A Short Story

Just messing around.

Updates and a note on Personal Work

There are now a couple new prints in my store, including the Frog Folio drawing in the previous post. My online store is here.

A week or so ago it was Draw Cat Rackham Day on Twitter, and I whipped this up.

Cat Rackham is the webcomic (and now print comic) of Steve Wolfhard. It is endlessly enjoyable.

This is a grayscale version of a drawing I was working on for awhile that I'm tossing into the ol' scrap-heap.

It isn't a paid job, and the deadline is flexible, so I have that luxury.

Priorities change when working on unpaid work or personal work. On a paid assignment, the emphasis is most often on creating the best piece within the timeframe that the client and budget allows. On personal work, there are different, less rigid guidelines. What is this piece doing for my portfolio? What is this piece doing to advance my drawing ability or career? Is this something that people would buy if I made it available as a print?

When the only reward for making a good piece is, well, having a good piece, working can become difficult. When there is a loose or no deadline, you have all the space to second guess every line, every mark, and to go back and change them.

On this drawing, too many of those little negatives added up and I felt like I was just barely treading water. The drawing is filed away, and we move on.

Frog Folio

Blogger's meltdown deleted this post, so here I am, reposting.

-----

Every year Dellas Graphics puts out a promotion calendar called the Frog Folio, which led to tons of award-winning illustration over the past fifteen years. AD Jim Burke was kind enough to invite me to participate this year.

Subject matter was completely open, apart from the inclusion of at least one frog. I've had this idea kicking around in my head for awhile and figured now was the time to make it happen.

This year's roster includes Rick Berry, Polly Becker, Ryan O'Rourke, Joohee Yoon, Roger DeMuth, Teresa Fasolino, Bill Mayer, C. F. Payne, and Bill Thompson.

Some details:

And the rough comp -

I basically grew up on kaiju movies, and the best part of this piece was revisiting a lot of those for reference. I don't have my vhs collection anymore, but there are a ton on Netflix Watch Instantly. If you haven't seen Ghidorah: The Three Headed Monster, you're in for a real treat.

This was actually done simultaneously with the last piece, in one weird week.

Facing a Daunting Challenge

I did this piece a couple weeks ago for SooJin Buzelli at Planadviser. It's about facing a daunting challenge, and is also about retirement income. I guess I've been thinking about weird birds a lot lately.

Sketches -

----

It's been nice to hear reports trickling in about people picking up The Anthology Project v.2 at TCAF or Stumptown. So far the response have been pretty great.

Spectrum, Society of Illustrators

Good news, everyone! These top two pieces were selected to be in Spectrum 18, out this fall. The top one is from Turtle Soup and will appear in the Comics section, while the bottom is of course from The Hobbit, and will be in the Unpublished section.

You can buy prints of that Hobbit piece here, and purchase The Anthology Project, volume 2 here. That one starts shipping on April 27, though I think some folks have picked up copies at a couple of conventions already.
Additionally, this piece, which was done for Plansponsor Europe and went on to be selected (along with a couple other pieces) to appear in the Society of Illustrators 53 book is now part of the Society of Illustrators Travelling Exhibition. The selected pieces will be shown in several schools throughout the country. Cool!

I'm currently working on some cool stuff, but it's still secret, so shhh.

Frogs, kaiju

Hmm, I wonder what this stuff is for?

Kaiju was my lifeblood as a kid. I'm glad Netflix Instant has a few streaming. Helps fill the gaps between NBA playoff games. Ghidorah: Three Headed Monster is my favorite one they've got up. Wish they had Godzilla vs. Megalon or Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla.

Elliott Erwitt

I have a small piece in this week's New Yorker about an upcoming "Best Of" show featuring famed photographer Elliott Erwitt. You may know him from this picture? Or maybe this one?

Luckily for me he's also known for this one.

Seems like an interesting fella.

AD Jordan Awan.

And I'm off! To my next adventure!

