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.

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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 -

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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.