Julius "Pretty Boy" Porter

This started out as a quick sketch of an ugly, old fashioned barber with a glass eye (ya know, that ol chestnut). Somehow the pants got tighter and the shoes got clunkier and now he's got some weird punk vibe going on...

...oh well.

I'm trying to keep up on my artwork this summer, but an 8 to 5 job kinda puts a damper on my enthusiasm. At least my lack of a scanner is forcing me into practicing with my Wacom drawing skills.

Spot Illustrations

Here are two spot illustrations that were aimed at children. Each one was an assigned topic (mad scientist and singing cowboy).

"Sticky Fingers"

Somewhere out there, there is an article called "The Sticky Finger Set." This article is about a father having a mental breakdown because his kids keep stealing all his stuff (tape, saws, keys, scissors, tent poles...because kids apparently love tent poles). Anyway, I did a lil picture for it with children as paper cut-outs tying up the dad.

The original versions of this featured much warmer colors and a much, MUCH angrier father. Slowly it went from a feeling of homicidal rage to soul crushing defeat...sounds like fatherhood to me (HA).

Some Faces For Your Face

I took some time to actually look through the posts on this thing and I realize that I don't put pieces from fine arts classes up. Now there was probably a reason for this originally, but I've long since forgotten what the reasoning was...SO here are a few drawings from my portrait drawing class. Most of these are just one class worth of drawing and I think they're all done with good ol fashioned graphite...and just so no one thinks we have mutants for models, the one on the bottom left corner is pretty exaggerated.

Sorry for the horrible photography involved.

Kids book? Yes, please!

So this post is going to be a long one. I'm in the process of writing and illustration a children's book and I would like to blog my brains out on the whole thing. As I go throughout the process, I'll add more sketches/ comps/ line drawing/ and final artwork into this post (instead of making a new post every time and cluttering the blog, I'll keep this project as one single entity). So check back here and enjoy the "creative" process.

The book is (as of right now) called "Katie and the Land of Couch," and is about a little girl named Katie and her brother Hughie (both named after british celebrities I enjoy: Kate Nash and Hugh Laurie) in the town of Cobblestone. It's a rainy day and they help their parents clean the house which eventually leads to them falling into the couch and being transported into a magical world. They make a lot of strange friends (dust bunnies, a wind-up-mouse, a sock-topus, a toll collecting piggy bank, lost remote controls) and even some enemies. Will they be able to make it back home?...of course they will.

The first images are a bunch of preliminary sketches for the characters and some scribbling that is almost a understandable plot (notice how the interesting idea of a scarecrow with no friends lost out to "something with a british girl").
The second images are a few of the pages during the storyboarding process. I really haven't gotten the chance to sketch enough giant cartoon pigs in my lifetime... and yes I'm sure there are some typos in the sketches.

Then there are a few color comps and finally there are three (more or less) finished images. I think I'd eventually like to go in and add a quilted texture to the ground to make it more couch-ish.

Sketch-to-death recap

Right in the heart of finals but I'd still like to get something on here. The simple solution is to throw up a bunch of junk from sketch to death... HOORAY

Check out the Sketch to Death Blog to see what words inspired these and what others did with their thinkers.