Carl Fisher's Roads

These pieces accompany an article in the May/June issue of Muse Magazine, titled 'Carl Fisher's Roads.' It's a textbook excerpt about Carl Fisher, an entrepreneur in the early part of the twentieth century who had his finger on the pulse of America's growing need for personal transportation and the hurdles that needed to be overcome.

Highway engineer F.H. Trego recommended packing the following items on a long-distance drive in the early 20th century: an ax, shovel, and four-foot hardwood plank, 50 feet of heavy rope and 16 feet of cable, an extra engine valve, two jacks, two spare tires, three gallons of oil, a pile of cooking and camping gear, and a small pistol.
The first roads were nothing more than glorified game trails.
Early bicycles were extremely dangerous, and the big-wheel bikes (called "ordinaries") were essentially brakeless.
One of Carl Fisher's terrific business models as a bike salesman involved throwing a bike off the roof of a building and then giving a free one to whomever lugged the wreckage back to his shop. He also used a similar tactic when he sold cars later on.

A small diagram of the different layers of the typical road.

Prints of the top three images are available for purchase here.

I always love working for Muse AD John Sandford, though I have a tendency to bite off a whole lot to chew on in his assignments. These are all half or quarter-page spots, but I thought they'd make pretty nice prints, so I ended up working on them quite a bit bigger. Ah well!

Dungeons and Dragons and Drawings

This is weird. These are sketches of the five characters in the D&D campaign I've been playing in for the past couple of months. I can't say enough in favor of Dungeons and Dragons, despite the (well-deserved) stigma of being really, really nerdy. It's a great exercise in world and character building, and gives you a chance to think creatively and solve problems in a group dynamic.

Unlike videogames, which I still love, the quality of the experience and the end result is directly related to what you bring to the table. The more you invest in character creation and creative thinking (two of my favorite things, obviously), the more fun you have.

My character is the guy with the spear and the mace and the black, dead hands. All of these (especially pages 3 and 4) need some more work before I can do a final character drawing. If you can guess everyone's race and class, I'd be really impressed.

As stated in yesterday's post, I opened up an online shop to buy prints. It is here. They are super good quality and super affordable.

EDIT: Since folks are still guessing the character races/classes, they are as follows: halfling ranger, goliath fighter, dwarf bard, eladrin ranger, human cleric, and the eladrin ranger again.

Prints!

I am selling prints online for the first time!

You can buy them here.

I'm also giving away a couple on twitter, so you can follow me there and maybe win a free one.

Turtle Soup process

Hey folks!

There's a short slideshow of some Turtle Soup process work on the Anthology Project's tumblr here.

And remember, you can always preorder the book by checking out the link in yesterday's post.

Preorders

The Anthology Project volume 2 is now available for preorders!

Preorder!

More updates soon (hopefully).

More undertakers

Slowly working on some more undertakers, and getting a little more ghoulish as I go. It's nice to step back into horror for a bit.

Undertakers

I'm working on some developmental sketches for a new piece for a potential alphabet book, headed up by a good friend of mine. My letter is U, which in this case stands for Undertakers. I don't have much to say on them as of now, since I'm still in the very early stages of exploration on this one. So far though, it's a little like going back to Innsmouth.

If you follow the Picturebook Report blog, you probably know by now that the project has come to an end. It was a group decision that the concept and our volition to complete our respective endeavors had sort of run its course. Once I fell behind with The Hobbit and worked on other things in between pieces, my interest in the series waned. The next two scenes are a couple of my very favorites in the book, but my heart's not in it right now, and I would much rather work on some things which aren't bound to that narrative. I'm proud of the work that I completed and may return to the project, but there will be no formal posting schedule. Thanks for understanding.

Beorn 5

Alright, I think I'm about done with the design stage of Beorn, which is great, because I'm also finished with this sketchbook. In the end, going back to the absolute basics of character design really helped figure out his body shape. Square = solidity. Duh.

