Gimmie all those hats!

Most definitely, I have the greatest friends in the world. I know, I know, EVERYONE has the greatest friends in the world, but... well.... So do I, is the point. Here's an example of why:

I was talking to my friend Ren about when we should get together and paint something because our schedules were kind of misaligned. When it turned out that she had Saturday available, I said "Yeah, I can do Saturday. I just have to meet this wedding planner and work some stuff out with her."

This was the point at which Ren lost her shit in the most glorious of ways.

"WEDDING PLANNER?!??! OH MY GOSH, DID BILLY PROPOSE?!?!? YESSSSSSSSSS!!!!! I'VE BEEN PLANNING YOUR BACHELORETTE PARTY FOREVER!!!!! IT'S GOING TO BE AT THE REN FAIRE!!!! COMPLETE WITH STRIPPER KNIGHTS!!!! I WANT TO KNOW IF IT'S EVEN POSSIBLE TO STRIP OUT OF SHINING ARMOR!!!!!! OH EM GEEEEEE" At which point I think she started foaming at the mouth, and I could not stop myself from laughing. I mean, really? Stripper knights? I must admit, once she brought up the physical complications of gettin' your groove on while in full plate armor I, too, became morbidly curious as to its doability.... But gettin' assaulted by somebody else's junk just ain't my style. Still, absolutely HILARIOUS.

Apparently, though, I had forgotten to mention that I'd started working with a wedding planner as her graphic designer/assistant. Whoopsies. Here's a sample of what I've been doing for Terri over at Wedding Fairytales:



Very suddenly, I have become the go-to gal for event invitations... Which I'm totally cool with, actually. ESPECIALLY wedding ones, because I jump at any chance to sneak hearts into my work.



In other news! I've decided to take on a lottttttt of different projects. On top of working on The Many Faces of Mister Bubb, I've started a cooking blog called Biscuits-n-Crazy, and begun work on a card game! (The concept of which I'll share once I've sorted out enough images. I've already got almost a hundred ready! Whoo!)

As always, dear reader, I hope you're having an amazing day. However! If you find yourself feeling a bit down, here's a clip of the Jim Henson puppet stage show (Called Stuffed and Unstrung) that... if it comes to your town, you should IMMEDIATELY buy tickets for. I promise you, you'll love it.

It's rainin' cats, hallelujah!

This month has seen some interesting changes, not least of which is my sudden overflow of cat-related artwork! Most people who know me, know that I have two true, sickening obsessions... My boyfriend Billy, and my cat Bubba (whose proper name is Prince but which has been obliterated due to overuse of nicknames). I've been itching to make a children's book for a while, now, but couldn't seem to get any of my ideas to work once I started tinkering with them. It almost felt like my brain and my hand were more occupied with getting into some sort of epic slap-fight with one another than doing my bidding, which really didn't sit well with me. Frustrated by my sudden art block, I complained to my flu-ridden boyfriend that I couldn't seem to do anything I really wanted to. Now I'm not sure if this was a stroke of brilliance or a stroke of fever talking, but he said "Why don't you write a book about Bubba?"

From there on out it was like DUH, WHY DID I NEVER THINK OF THIS BEFORE?!?!? The tentative title is set to be "The many faces of Mr. Bubba," which is a book about all the things my cat does that we decide are him pretending to be something else... like a doctor when we're sick, or a mountaineer when he climbs on top of us while we're sleeping. I was super excited by this concept and immediately got to work planning the character designs and laying out a couple of pages... including the cover, for which I've decided to use a different style than my norm. Here's a preview of the in-progress work for it!



I tried about a billion zillion different cat designs before I settled on making him absurdly cute, with eyes almost as big as his whole head! Interestingly, the process I've been using is super different from what I've been doing all year, which I think is actually one thing I was craving. I was getting bored with being comfortable and wanted to branch out and experiment again, so.... Voila! Not a single drop of ink was used in this piece, and in fact... the bits of red you see are the remnants of the roughly 1"x1" pencil sketch I used as my guide for this. I haven't done enough purely digital stuff, and so far... this has been a lot of fun!

Now of course, like some sort of act of fate... The woot.com derby was announced yesterday as being kitties! How crazy is that?!?!? In the middle of me drawing cats, I'm actually encouraged to draw MORE cats?! Well obviously, I decided this was an awesome idea and produced the following t-shirt design, which I'm hoping does well this week! You can vote for my design at the woot.com derby, which I would very, very much appreciate. But, if you'd just like to see the design, here it is!



I did not appreciate just how 80's Lion-o's hair is until I got to draw it... Man... That mane is glorious.

Well, that's all for now, folks! And rememmber....

A sacrifice to the porcelain throne.

As I mentioned in my previous post, a number of the gifts I gave away this Giftmas were given new homes without being documented (I originally had a really weird section here where I went crazy comparing the prezzies to illegal aliens and it got suuuuuper out of hand. It was kind of funny, but kind of weird. Kind of... really weird. So it's gone, now. Poof!). Luckily! Brandi so graciously has provided us all with photographs of the portraits she and her husband received from me this year! Yay!!!!

