WIP: Robster 2

A little bit more fleshed out. Still working the colors, trying to nail down my workflow. Digital painting for me is so frustrating because I never know when a piece is done.

With that being said, I'll be giving this one just a little bit more love..

WIP: Robbster

A digital painting I started tonight after spending a majority of the evening working on real work. I just wanted to let off some steam by painting a really dumb-looking character. I think the more stressed I am, the less intelligent my characters are :)

As this is only a work-in-progress, I hope to finish him up and post the final very soon!

Sand Hands!

A character that popped into my head one night as I was jumping into bed. I immediately had to sketch him out. I played with his design for a while, then came up with a direction and concept for him.

He's a big rubber sack body filled with sand. I imagine he feels a bit like a stress reliever ball (Those sand-filled balls that you squeeze when you're mad). He's leaking a bit of his insides, but still held together enough to pound fools with his club hands.

Judith the Bag Lady

So I've decided to try to get back into digital painting and hopefully improve my technique. It's a whole different mode of thinking for me, as I'm more inclined to draw with clean pen & ink, with flat colors and shadows. I love the volume you can create with lush digital painting, and it also helps me to visualize my characters as fully rounded 3d shapes.

With that being said, this is Judith. She's a bag lady.

Now with alternate claws!

Every year, the team at MAKE (where I work) participates in Minneapolis advertising league bowling. It's a blast, and we even somehow managed to win the championship last year:) But aside from the bowling, pizza, beer, and beer, we also recently started sketching between frames.

With input and suggestions from some friends, I wanted to make a version of our favorite mammalian hero with alternate claws. I can't post all of the claw versions that we came up with, as some are less than savory...

Brain Drops

This is a freeform illustration I drew while visiting my girlfriend's family over the weekend. I had no real idea of what I wanted it to be, I just wanted to have some fun with a tech pen and a hot press illustration board. After everything was inked, I scanned it and colored it digitally. This offered me a lot of flexibility as far as color tweaks and variations of tone. I'm happy with the way it came out, but I still may give it another subtle color pass.

Has it been that long??

Wow. So I haven't posted in a while.. Lots of things going on in these past couple of months, and it's still crazy busy around here.
I took a vacation to the big island of Hawaii in early December and it was AWESOME!! I've included some pages from a sketchbook I brought along, as well as some photos. Pictures hardly do the island justice, but it may give you a bit of an idea at how colorful and vibrant the environment is.

I also used this trip as an opportunity to try something new with my sketching, and I picked up a travel kit of windsor newton watercolors and a brush tip pen. It was very convenient to keep the watercolors on me at all times to quickly splash color on the page, and the brush tip kept my drawings looser and more gestural than usual.