The final design will probably incorporate elements from a lot of the drawings, which is what usually happens when I go through all this. I think these drawings are more a way of weeding out bad decisions rather than arriving at a final, concrete design.

Beorn 4

I sort of went off a little on these and just started doing strongman body structure. There are some fun ones in there. I think the last page, where the bodies themselves are bigger and thicker are the best of the lot. I used to love watching World's Strongest Man competitions on ESPN2 at like one in the afternoon. That sort of body type has always been interesting to me, where it's not the defined musculature that conveyed the enormous strength of those men, but their sheer size. I'm hoping to get to something like that with Beorn, but on a larger scale. He's what, fifteen feet tall? Twenty? Something ridiculous.

As some of you in the comments have hit on, Beorn IS a really simple character. He's big and he's strong and he's old and he lives alone. The origins of the character are obvious and singular -- Tolkien just wrote a berserker into the story. A giant man with a huge beard who builds long wooden houses and turns into a bear? And his name is Beorn? Alright.

Despite that, I really like the character. The giant bees that he keeps and his weird bipedal dogs that he talks to really seal the deal.

Beorn 3

So, Beorn's coming along. I'm on a better thought-train with these, though I'm still shaking a lot of the dust of a few weeks without much drawing. The checked images are what's workable here. I think there's one on each spread. I struggled through these drawings to make something better than the second drawing in the previous post, and I don't really think I succeeded. I think I'm onto something a little better for his face and something a little better for his attire, but I think these body structures are a step backwards, or at least a step sideways.

A part of me is just sort of burned out on drawing big burly guys with giant beards. I'm desperately trying to find some new ground there to tread.

I'll talk about Beorn's character a little more in the upcoming posts.

I just finished rescanning most of the work from my 2009-2010 sketchbooks in the hopes of compiling some drawings into something you can buy. I have about 150 or so spreads to cull images from, so the book that I put together will have a lot of content. I'm shooting for around 80 to 100 pages and I'm hoping to have it done and for sale in the next few months.

Beorn 2

The good news is that these aren't terrible. I think I'm coming closer to the right body shape; the more realized drawing on the second page is pretty good. I draw a lot of big burly guys, and varying their body shapes is becoming more and more important. I can't have Beorn just being a big dwarf, and I have to differentiate his body shape from the trolls as well.

I'd like to show him with that type of strength that comes from manual labor rather than weight-lifting, with a solid core and sinewy, corded muscles in the limbs. The first drawing on the left is too ape-like, too stupid. I like the one on the right. Let's see where it goes.

Beorn's long, low house is surrounded by hives filled with bees bigger than your thumb, which of course beings to mind one of the ultimate horrors of this world, the Japanese Hornet. Learn more about these living nightmares here. I don't know if the final piece will include them in any, but now's as good a time as ever to get good at drawing hornets.

Beorn 1

These are awful, but it's good to be back.

Beorn is a really simple design that is going to be really difficult to figure out. Big black hair and beard, wool tunic to the knees, bare arms and legs.

The next two pieces (this included) are two of my absolute favorite scenes in the book.

Turtle Soup

This is the first half of Turtle Soup, my comic for the upcoming second volume of The Anthology Project. The book will be out in the spring, so if you want to finish the story (which take a SHOCKING TWIST on page 7), you'll have to pick it up. I'll remind you when the release date is closer.

Here are some layouts and things:

Kali did my title text and spent a solid chunk of time helping me nail down the color, which is always difficult and frustrating for me and less so for her.

I was working for awhile on a story called Good Work, which didn't pan out and simply ate up a lot of my time for this comic. As a result, this thing is a little more rushed than I would've liked -- I was redrawing bad panels into the eleventh hour, when the whole thing could've used another pass at the layout stage. I will say that the second half is much better, both in drawing and storytelling, so pick up the book next year. I think it'll be at all the main conventions, so that'll be super easy for you. There is some amazing work in that book, so far as I've seen.