About a year ago, when they moved into their house, Jimmy and Brandi started getting fun with decorating all their rooms with paint and pictures and curtains and all sorts of stuff that has made their place seriously gorgeous... But for the life of her, Brandi was unable to find any wall-art that would match the color scheme in their bathroom.


(This one's Brandi! She thinks I drew her low on the page because I often draw people looking terrifying, but actually it's because she's a munchkin and I originally was going to draw her and Jimmy on the same page together and have it so neither of them was fully captured on the page because I think extreme height differences are hilaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarious and deserve to be celebrated.)

Their bathroom has a super-rich red that's a couple of shades darker than what most people would look at and involuntarily shout "RED!!!!" as well as a very nice soft, light brown, and white. She'd pitched to me a good long while ago the idea of commissioning some portraits of her, and her husband, and their super fabulous dogs.


(This one's Aulbee, he's such a sweetheart! And a proper gentleman, to boot. Possibly one of the best groomsmen at their wedding, although that's a hard title to claim given the sheer awesomeness of that lot.)

Our plans got a little out of hand, and I decided that I wanted to make the pictures SO SUPER FABULOUSLY SPECIAL and was going to hand-make paper with her out of some of the leftover cotton from their southern belle/Irish as all hell wedding [which we should still do!!!!!!!] and use it for the portraits to make it sort of a secret specialness that was super cool.


(Here's Jimmy!!! He is both super Irish, and super tall. You may think that sash is a little too much, but I promise you... This is based on real-life. He was pretty much dubbed little Mr. Irish king of the universe in a pageant or something, as far as I have decided based on photographs and a wild imagination. I hope that he rules his subjects wisely.)

We kind of got carried away with the idea, but never got an actual chance to do it so the paper has, sadly, continued to go unmade. However, that doesn't mean the portraits should suffer for my laziness and short attention span!!!! Which is why I made them these anyway, despite it being somewhat divergent from the plan.


(Meet Bama! She's kind of a derpsauce pooch, and as sweet as she can be... well... I am cruel and imagine her looking like this in my head. This is, almost certainly, my favorite of the portraits for how ridiculous it is, and how seeing that tongue flopped out never fails to make me giggle.)

Now despite the fact that these are goofy pictures, and just ink on watercolor paper mounted on some random heavy-weight red paper I found and guestimated being a good match for the bathroom that I completely intended them to be displayed in... They immediately went and had them mounted, framed, and displayed in a place of honor in their hallway.




You walk into their house, and these are basically one of the first things you're going to see. I am kind of stunned, and incredibly flattered! ...The downside is, though, that there's still nothing hanging in their bathroom, and I'm not sure what to make to fix that problem for fear that it will be too fancy again and and be put in another place of honor. Oh, woe is me with my terrible, horrible problem of being appreciated. =>.<=

Seriously though, I'm super flattered and super glad they like them!

Welcome to the world of tomorrow!!!

'Allo blokes and blokettes! It's been a refreshing sort of holiday-time for me, given that I took a full and total week off from work and life and ran away to the strange and mystical country of "New Jersey" to learn the secrets of Christmas! Oh, what a glorious time was had by all.... except for the bit towards the end where I got the flu and then had to go back to work and life and reality and long for the days of freedom. Ah, freedom. Anywho! I finished the comic the week before Christmas and sent it off to the publisher, so I'll keep you lot updated on when that'll be available for public consumption. In the meantime, here's something I couldn't share with you before because it was a gift for someone!



Sadly, the other things I made either weren't photographed [the Cut the Rope-based ornament I made for Billy and the series of portraits I made for Brandi and Jimmy], or haven't been given to their owners AND haven't been photographed [the painting I made for my youngest sister, Nanners.] So hopefully, some day, I'll have photos of those and be able to share them with you lot.

In other news, I've been watching a lottttttttttttttt of Doctor Who lately and have officially decided that David Tennant is like, totally, like, the cooooooooolest doctor of them all. The companion he's currently got as far as my viewing goes is Donna, and to date I think that his best pairing was with Rose. Now, Rose was RUBBISH when Christopher Eccleston was The Doctor, but she hit her stride once Tennant came on the scene and their on-screen chemistry was amazing! The companions he's had since Rose [Martha Jones and Donna Knoble] have been great characters with great attributes and quite a lot of spunk, but they haven't really felt as genuine to me as the connection he and Rose ended up having. Then again, I'm only on the Agatha Cristie episode with Donna, and I'm fast beginning to like her... enthusiasm and cleverness. Also her no-nonsense attitude towards some of the things they come up against, and her confidence. I like to see daring and confidence in the companions.

Anywho! I've been playing around with the idea of doing some Doctor Who art, as well as some fairytale-based art and have sketches of the latter already prepared and ready to go... But I may decide to give that all up and go ahead writing about fire trucks. This story's been a long time coming, and I never really thought about telling it but now I've thought of it I can't really help but want to see if I can let it grow. There's a whole lot of future out there and I'm looking forward to seeing it!