So…yeah, it’s been a good long time since I posted anything here. I’m not really sure what to say about that except…damn. In the plus column, if you could call it that, while I’ve been away from posting here, I’ve filled something like four small sketchbooks and two or three larger ones with drawings. In short, I have plenty of material to talk about. 

In scanning through my drawings I found several that were running on a bit of a theme. A while back a friend of mine started publishing her…very adult stories about a woman and her special friend who is a…yeti. Okay, look, it’s erotic fiction featuring a woman and a yeti. She has always enjoyed my drawings, and I offered to try my hand at drawing a book cover for her. Then a lot of stuff happened. A lot of it bad. Most of it I’m still dealing with, and I didn’t finish the book cover. 

Fast forward a year or two and my friend has to go into the hospital to address some health issues. As a way to cheer her up during her recovery I picked up her characters again, and started researching cover art for romance novels. The idea being to take existing romance novel cover art, and insert her characters into the scene. 

Now, I had always been kind of dismissive of romance novels. They seem like the perfect thing to pick up at an airport bookstore. Cheap, disposable, short on substance, and a guilty pleasure, even for those who follow a favorite author. The covers were the best/worst part. Cheesy images of muscular men looming over busty women who seem to be having a kind of wardrobe malfunction nightmare scenario. 

I was wrong. The authors who are responsible for these are serious writers. There are awards for romance novels and novelists, and it is a genuine literary category. I was also wrong about the cover art. There are some great covers by very skilled artists, and there is a distinct style to the cover illustrations. I found this as I did essentially master studies of their work. 

The funny thing? Doing studies of the work of the artists who illustrated novels for romance covers helped boost my own artistic abilities to a new level. 

As I was going through and scanning some of my recent drawings I found that I had enough for a bit of a themed post, so here they are. 

To get the style, I started out looking for photo reference of romance novel covers. My search history, recommendations on Amazon, Instagram ads, and Pinterest notifications got…real interesting around this time. 

To continue learning the style, and to figure out what I wanted the final piece to look like, I tried studies of a few different covers from different artists. Here is another one. The cartoonist (or smart ass, I never can tell) in me couldn’t resist adding some word balloons here. 

It’s around this time I was starting to recognize that the artwork adorning these covers was no joke, and the illustrators were legit artists. Once I started to appreciate the style, and I’ve even come to enjoy it a bit, things started to click. Here’s another sketch from around that time. 

About this time I had what I needed in terms of an understanding of the style, composition, and tone. It was time to start trying to tackle the characters. Here’s one of the first concepts I did including my friends original characters. 

I still like the one above, but ultimately I wanted the interaction between the characters to be more personal and intimate. I wanted them facing each other. So here is a sketch where I’ve gone through and started inking. 

And here is the final, which was NOT done in my sketchbook. I used Strathmore marker paper and copic markers. I’m not usually a huge stickler for the kind of paper I’m working with. Different papers have different qualities. In this case, I wanted to use marker paper because I would be working in grays, and I didn’t want the already muted tones to become muddied because they’re bleeding into the paper. 

Overall, while there are things I would change, I’m happy with the result, and my friend was over the moon when I handed it to her, which is what really matters. 

Or as close as I get to it, at any rate. It’s been a long time since I put anything here. For anyone who is following me, I apologize. Mostly that can be attributed to life stuff, and wanting to do important things like, maybe, sleep a little, just here and there. The first part of this year was a complete shit-show, and coping with it has mostly been what’s kept me away from putting up a new post. Even so, in the time that I’ve been away, I’ve completely filled up two more sketchbooks, so it’s time to post up some selections. 

I have been listening to the Critical Role podcast ever since accidentally finding myself in their panel during WonderCon 2017. They were up in the room schedule ahead of “Quick Draw with Sergio Aragones,” which I try to catch every time I make it to WonderCon and/or Comic Con. Rather than wandering around for an hour and hoping to get a seat I thought “what the hell, I’ll sit in on this until my panel starts.” Quick Draw is always fun, but I don’t remember who was on the panel that year, other than Sergio, or what they drew, but I do remember the Critical Role panel. They made me laugh as hard as anything else I saw that day. This drawing is Caleb from Critical Role’s current campaign, “The Mighty Nein.” Caleb is played by voice actor Liam O’Brien. 

