I went to the Ren Faire yesterday!

Heya chumps and chumpettes! It's been a long, winding month here in crazytown and I've finally had a chance to check in!

This half of the year is always kind of hectic for me, because in addition to all them fancy 'give everybody ALL THE GIFTS' holidays that are now, about 3/4 of my friends have their birthdays between September and December. Oh no!!! My lovely, wonderful, gorgeous, amazing, and absurdly loving friend Ren's birthday was last month, and I sadly did not have any money to buy her anything. That's not to say that I normally buy people things in the first place [What artist DOESN'T make at least 2/3 of the gifts they give?], but I had an idea of something to purchase this time around and was kind of disappointed that I had to default to handmade. So anyway! This year, I made her an inked [and later mounted] drawing of her Pathfinder character, Ehalania, and her... Pet? Fuzzy-Wuzzums. I shit you not, that's what she named her character's tiger. We have some AMAZING adventures together every Sunday and I felt like this was an entirely appropriate gift, especially given that I was going to give it to her right after one of our Pathfinder sessions anyway.



That week, I was reeeeeeally craving some deep-inking, but I haven't done anything with extreme shadows in quite a while. I figured if I pulled it off, she'd win a fun and unexpected piece! And if not, well.... Then I at least got to experiment. I feel like I could have done a bunch more detailing and played around with texture and dry-brushing, but Ren loved it so... Who cares! This was fun for me to make, and it gave me some great ideas for whenever I get around to making a picture of my own character.

As a little bonus, I'm feeling generous [and a bit guilty for not having posted for quite some time] and have elected to share a very rough beginning stage of the coloring of the first page of Little Red Men, a forthcoming comic written by the talented Sam Verrall and illustrated by the dead-sexy... Me.



This page has a lonnnnnnnnng way to go until it's finished, but I'm having fun messin' around with it and trying to decide on the best way to create the warm, reflective lighting from the fireplace. Gosh though, this comic looks like it's about creepy aliens that wear wigs according to that last panel. ... I kinda like it.

This weekend, I'll be taking a break from the comic [probably] to help the infamous Brandi make some paintings for her brand new office!... And celebrate Billy's Mom's Birthday! .... And his god-sister's birthday!!! [See, told you there were a lot of birthdays right now. My roomate's birthday is in like... two weeks and I'm still not done her gift yet, either!]. I've actually really missed painting and I'm suuuuuper excited to bust out the ol' staple gun when I stretch the canvas. Hopefully we finish the paintings quickly and I get to photograph them and share!

Don't tell your mom!

There isn't a preview here, certainly! I would NEVER dream of giving off a few crude sketches from random panels of the comic I'm working on to give you guys a taste of how it's coming along. Why, I object to your accusations! I am a standup citizen of the artistic community and I would certainly not abuse my powers of illustration to share some here-and-there bits that won't make sense all jumbled and out of context anyway! Gawrsh. Just what kind of dame do you think I am?

But speaking of previews, this certainly isn't one.



Now that we've got that out of the way though, I feel like I can get on with my business. Which is certainly not taking a nap during my lunch break, if that was what you were thinking. Because it's not. It's something else.

Goin' a bit batty. Har har har.

Howdy, y'all! So, I'm taking the weekend off from working on the comic to hang out in Jersey and celebrate father's day with Billy's family! I'm super excited to get a move on the cooking that Brandi and I are going to do for the Sunday BBQ [The Gluten-Free kid and Vegetarian kid are going to do some cooking for Glutenized meat-eaters?!!? Oh noooooooooo!!!!!] because we always have awesome food adventures and, this time, we're going to be playing board games and watching Dr.Who simultaneously! How jealous are you?

So obviously, there are going to be some awesome treats getting pumped out for Billy's family this weekend, but what do I have for you? Well, I'm glad you asked! First, and most excitingly, I have one COUNT IT, one actual finalized and finished.... panel... for the comic!



The way this panel came about was that one day, during my character-sketching bonanza, I got fed up with fiddling about poses and turning heads and designing chairs and just wanted to draw! ...But it doesn't really make sense to draw just whatever the heck while I've got this awesome project to pull from and decided to take one of the more striking images that Sam, the writer, specified in the script. It was originally just something I was doing because I wanted to keep sane and because I wanted to procrastinate while still being able to claim productivity but... I ended up going all out. Luckily, this particular panel was written to be a sort of inset panel on the page, so it doesn't matter that I made it completely separately from a fully-realized page. I'm pretty pumped about the way this came out, and Sam went super crazy over it, too!

Also, here's some stuff that I did for work that didn't make the cut!



This piece WAS going to be the cover of a brochure for this Summer's newest polish collection but, unfortunately, they decided to just not do a brochure at all! This project was a lotttt of fun to do and I was glad they let me try it out riiiight up until they decided not to go with it. Le sad. This is a common theme though becaaaaaaause....



this one is ALSO not being used. The rejection of these two designs was particularly heartbreaking to me because, obviously, they are fully-realized... I had a lot of fun working on the projects so I guess I shouldn't be sad about them. Plus, I got to take home the props from the second one and am tooooootally going to add them to my studio at home. I forgot how much I loved painting with actual paint until I did that UFO! Even though it was done with acrylic [my LEAST favorite paint] and with an eh quality brand of paints, it was just... fun!

You know what else is fun, though? Making your own guacamole! ... Which I'm going to do right.... NOW.

Progress!

Howdy! And welcome to the post in which I give you some very vague previews and slightly-related character sketches! Above you will find Dr. Can't-be-bothered-to-look-up-his-first-name-right-now Freeborn... Mostly. The colored one, while more entertaining, is not the final version that I'll be going with. However, the floating heads on the second image ARE! Huzzah! Freeborn is the hero of our... unique... tale. Well, I wouldn't really call him a 'hero' so much as 'a guy the story follows.' Nonetheless, he's a rather interesting chap! How is he interesting? Well, he is in no way related to an octopus, for one. And he has not been reported as wearing an ice cream cone as a hat for another. Also, he seems to be particularly poor at winning bets but excellent at drinking to the point that bets start flowing freely. Only some of that is relevant to the tale, really.




This chap is, for all intensive purposes, about as important in the story as Freeborn is. Interestingly, he doesn't actually have a name! He's listed in the script simply as "Guide" which is certainly his duty in the comic. Personally, I think he's a bit of a dumb-head, as you may well notice from the little side notes surrounding him. I'm not going to reveal what all that's about quite yet, but I gotta tell ya... As stories go, this one is bizzarrrrre. It involves an old myth that is all kinds of super-kooky and makes for one incredibly interesting story. It involves Australia, fig trees, and the color red quite heavily. OH NO, WHAT EVER DOES THAT ALL ADD UP TO?!?!?! No, seriously, you probably don't know. It's a very obscure myth but I honestly love the heck out of the tale that Sam, the writer, has made of it. Stay tuned for more, later!!! I think I'm going to spend my evening inking.