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?

Memento Mori, buddy.

I recently made a cover illustration for the Story Collider online magazine. The subject was death. Did you know that when you do a Google image search for "deadly nightshade," most of the flowers that come up are actually woody nightshade? Because I sure didn't! Fortunately, that's one lesson I walked away with after art school. Always double-check your photo reference, because someone out there is going to know the difference.

Castle on the Mountain

A concept drawing of a fantasy world. My friends and I went camping in Maine this summer at the foot of Mt. Katahdin, and this is loosely based on the view we had from our campsite. Also inspired by the work of Hiroshi Yoshida. That guy is awesome.

That castle at the top of the mountain must be huge. Almost the size of an entire city. It was built by an immortal hermit because he had nothing better to do for a couple thousand years. Then people from the foot of the mountain started moving up the mountain to be closer to this amazing castle that seemed to be springing up on its own, but their presence there drove the immortal man away. He only wanted to toil in solitude. No one lives there anymore, because it is so difficult to get water up there.

Constellation: Lepus

Hey everyone!

It's been a little while, but I promise this post will make up for all that lost time! I was working on this 12-page comic in what free time I had last month. Here's three pages of action out of the middle. I titled it "Constellation: Lepus"

You can read the full 12 pages on my new DeviantART

Lily: Character Sheet

I've been cranking out character sheets for some of my favorite original characters from several different stories I keep on my back burner. This is Lily, from a story that still has a long way to go, but I think she's a really fun character. I want to have her in my portfolio

Grinnat The Jerk

This is the villain from a comic project I'm working on. He's not particularly tough but he's a real jerk.

Science For Princesses

Oh I almost forgot!

I made this paper doll a few weeks ago as an illustration to accompany an article about gender stereotypes in the scientific community. The paper doll actually works, too. The article includes a high resolution file you can print out to cut out the shapes, and dress your own scientist! The illustration appeared in June, but I've had other things on my mind and forgot to tell you about it. Whoops!
You can read the article on the Story Collider Magazine's website. The article is called "Science For Princesses."

Concept Art: Skycastle Moebius

A bit of concept art for you. Things in space always have such a utilitarian appearance. All geometric shapes and exposed piping. Bo-o-o-o-oring. Buildings on Earth have been made with fancy details all over their facades for centuries. Why doesn't anyone ever put relief sculpture on a fuselage?

I was looking through the works of Jean Giraud, known by the pen name  "Moebius" in the sci fi world, and I was inspired to design this city in space. The residential central dome houses roughly the population of New York City, though majority of the business is done in the head. Life support is all housed in the nude at the ventral end of the station, but of course since the designers valued form over function, there are numerous bottlenecks and design flaws. It really isn't very efficient, but boy is life there lavish.

Digital Painting: Forest Hut

I haven't done a lot of digital painting in my career, I want to try it out. This is just a hut, it's not specifically for anything. It was fun. Critiques are welcome, email me at joe@joewierenga.com

Character sketches: Teen mysteries

Progress on the character design. I like her being nerdy but I can't decide if she needs to be more "leading lady"

Emissary of the King

It's been a while since I've posted anything so I thought I'd show you all a page of concept sketches I've been doing for one of my projects. This is the main character of a cartoon pitch I'm putting together. She's sort of a nerdy girl who fights dragons with science, you know, that type of character. 

I'm trying to settle on an outfit for her. I don't want this project to involve costume changes, I want it to be more icon-based. Just one outfit, and maybe one coat she puts over it when she's in cold weather. But I haven't even settled on a name for her yet. That's kind of an important thing to have in the pitch bible. Hrmm. 

Hey Pen Ward, call me

I'm really enjoying doing these animated doodles. I have to admit, this one kind of got away from me. At first it was just Finn from Adventure Time pulling out a sword, and then, well, it just kept on going.

Mee-yull-neer?

The power of flight make things too easy for super heroes. These days they're giving everyone the ability to fly. Remember when Wonder Woman had to park her invisible jet? Now there's excitement for you.
I always thought Thor's method of transportation was cool. He throws his hammer so hard that it lifts him off the ground. Of course the physics of that don't actually make any sense, but I wanted to try it anyway. This is a rough line animation, I just wanted to capture the weight and the momentum.
You're going to have to imagine a thunderclap at the same moment as that shockwave, because Mjolnir clearly must be breaking the sound barrier to lift up a guy as heavy as Thor.

Next Stop Laputa

A new piece taken from the world of master director Hayao Miyazaki. This is Dola and her pirate gang from one of my favorite movies, Castle In The Sky.

As far as I'm concerned, Dola is one of the greatest characters of all time. Miyazaki always does a great job of adding dimension to his characters--bad guys are never purely bad--and the Dola Gang is one of the best examples. Here you have a band of robbers and thieves, ruffians and lawbreakers to their core, yet at the same time the entire crew is a bunch of mama's boys. And Dola herself is such a great twist on a tired anime trope. Miyazaki has always eschewed the whole "women as buxom sex object" thing, with Dola it's almost like he's saying "you want a sexy sky pirate? Fine, but I'll set the story when she's 70 years old!" By keeping sexiness from slowing things down, it pulls focus to more distinctly feminine kinds of strength in Dola, like motherhood. But this is starting to turn into a dissertation. I'll ramble about that some other time.
Best regards,
-Joe