I’m proud to say that, not only does the oldest of my offspring enjoy reading, but they have begun to share my passion for comic books and graphic novels. There is a great series for younger readers, called DC Super Hero Girls, Super Hero High. It features a huge number of DC’s stable of heroes, but much younger and attending a high school where Amanda Waller is the principal, and Grodd is her assistant principal. I know, it’s a weird idea, but stay with me. The stories mostly center on a group of young female super heroes that includes Wonder Woman, Poison Ivy, Bumblebee, and Katana. My oldest really likes Katana, so I drew this. 

Just a picture of a small owl. I like owls.I almost exclusively draw people and the human figure. Every so often it’s good to stretch myself and practice drawing something else. I do all right with animals. Where I really have some work to do is still life and perspective. 

This was drawn while I was staying at a hotel for work. I don’t always draw nudes, but when I do, they are really shy about it. Seriously, there was a time when I thought that to draw nudes wasn’t that important at all. I mean, if you’re going to be drawing a comic strip like I still (sometimes) do, you’re almost always, around 90% of the time, going to be drawing people wearing clothes, right? So drawing nudes is maybe a nice thing to do sometimes, but it’s not really important. If Snopes were to pick that up it would be “Mostly False.” It’s true that drawing a comic strip doesn’t often call on me to draw my characters in the buff. I think if it did, that would be a totally different kind of comic strip. What I have found since drawing nudes both from photo reference, and especially from live models, is that the way you interpret a person’s body when it’s covered with clothes is way, way different than when it’s not. Our clothes obscure, lift, restrain, tighten, and otherwise shape our bodies in certain ways. Before I had drawn a nude model I couldn’t appreciate how much this had thrown off my understanding of anatomy and proportions, but it had.  

Again, working a little outside my comfort zone and drawing a gray kitty. In the case of cats and owls, I have a lot of fun with the eyes. Both animals have gorgeous eyes that let you layer color, on color, on color and play with all kinds of highlights. It’s fun. Though, somehow, my owls always look like they’re scowling. My cats always look like they know many things that you do not. Which, I guess, just makes them cats. 

Another character from Critical Role’s current campaign. This time it’s the tiefling cleric, Jester. All of the characters are great, but it’s hard not to love the youth, joy, and humor that voice actor Laura Bailey brings to Jester. I forgot to mention this about the drawing of Caleb, but for both I’m experimenting with adding the solid black inked lines after adding the color. The result seems to be a much bolder drawing, and cleaner lines because my markers haven’t leached away some of the ink. 

I did notice after I had drawn this that I’d forgotten to add her tail. Oops. 

The last four months have been busy. I think I mentioned in my last post that the company I work for had been acquired by another company. Work on integrating the two organizations is well underway and finally starting to find its stride after getting off to a rocky, rocky start. In the midst of that I took the family for a weekend in the mountains so my wife and I could celebrate our 17th anniversary. The week after that I went San Diego for Comic-Con, which was weird. I had fun, but the shine has come off of it a little bit. I think attending as a fan is becoming less interesting, and I need to start working on attending as an exhibitor, and having a table in artists alley. Maybe not for the San Diego Comic Con, but possibly for WonderCon, or Long Beach Comic Con, or Emerald City Comic Con, or even the Denver Comic Con. Just depends on where I can get the most bang for my buck. 

Anyway, while work has been extra stressful it has become more important to find a way to connect with the things that make me feel good. Drawing being a big one. Most days I get home from work, eat dinner, talk with the kids a little, then pull out my sketchbook and start drawing something. Usually I’m drawing a panel of my comic Geek Speak, but I’ll also pull up photos of models on my computer and draw those, or draw something from fandom of some kind. Every so often I get a request from one of my kids or one of their friends, and I’ll spend some time working on that, too. I’ve basically filled two sketchbooks in the last three months or so.

Here are just a few of my recent drawings. 

Wonder Woman is a terrific movie, and a real breath of fresh air in the world of comic book movies, which are dominated by hyper-masculine male hero stereotypes. As amazing as Gal Gadot is in the lead, I was really drawn to Robin Wright as Antiope. I could happily spend two hours watching a spin-off movie about this character, where Ms. Wright gets more to do than lecture her sister about training Diana, and then die fighting Germans. 

I draw a lot of things that are cool-looking, or sexy, or scary, or badass…or at least I try to. Every so often it’s good to draw something cute, or happy, or whimsical. Not everything has to be dark, or brooding, or violent…I’m looking at YOU, DC Cinematic Universe. I drew this from a Funko vinyl figure of Twilight Sparkle from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. 

