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.