Panda Study

Lazy Saturday mornings + getting started with some coffee before taking care of real life stuff = Panda Study

Margot my niece recently requested a panda and bamboo painted on her wall. Bamboo is a no brainer, but I dont generally draw bears so I thought I'd give it a quick shot. None of these are anything I'd consider using... but I figure the study and the process of figuring something out is worth sharing. I didn't get to any body studies, just faces straight on playing with different head shapes. The study ended with me feeling that all of this is very flat and boring, so next step is to play with better angles and poses.

PS: Still having trouble figuring out how to harness the power of the markers! I need to figure out a good technique/style for them. Right now it all just looks messy and blah! Guess some things just take putting in the time with the medium, frustrating as it may be without an undo button!!!!

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Wishful Thinking

This is a sketch I did per the request of Ashley for her Fab For Less house. She gave a group of us a common theme and asked us to create a 6" X 6" black and white work of art based on the theme "wishful thinking" I guess I went SUPER literal as it related to her project, but I just couldn't get the imagery of the little girl, the victorian house, and the windy stairs out of my head.

Generally my style tends toward the more simple, flat, clean line, and graphic, so this time I wanted to experiment with perspective, and try using marker technique and a sketchy pen technique.

The markers dont come naturally to me at all. I definitely want to keep experimenting with them. I put this sketch off until the 11th hour though, so I just needed to finish it and get delivered to the house. I'll post pictures from the house later and explain more about the project.


These are just some sketches I did as I was experimenting with the look of this piece.

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Bored Bird

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Oh The People You'll Meet

In between a few After Effects CS3 tutorials today, I took a break from staring at the computer to sketch a bit. The three heads on the right seem like they could all be part of the same adventure.

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More!!!! More?

You know how it is. :)

This is a sketch I just finished and I think it would be nice to do a series of em on canvas with ink and acrylic... well... at least next time I'm feeling a little more like sketch 2.

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Old Pencil Drawings

Another area of the old HD contained a few pencil drawings of my family that I did many moon ago and the tea diffuser I did in metals and jewelry making. The roof is a lid that lifts off so that you can insert the tea leaves, then you place the tea diffuser into an entire pot of tea. The tea diffuses out of the carvings on the side that were made with a very tiny little coping saw.

Here's a more recent sketch I did for an art swap we had at work.

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Armadillos are fascinating!

They jump straight up in the air when they get surprised! Unfortunately this seems to be a cruel involuntary defense mechanism to give a creature who needs to cross busy intersections. Poor lil fella.

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Aquaphobic Octopus or Supersoaker Sniper

Ok.... so the title is a groaner and could use some help, but here's a little colored pencil/sharpie drawing I threw together for an art swap we did here at work. I was in the mood to do something semi-colorful on a nice dark deep colored paper and this is what it evolved into. I love very organic twisty imagery and octopus legs just sort of formed from my squiggles as I was planning it out. Before I knew it I had a very terrified looking octopus and ended up adding the little fishy as his aggressor. The paper was textured, so I decided to work with it and see what kind of result I could get using the textured side. I couldn't quite get the colors of this scan representative of the original, but oh well, close enough.

Everyone who participated in our art swap brought in a piece of art. There was a ton of variety from quilts, to photography, to paintings, to re-purposed ready made art, to quick character sketches. We all drew numbers and swapped based on what we drew. It was a lot of fun, I ended up with a very cool "burner" that Dan did, and Frank Tai got this piece.

Other old sketches.

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Speak Easy Invite Illustrations

Earlier this week our illustration/animation team started compiling a bunch of illustrations to put together an illustration reel. I bounce around between so many different things, I had to dig way back for some actual illustration work that I'd done and I came across this old Speak Easy invite that we put together for Suros. Mike Rendel, a fantastic print designer here, put together the layout.

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The Penguin Monologues

Here are some penguin sketches I doodled recently. I developed one into a vector character that I began animating for fun. The animation isn't done yet, but here's the start.

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