Happy Holidays!

Been busy oh so busy.  Sketches done on the plane travelling for the holidays.  One of those little bitty no one is beside me but my seat is the size of a folding chair planes...my overhead light didn't work so I had to resort to the laptop wedging myself in with the wacom tablet.  I had to keep moving so the stewardess could fit past me in the aisle...

Another sunday evening at the Berkeley Botanical Garden.  Manzanita has the best bark ever.

Tiny 5 minute warm up for the day.

Sneak preview of some of the new art for the Steamcon Seattle show this weekend.  I'm pretty pleased with it so far.  Steamcon will be at the Hyatt Regency Bellevue this coming weekend, if you're in Seattle and like Jules Verne you should stop by!

Thumbnails for some posters for Steamcon (in two weeks, so much do!)  I've slowly gotten to the point where the color thumbnails are my favorite part of the whole process.  I could just sit and do these for days.  I used to be so in love with line work, but I've drifted off in the opposite direction lately.

Little sketchbook pages done at APE this weekend.  I brought my super limited 4 grey tone set of copic markers.  And there was a handy white prismacolor pencil lurking at the bottom of the pencil box.

Some sketches for the new piece I'm trying my darnest to finish for APE this weekend.  You've seen the long ago and far away color thumbnails for this particular piece way back in THIS POST from 2009.  Some ideas get better with age ;-)

Linoleum cut tiny cards.  With shiny new packaging (I'm easily amused by these things).  Gonna try and do/post more traditional work from now on.  The more I work at the computer the more I want to just go back to making things by hand no matter how clean and easy the computer makes it.

Busy busy.  Not much besides things for work and things for shows, so here's something I did a bit ago that I have permission to show now!  T-shirt design for http://museumofrobots.com/ - it should be available in stores near you soon! (as long as they have good taste ;-)

Another warm up sketch, this time a 1930's style swim suit pin up.

Revisiting the Wolf and the Woodsman characters as a warm up today.

Character sketches from a short story by Ursula Vernon. I'm not really satisfied with the grandmother, Some reworking in the future I think. You can read it on her blog and figure out how you feel I did - Part 1 & Part 2.

Silly warm up sketch. Return of..uhm...that girl with the boots...

More 'secret project' sketches.

Been doing an exercise lately where I take people I've drawn stylized in illustrations and try to translate them to a more realistic style. Trying to recognize some things I fall back on too often, and bad habits I have when drawing.

And now, something totally different. Just a quick painting from a photo for the sake of practice. I was feeling like I needed to take a bit to really focus on the face and the relationship between all the forms. You can probably find this photo on the internet if you want to see how you think I managed ;-)

More 'secret' project stuff...with some lady over there on the right who is totally unrelated.

Sketch for a 'secret' project (so secret that I post the very first sketches on the internet), and some design work for a 3 color linoleum print that will be a follow up to this. Because for some reason, doing something easy that I've done before doesn't appeal as much as doing something I know will be really hard and frustrating...

Remember folks, don't bring a cupcake to a swordfight.

A few of the little 5X7 paintings I did for the gallery show hanging right now at Blow Salon in Berkeley. These happen to be my favorites, maybe sometime later I'll post the other 4.

Designs for some paintings that were going to be in the gallery show that opens this weekend, then ended up not being. They sort of expanded into maybe something else. We'll see.

Self explanatory.

More chickens. And a cowboy.

I'll be honest, I've been kind of wanting to draw chickens since I passed a couple on the street on the way to the farmers market this week (no lie, nice big lovely looking chickens bustling down the sidewalk in Berkeley). So many other things I should be working on, and I'm sitting drawing chickens.

After a memorial day spend cleaning and rearranging my desk and installing drivers and updates and more updates and wondering why the new scanner/printer machine refused to initialize....I have a working scanner again! Flowers from the Berkeley Botanical garden at Tilden Park.

Random assortment of sketches for various projects. My scanner has decided its no longer on speaking terms with my computer so while that works out, its all digital all the time.

Happy Mothers' Day

A picture of a memory, for my mom. When I was a kid I used to beg her to draw me. I was completely fascinated by the whole process, and by the final, and by the magical-fantastic-ness of it. I would (or did, in this instance at least) add props to make what I considered an interesting set up for my mom to look at, so I put a stuffed bunny in my lap and posed and wanted my portrait drawn. In a teal nightgown, in the dining room.

Happy Mothers' Day!

More nice weather, more time in the park, more quick house painting. I couldn't get over the little awnings.

Afternoon in the park, across from a teal house with lavender trim. Actually I think my teal paint doesn't quite do it justice - it was a pretty vivid house. I was meant to be working on something else, but this happened instead.

Just coloring a sketch from last week, really quickly. It hardly deserves its own post bit I'm giving it one anyway. Same girl, same dress, new hat.

Not happy with it, finished it anyway. Kind of artist-block-ish these past few days. To many big ideas not enough brain power to work out the details.

Just another little page of sketches. Mostly for the joy of sketching anything at all that isn't for work. Yay small burst of free time!

In case you wondered how they came out. Saving the auto-repair idea for another day, and a more rural robot set (you know, after the city bots you have the country bots).

Another rare moment of posting proper 'work' work here, because I was terribly excited to get to do this one. Poster for the RoboGames, which will be in San Mateo April 15-17. Super neat competitions where robots compete in all sorts of tasks including bar tending. Check them out!

The robots never end. Thumbnails for more letterpress cards. Only 3 of them get to go on to press.

You'll probably see this again after the blocks arrive and its printed and I feel all accomplished. In the mean time, I need to figure out why I can only seem to do decent inking in the middle of the night. I'm getting to old to stay up all night playing with pens.

Preview of some designs for a letterpress 'secret project'. Yes I know if I put it here its not secret but honestly its the only personal work I've got going on this week, and I'm to pleased with it not to put it up somewhere.

Back to only having time for quick sketches and messing around with color in photoshop.

Working on the layout for a painting for a friend, illustrating a short story she wrote. I finished this shetch and was struck with a sudden conviction that I had accidentally copied the cover of Craig Thompson's 'Blankets'. I had to go check to make sure. Apparently I'm not actually subconsciously duplicating the cover illustration, phew.

Happy New Year. I'm back from holiday travels, thinking about how much I missed my Really Big Monitor while I was gone, trying to work on my laptop. So, in honor of the new year - another topless girl warm up sketch.