Then where do baby birds come from?

These were a few environmental thumbnail studies done for a project for class. One student made fun of it and said birds are gay. I know this isn't true though, as I specifically drew a totally hetero bird.

Sinestro

It's my left hand, as drawn by my right. I did an example the other way too, but it looks like I just had a stroke so I thought I'd post this one instead.

Hands Thumbnails Knees and Toes

These are some hand studies I did as examples for class. Man, did the students hate drawing hands after a couple days. Me? I love 'em. Hands are awesome.

Puff

What do you do when somebody draws nothing but dragons and thinks what you're teaching them is totally irrelevant? Why, draw a dragon proving all the concepts you're doing in class actually relate, of course. And of course that person would be absent the day you do this. Oh well.

Cranky Pants

I had the class do grid drawings based on portraits, but in a stark black and white kinda film noir or Frank Miller style. This was my example. It's my infant niece on a particularly bad day.

I'm Eggstatic for the Eggcellent Eggs!

They're eggs! I drew these for class as an example for my unit on value because eggs are easy to draw but hard to capture in light and shadow. Or at least that's the idea, because I think I totally boffed drawing the one in the center. Oh well.

Steve-O, No Reference

Steve-O, no reference. No intention to draw Steve-O either, it just turned out like that.

Fat old baby man

Albert Finney is Winston Churchill.

Burlyman

This burly looking gentleman likes to kill babies and eat them. He bites their arms off like sausages. Other people's babies though, not his own. That would be monstrous. He's actually a very loving father to his own children, whom he is raising to kill and eat babies.

Pi-Radical!

Doctors is all swabs ... and that doctor there, why, what do he know about seafaring men? I been in places hot as pitch, and mates dropping round with Yellow Jack, and the blessed land a-heaving like the sea with earthquakes—what do the doctor know of lands like that?

Baby Mickey

Wasn't Mickey Rourke an adorable baby?

Survivor

This proud looking old lady lady with the short buzzed hair survived breast cancer, and her treatment saw her once lovely locks shorn off. I kind of feel bad for having given my drawing cancer, but on the other hand, it does seem to have given her an inner strength and resilience my other, cancer free drawings don't know.

Mustache City Pretty Lady!

Drawing pretty ladies is fun, because unlike real ladies, I can draw mustaches on them if I want. Real ladies would get super uptight about that, but this chick I made up? She's got no problem with it. I just haven't given her a mustache yet, but if she gives me any lip...mustache city pretty lady!

Duros

Remember me? From Star Wars? No, the first one. No, the other first one. Okay the "fourth" one you nerd. No, I didn't have a lightsaber, I was in the cantina. You know, the bar with all the aliens? Obi Wan cuts some dude's arm off? No, I didn't get my arm cut off. No I didn't talk. No. I just sat there and drank okay. Okay?!

I was in Star Wars dammit!

tuff guy

This is the guy in the movie who shows up with thinly veiled threats for like two scenes, but they're memorable scenes and the protagonist better do what he says.... or else.

Holy Ghost Rider

I was just jerkin' around with some Crayola and construction paper and wound up with this skull headed bishop guy. Kind of a Dark Ages black plague thing maybe?.

El Beardo gets a trim

Here's the strongman in younger, more cleanshaven days. I think maybe he looks a little like a totally roided out Christian Bale.

El Beardo

Here's still another pass at the strongman guy. I think he looks pretty good, but maybe a little too much like a super buff Rasputin?

Also Strong Like Bull

Here's take two on the Strongman. I like this drawing much better.

Strong Like Bull

This is my first pass at a strongman type character. As you can see, his initial metal hand thing stunk. Just like The Bearded Lady, I'm still not sure about his costume.

Not by the hairs on my chinny chin chin

Another Bearded Lady sketch. Still haven't worked out her costume.

I'm The Bearded Lady, who the hell are you? One of the Freaks?

It's August and I'm going to make it concept sketch month! Or at least until I run out of concept drawings.

Sometimes I'll come up with ideas for stuff, like cartoons, or characters, or stories or whatever and do a bunch of sketches to hammer it out. Then I usually drop it and never finish it... I mean let it gestate and return to the material when I'm ready to tackle it again. Yeah, that's the ticket.

This is The Bearded Lady. I'm not sure I like her costume and I think her beard should be longer, like Cousin It long. If I do another pass at her I'll post it.

Sitting for a portrait is dull

This is a portrait I did of a student a while ago and based on the look of it she was fairly tired or bored at the time. It would have been about 8:00 am at school, so I guess that's pretty understandable and really she should be commended for not falling completely asleep.

We partnered up for the students to do each other's portraits with one sitting and one drawing and then switching off. After this drawing the entire class wanted to partner up with me, and so I did quite a few of these, but I only kept a couple.

Johnny Sixkiller

I watched "Thunderheart" on TV the other night and wanted to draw an American Indian looking guy. Is there a way to depict members of a particular race in cartoon without resorting to racist caricature? Hopefully.

Thankfully there aren't that many Indians left so the chances of any of them seeing this and being offended are probably pretty slim. Although come to think of it, it's possible being reminded there aren't very many of them left and saying "thankfully" before the expressing the idea might prove offensive too.

At any rate if you're Indian and don't like this blog entry I'm sorry. I just saw "Thunderheart" and wanted to draw.

April Showers Bring May Flowers, Mayflowers Bring Pilgrims, Pilgrims bring Smallpox

Anybody throwing a baby shower and need an invitation design? Well, help yourself because I apparently missed my deadline for this one and have no use for it, so it's all yours, copyright free.

Hey, Zeus

It's Christmas in July! Or as this guy thinks of it, who knows what month it is because where he lives it's hot as hell the whole year!

