Sketch #33 - Happy Holidays

Holiday card idea.

Short Stop

Going to have to take a break this week. I have a project launching on Friday and I have a long way to go. All my extra art time is going to be taken up getting some pages done so I'll have to put off practicing for a short bit.

Sketch #32 - More Monkey

I suppose a turn-around would be best, but I wanted to see if my monkey design worked from different angles. Kinda does. He's part of my rebranding studies for my personal home page.

Sketch #31 - Ugly Bird

Man, turkeys are some ugly ass birds. Eek!

Sketch #30 - Wii Station 360

This week's crayons was "Wii Station 360." So here's mine. You grab the thing by the handle and swing it all around!

Sketch #29 - Bad Anatomy

Well, the colors are okay. Poo.

Sketch #28 - Vector Lady

The gradient mesh tool scares me. So I started messing with the blend tool. Not as detailed as I guess she could have been, but that's what you get when you're trying new things.

Sketch #27 -Shoot For the Moon

Well, the moon kinda looks like a banana. But this is an image for a retirement ad.

Sketch #26 - Wanda

Slightly longer sketch. This is going to be a promo image for Erfworld. More on that when there's more to tell.

Sketch #25 - "Polling Place"

This week's Crayons was "Polling Place" so I made a weird dude determined to pole vault over a really high thingy.

Sketch #24 - Screwing Around

Not sure what else to call this. Playing around with more hard brushes.

Sketch #23 - Cammy

My favorite Street Fighter character is Cammy. I wanted to try rendering her with hard brushes. Umm... that didn't sound too good...

Vote

Thought I'd co-opt the terror alert colors for a bit. Don't forget to vote.

Sketch #22 - Experimental

Not sure if this is a successful experiment or not, but here it be. I wanted to blend some photoshop and illustrator stuff together but I realized I didn't have any good Illustrator patterns built up. I think I might revisit something like this when I have a good library of my own patterns. Blech.

Sketch #21 - "Tex Mechs"

Giant robot luchadore!

Sketch #20 - Audrey (Limited Palette)

Well, didn't start out that way, but I decided to just use a limited palette to render a quick sketch of Audrey.

Sketch #19 - Headless

Happy Halloween!

Sketch #18 - Fall

Wanted to do a quicky to celebrate the changing of the leafs. I'm more concerned with getting some good color depth right now rather than details (read: I'm a feard of drawing leafs!).

Sketch #17 - "Space Monkey"

This week's Crayon on the Walls was "Space Monkey." I want to do more Illustrator type stuff so I decided to mix in some Illusrtator and Photoshop.

Sketch #16 - Kamen Rider Kabuto

Using photo reference, I did my tribute to Kabuto. Worried more about color than detail.

Sketch #15 - Background Studies

Cheated a little today, but I got a lot going on. These are some background studies for Erfworld. Trying to establish some time lapse sunset with each shot.

Sketch #14 - Future City

I don't do nearly enough landscapes. It shows. I'll just need to keep at it until I get somewhere.

Sketch #13 - Monkey Ponders

And now, back to monkeys! This is a slightly unsuccessful attempt to mess around with some mood lighting. Not sure Monkey turned out as well as he could have.

Sketch #12 - Joxer the Magnificent

Our first theme for the week on Crayons on the Wall was "Jack of All Trades." I immediately thought of Joxer.

Sketch #11 - Monkey King Triumphant

Son Wukong stand over the fallen hoard.

Sketch #10 - Monkey King Faces the Mongol Hoard

Monkey King vs everyone!

Sketch #9 - Monkey Pole

The Monkey King's main weapon is his iron cudgel. It can grow or shrink to any size he wishes. Most of the time, it's portrayed as a red staff with golden ends. Katsuya Terada's Monkey King was one of the first I've ever seen where his pole actually grows and shrinks. Taking a cue from Terada-san, I've given my Monkey King an impossibly HUGE Monkey Pole. He's naked, but I didn't think to sketch in his Monkey Dong.

Sketch #8 - Monkey King Study

Obviously, monkeys will continue to feature on my sketch blog. A few months ago, I went to the National Zoo in D.C. with my fiance and her sister. We tried to see Tai Shan, but we couldn't get in. So we walked around. In the House of Small Mammals, I saw a number of golden lion tamarins. Instantly, I thought of the Monkey King! So I want to develop my own version of the mystical hero. This is my first study. Looks a bit more like a dark-faced lion. But it's a start.

Sketch #7 - Ju-On

There's a sound effect that goes along with the post, but it doesn't quite work when you write it out. Being Friday the 13th in the month of October, I thought I'd sketch Kayako from Ju-On or The Grudge. The Grudge 2 opens tonight and I'll have to make some time to catch it.

Sketch #6 - "I wind my pocket watch..."

Audrey gave me a pocket watch for an engagement present which really surprised me. More messing with color. Usually warm colors are used to bring objects forward and cool colors are used to push things back. I tried to do the opposite with this one. Since a majority of the piece has warm colors, I'm hopping that the pocket watch will pop out.

Sketch #5 - Girl's Best Friend

I'm getting married! So I thought I'd try my hand at a diamond. It's hard to do caustics without fancy filters and all so the challenge is to paint it all by hand. I tried to stay away from pure black and pure white. There turns out to be a little bit of green in the body of a diamond. This looks a lot better nice and small.

Sketch #4 - Kamen Rider The First

The story goes that the creator of Kamen Rider took a few production designs of the character for his kid to pick. One design was based on a grasshopper and his son picked that one. Thus, the original Kamen Rider got the grasshopper theme.

We were trying to figure out if bugs have blood this past weekend. Turns out they have hemolyph instead of hemoglobin which is basically goop. So to remind me, I sketched a grasshopper.

Sketch #3 - IT Solution

Having computer problems? No computer, no problem! Playing around with color values.

Sketch #2 - Crawling

Some sketches will be full color, some will be lineart. Just depends on the problem I'm trying to work through. Started out as a forearm study and now we have a crawling man!

Sketch #1 - Angry Monkey

Thus, it begins! Not sure how often I'll be updating this space, but I plan to sketch as much as I can.