggestions for other ladies to feature, but I can definitely use more! Here are some possible candidates, to awe and inspire you: Nellie Bly, badass reporter lady who traveled around the world and faked insanity in order to write an expose on mental institutions, Wilma Rudolph, who battled polio as a child and still managed to be the fasted woman in the world, Walllada bint al-Mustafki, sexy poet lady with a secret lover, Kate Sheppard, leader of New Zealand's suffragette movement who helped make New Zealand the first country to give women the vote, and like.. a lot more. There are so damn many, I'll have to make more calendars. :)

A Year of Rosies: Ada Lovelace

New project alert! (Don't worry, I'm still working on pirates!)

This was borne of my last ever assignment at MIAD. It sounded totally crazy at first- we had to find an "icon or mascot" .. then put them in a different era and redesign them to suit it. Then, we had to make two illustrations of that redesigned icon/mascot for a calendar.

Errr, what?

But pretty quickly I hit upon the idea of using Rosie the Riveter. I wanted to do two illustrations of women who were doing stereotypically "male" jobs- but I wanted them to be true things. I researched a lot and decided I'd use actual, real women of history. After all, Rosie is based on a real woman anyway!

My concept for the calendar in entirety is to have 12 months - 12 women - 12 different industries typically dominated by men. So far I've done Computer Programming (Ada here) and ruling a country (Hatshepsut - I'll post her soon!). I have plans to do probably Frida Kahlo (for art) and Amelia Earhart (for flying!) .. but the rest are wide open. Here's where you can help! Do you have any suggestions of badass ladies of history? Or industries that would be good to feature? I would especially like ladies of color - my sense of history is embarrassingly white-centric. Please please, comment with suggestions and ideas :)

Pirates Process Part 3: Maxwell Dubois

It took me a while to come up with this little guy, but the piece went more or less without a hiccup. First mate for Cap'n Gran, mister Maxwell Dubois. (Originally he was named Mister Gibbs. I realized later that was a character in Pirates of the Caribbean, so I wound up naming him after a nickname for the dog he is modeled after.)

You can see in the sketches below that I went through a lot of different ideas for Gran's first mate. A pet cat, her daughter, her mother, her sister... and finally I thought of a dog. Originally he was going to be a weenie dog, but the brown didn't work well and I thought it would be a funny surprise if I made him look like my boyfriend's dog, Max. (Who I looove.)

As you can see, the bird wasn't in the original sketch. I think it was suggested by my thesis instructor, the fantastic Susan Kwas. Other than that, it was a very straightforward illustration. I'd established the colors when I worked on Gran, I didn't change the composition much at all.. pretty easy.

Pirates Process Part 2: Ursula the Undead

Second piece I finished for Pirates vs Pirates (vs Pirates vs Pirates): Ursula the Undead, queen and captain of the zombies! She's a pretty straightforward zombie pirate sort of thing, but who can resist some classic green zombies? They're fun!

I really wish I had more of the progress shots on this one. You can see from the sketch to the final how much I wound up changing the pose. Mostly her legs - it just wasn't clear enough with her leg obscured by the long skirts, so I moved it and moved it and moved it, shortened the skirt, removed the skirt, all kinds of stuff to get to what you see there. I also went through a lot of variations of the ship (you can see in the middle one a bit of what I'm talking about - there was a higher platform and a lower part) and a great deal of color combos. Originally it was sunset, but it didn't feel zombie enough.

The character design didn't change as radically as Gran - she was pretty much settled early on. The tricky part, for me, was making her a "cute" enough zombie. (And stylized enough.) You can see that progress on the sketchdump below.

Pirates Process Part 1: Cap'n Gran

Here's the first piece I completed for thesis: Sky Pirate Cap'n Gran! She's still one of my favorites, maybe because the character idea just cracked me up. It took me a while to get there (which you can see in the process sketchdump at the bottom of this post) but I wound up arriving at this silly smoking grandma whaler character. She's the matriarch of her ship (a zeppelin, in her case, because sky pirate, duh) and her crew is all her children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews and so on. She's talking to a group of them to get them riled up to go get some loot!

You can see in the sketch on the left, originally she was talking to a whole massive group of crew. I wound up cutting a lot of them out because they were just too distracting. I also ended up simplifying the space and bringing her closer to the wall, making that window much bigger. I did that to emphasize her silhouette and make things a bit less cluttered, as well as make it clearer that she's a sky pirate. Between the basic flats/shading in the middle and the final on the right, I wound up messing with the crew member in the front quite a bit. I got some feedback that people didn't see her arm as connected to her body, and also that her glove was covering up too much of Gran. I moved her all over the place, and finally wound up giving her tiny hands and a little noodle arm. I also rotated her head so it was more obvious that she was a person there, instead of that ambiguous hair shape.

I've got a bunch of process sketches and an explanation of how I got to the final design below - enjoy!