The Field Guide to Magical Animals

Hello, Bloggers!

I recently started a new webcomic, and I wanted to spread the word to you! You can find it at http://fieldguideonline.com/

It has all kinds of cool stuff, like a fantastic onlone graphic novel (new pages on Tuesdays and Wednesdays) that looks like this

Also short bonus comics like Toothy Grin and more coming soon

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed making it! That's fieldguideonline.com!

Go To My Tumblr

Hello, Blogger followers.

I've been fazing out my blogger page little-by-little for a while now, but it's about time I announced it here to make it official. I don't plan to update this blogger account anymore. This site has done me well for years, I know, and I'll leave this archive here for anyone curious about what I was up to between 2009 and 2012. But this page has been becoming increasingly redundant. Every piece of art I post here is also being posted on Tumblr, and DeviantART, and Behance, and Facebook, and maybe even being sold on Etsy. If anything, I'm over-extending myself as far as web presence is concerned. And everything blogger does, one of those sites I mentioned above does it better.
So those are all the reasons why I'm pulling blogger out of the rotation. If anyone is interested, I hope to see you all again in any of these other outlets. If you aren't using any single one of those other sites, frankly I'm shocked. Even babies and cats have Facebook these days.

So thank you for all you've done for me, blogger. And farewell. Don't feel too bad, this is just the way of things on the internet. Remember Friendster? Or Myspace? It's probably only a matter of time before I leave Tumblr for Instagram, and Instagram for whatever they think up next.

Yours,
Joe Wierenga,
Brooklyn, NY

Which Witch is This?

A Halloween-y image for you, just a few days late for Halloween. But Halloween was cancelled here in Brooklyn, so who's keeping track anymore? This is the first in a new character series I'm starting to keep myself active. This is just a personal challenge: my goal is to make one original drawing of a classic trope each week. This week is a witch, next week I might draw a cowboy, the next week maybe a vampire, the week after that a space man, on and on until I run out of ideas. This seemed like a very attainable goal when I thought it up a few weeks ago, but then I had a freelance project kick into overdrive, and now suddenly I don't seem to have any time to work on it. So the character series will update whenever I can manage, but I'm still hoping for weekly. 

Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween! Something a little bit different today. This is the jack o'lantern I carved this year. My cat, Elvis, was kind enough to pose for it. Pearl took this picture of it on our windowsill, and she also took the original picture it's based on. Isn't she a talented photographer?

New Sketches

I’m really excited, I think I’m closing in on the right visual style for one of my personal projects. This character is a girl detective who solves mysteries in a world of  werewolves and dragons, and this is the closest I’ve ever been to being happy with her design. Getting the main character to strike the right visual chord is one of the most important things with a project like this. I’ve been rolling this ball forward on and off for the last few months, and I feel like now I’m so close I can taste it.

My Antlers

The second in my series on color and digital painting techniques. I could have sat with this one forever, maybe, adding here, subtracting there. As a perfectionist with OCD tendencies, that would have been well within my capacity. But I'm not sure it would have made a difference, really. Sometimes it's better to get it out there and take what you've learned on to the next task.

Rainy Day

I'm starting a series to develop the style of color in my illustration work. I always feel the most at home with my pieces during the first stages where I'm making the line drawing. Working out the composition and the anatomy, capturing the action and the emotion... all of that is what I enjoy the most. And then comes time to finish the piece, and I sometimes feel a little lost.

It's my own fault. I spent the first 20-or-so years of my life doing nothing but pencil drawings. Linework is all I practiced in until just a few years ago. So, sometimes the best medicine is to do something outside of your comfort zone. I present to you: elements of digital painting. Hardly ever seen before in my personal work.

In this one I worked up the skin, boots and umbrella, but I somehow like it better with the coat and leggings left the same color as the background, with just some simple touches to indicate volume. What do you guys think?