Girana!

Was talking with my friend Jeff about the stupidest pitch for a "syfy" channel monster movie. I say Girhana should be thier next feature. Think about it. Jaws of a piranha, with the reach of a giraffe? SCARY!

Here's D!

I suppose it's obvious it had to be a dragon, heh. I tried to deviate from the dragon clutching a tresurechest thing...I thought about it for a bit and imagined a pudgy little accountant greedily counting his treasure. Donno why he's pink ...just seemed to fit :D

Squishy Little Dictator

I think this may qualify for the weirdest thing I have ever painted! A lot of what you see here is the result of a really odd dream. As I was painting and pondering the dream, (I'll skip over the potentially embarrassing Freudian interpretations:) I decided to sketch this little beastie as "the heart." It's like a squishy little dictator...or a delicate monarch who unquestionably wins the fight vs common sense. How can our strongest part also be our weakest?

Cleese-ey?

Finally got that new wireless Wacom, it's dreamy!

Here's something I did to take the tablet for a spin this weekend. I recently decided to sit down and watch the color theory DVD's a friend of mine gave me a long time ago. I don't know why it took me so long, after watching them, I can clearly see a lot of mistakes I was making in my "underpainting" technique that I was stumbling through by trial and error. I'm still not at the spot where I automagically know the perfect colors to use, but I think I'm taking steps to get closer. Practice practice practice!
In case you can't tell, it's supposed to be a caricature of John Cleese. In looking up reference I found that he's really, really serious in almost all his photos...thus the puppy-dog sadface. Maybe I should just tell everyone it's Poe. :P
Likeness and proportions. Tricky stuff. I suppose that is next on my list, LOL.

C!

And the alphabet continues! Her is my painting for "C." I'm branching out from fairytales to include fables...mostly just because I really wanted to draw a chicken :) This evolved from a sketch I did on one of my lunchtime walks. I'm practicing the same technique as with the beanstalk. I started with a sketch, then painted greyscale, then colored over it. It's amazing how satisfying it is to finally put that little white dot on the eye. PING! haha...:)

B!

Well, I nailed my butt down to the digital drawing board and did it! Here's B! Feels good to be going forward with this project, thanks for the encouragement guys :)

 For B, I knew I wanted to do a beanstalk, and I wanted the beanstalk itself to be a kind of character, I toyed with putting faces on each bean in the pod, but it read too tiny, so I changed the peas into eyeballs, thorougly creeping myself out, lol. Hopefully the white teeth read ok, I was worried I had put too many of them and it obscured the mouth too much.
Lettering is kinda like torture to me...I kinda punked out on this one.The snippets are written in a photoshop font called palomino, but the big letters are hand drawn. Maybe when I'm finished with the entire alphabet, I'll revisit the lettering.
The biggest struggle for me right now with photoshop and digital art in general is that I use dodge/burn wayy too much, I'm trying to beef up my color theory so that I can pick the right colors and highlights in the first place without going through 20 minutes of playing with the hue slider:)

Onnn to C!

Alphabet Drawerings!

Here's a piece that I did to kick off a project that promptly landed before it  got to the end of the runway! An old friend and I were going to do fairytale ABC's and this was my take on "A." For whatever reasons, this was as far as it went. I'm throwing down the gauntlet 2010...this is going to be the year of "doing things" and I am going forward in many ways, and it starts with "B"