This was a drawing from a while ago and was for a Christmas greeting card that said "Jesus is the Reason for the Season." His name is Jesus, get it?

He's a bandito that loves Christmas.

The Happiest Troll (because he just ate your baby)

I colored this happy troll guy up a bit in Photoshop and cropped off the part of the drawing that revealed he was wearing sneakers, because that part looked kind of stupid.

Rob loves Hooperball

Did you go to high school with this guy? Did he play on your high school basketball team? Was he also in band and that was what prevented him from ever being cool? Was his name Rob? What's that? All those things are true? How did I read your mind?

Actually, I didn't. I made Rob up, so if those things are true that's pretty creepy. Maybe I'm like a prophet or something.

Just a Hunch

I was watching the 1923 silent film version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Lon Chaney Sr and sketched a quick impression. The makeup was pretty amazing for the time, but for my money though, the 1939 version with Charles Laughton is the best. Plus Maureen O'Hara looked pretty hot as Esmeralda. In it's defense though, the 1996 Disney version did have them all beat in terms of singing gargoyles.

I've never read the book, but the silent version had a lot of text to read, so I think that mostly counts.

Why don't you go suck a duck? (vampire playground insult)

Vampires are supposed to be gross and scary, or at the very least have funny bad hair.

How to Draw Ace Turgison, Test Pilot

This guy's face just started out as a series of angles, like going down a set of stairs. Kind of like just drawing triangles. Add just a few more lines, and you've got Ace Turgison, Test Pilot in just eighty five easy steps. Simple!

Muskrat Love

So what's the deal with this old lady rodent thing? I don't know, do I have to justify everything that pours out of my pen?!

Okay, in full disclosure, I started drawing Jabberjaw, the Hanna Barbara shark who sounded like Curly from the Three Stooges on a show that was basically a rip off of Josie and the Pussy Cats set underwater. It wasn't working, so I turned him into a lady muskrat or something.

Why was I drawing Jabberjaw? I don't know, do I have to justify everything?!

Video Hits One

Ever watch old music videos from the early 80's and realize just how ugly we once tolerated our rock stars to be?

Creativity in America

Newsweek ran a story on creativity and how we've all lost it and America will go to ruin, or something like that. I didn't read the whole article, but I think the gyst of it was we're all doomed because no one reads Newsweek anymore.

Anyway, part of the article was a creativity test from Scholastic Testing that involved creating a complete drawing from a random form or line fragment provided. I thought I'd try it and the result is the magic window that reveals fat wrestling midgets as horned trolls.

I think the article was probably talking about the sort of creativity that pairs with math or stuff to make things like cell phone apps, but hey, those fat baby trolls are creative too, right?

Leapin' Lizards!

Wow, Little Orphan Annie sure grew up to look like a creep, didn't she?

Incidentally the deciding factor in creepiness is pupils, which I decided not to add to this drawing, which otherwise was just going to be some chick with Charlie's Angel's hair.

MISTER Whiskers

Bowler hats make even the cutest critter look like a tough!

Miller Time

I was just doodling around and hey- I stumbled upon a making a Frank Miller drawing...sorta. Maybe I should screw around with a video camera and accidentally create the stupidest movie ever made too (you know, like "The Spirit").

Vector Pepper

Yet another Illustrator experiment, this one using the Gradient Mesh tool. It's a pepper. Wouldn't you like to be a pepper too? It looks kind of cool and is infinitely scalable, but vector stuff is hard while Photoshop is easy.

Bill Ding

Another Illustrator experiment. It's a building!

Hex Prize

Here's the final product. Like I said, I streamlined some stuff just to make it easier or in some cases better looking when I took the template and turned it into an Illustrator piece. I ultimately liked it and think I prefer using a combination of Photoshop and Illustrator best rather than either one on its own, as each has its strengths. The finished product wound up in an area show for Kalamazoo too, so that was nice.

Hex Factor

Here's my mock up that I assembled in Photoshop because Photoshop is a heck of a lot easier for me to work with, or at least it was at the time. I was just trying to get colors and composition finalized. There are a number of aspects of this, like the spider webbing, that I eliminated or changed for the final product to either streamline the design or simply to make it easier for me to finish.

Hex Wife

Here's the drawing of the witch that I wound up using as the template for the actual drawing. Not as detailed as my sketches, but the whole thing was an Adobe Illustrator experiment and the more detail the more vectors the more work, so I tried to keep it kind of simple.

Chemical Hex

Here's a human skull for the drawing's background.

Hex Ray

Here's some animal skulls I assembled for the background.

Hex Box

A thumbnail sketch for what the background of the drawing would look like, or so I thought at the time at which I drew it. The finished product looked almost nothing like this.

Dues Hex Machina

Here's her other hand, plus some magic symbol thingy.

Hexadecimal

It's a study for one of the witch lady's hands, casting a spell or something,

Hex Chromosome

Here's the thumbnail sketch I made for the overall drawing of the pretty lady witch and all her gross, slimy, dead accouterments.

Hex Calibur

Over the next couple posts I'm going to present some sketches and studies that went into one final drawing. It's of a pretty lady witch, kind of like Elizabeth Montgomery was on "Bewitched"- she was cute as a button! But actually I was going for more of a Zooey Deschanel type look, whose overall cuteness is also relative to the proverbial button. In the end the final drawing didn't really look like either of them, but I did this portrait study to play around with it and see what I wanted her to be like.

Oh, Baby

This baby is for my sister's baby shower, or at least that's the plan. I think it looks a lot like what the kid will end up looking like, what with both she and her husband being blond haired blue eyed Aryan poster children. Although most babies are pretty anonymous blobs so its hard to be too far off regardless.