I really like Doctor Strange. The recent Chris Bacchalo run on this book is excellent and well worth picking up. Much of it is in trade paperback editions now, so it’s possible to get the full story without it taking up a bunch of space, or having gaps because issues aren’t available anymore. I was lucky enough at comic con to get a blank cover of Doctor Strange #1 illustrated by the amazing Juan Gedeon. You can see it on my instagram feed by clicking here. 

Just remember, if you venture into the world of Strange there are things you will see that can never be unseen. For your own safety don’t look at anything for too long, and, for God’s sake, stay away from his refrigerator. 

If you’re a fan of action films (I am) and you haven’t seen John Wick or John Wick 2, shame on you. I will admit, neither movie has much in the way of story or character development, but who cares! Both are two-hours of unbridled, no-holds barred awesomeness. Both also have a fun, dark sense of humor, which the second movie indulges much more so than the first. You won’t walk away from either movie feeling like you didn’t have a good time. 

It makes sense to leave things with my favorite of my recent endeavors in illustration. To be honest, I’ve never been a big fan of Doctor Doom as a villain. He was always a major nemesis of the Fantastic Four, which I was never all that interested in, and everything from his name to his over-the-top way of speaking is a little too on the nose for me to really get into. If he took off his mask and revealed his true identity to be Snidely Whiplash, it would surprise me not at all. He’s that one-dimensional a villain. However, he’s insanely fun to use for ridiculous things like this. The best thing about drawing this? Putting thick, sinister eyebrows on his goldfish. 

So, in my last post I swore “to God I will get better about this!” The almighty is probably almighty disappointed in me. Here’s a brief recap of the last few months,

• The company I work for announced that it was in the process of negotiating with another company to be acquired, that deal was finalized on the 18th of this month (April). 
  
• At the end of February I got into a car accident and broke my hand when the other person involved in the accident turned left in front of me. 
• The other person in the accident tried to claim I was running a red light, then lawyered up to the point that not even her own insurance company could get a statement from her. The whole claims process dragged out from February to April before my insurance company had finally had enough and determined she was at fault for the accident. 
• My car was a total loss as a result of the accident so I had to buy another car. I’d been meaning to get into a new car for a while anyway, I just wish I’d had a little more control over the timing of actually going out and doing it. 
• I was in a cast for a month which made it…difficult…to draw, but I still managed it. In a weird way it helped. It forced me to use a looser grip on my tool (heh, heh, I’m twelve), and to draw more from my shoulder than my hand. As a result my drawing and handwriting have improved. All it took was breaking my hand.
• I’m now in physical therapy, which is going well and have been drawing up a storm

…Yeah…That’s about it. How about some drawings?

I tell my daughter a different version of Snow White. I don’t like stories that portray women as simpering victims waiting for a (generally white) prince to come along and save them. A princess who knows her way around weapons, and is as comfortable in the wild or on the battlefield as she is in a ballroom sits better with my sensibilities. 

Spawn is just fun to draw. I love the cape, the chains, the spikes, and the weird green glowing shit that seems to emanate from his pores. 

Witches really do have the best school supplies. 

Whenever I feel down I draw one of the Animaniacs. There is just something about the characters from that show, and the memory of watching it after school every day, that makes me feel better. 

My wife and I had a date night a couple of months ago, and decided to get dinner and go see Rogue One. It was…a difficult movie to process. Jyn Erso is a heroic figure in this film in a way that you just don’t see in other Star Wars stories. In a way, she’s the most heroic character in a Star Wars film to date. 

I swear I’m going to get better about this! Promises I will likely not be able to keep notwithstanding, here are some of the things that have happened in the two months since my last post. 

I spent most of November at work in a bubble with various colleagues doing user testing on solutions that are being launched in our workplace. In the plus column, the company I work for paid for a lot of lunches to be brought in so I saved a bunch of money in November by not spending it on lunches. In the not so great column, it is really exhausting to be in user testing for an entire month. I’m spent most of last week working from home, and this week is pretty light, comparatively, so I’m starting to get back to where I’m feeling human again. 

Trump won the general election despite every established, reliable indicator pointing the other direction. Everyone freak the fuck out.

I managed to get a couple of comic strips online, and have mostly migrated my comic strip, Geek Speak, off of a Blogger site. It is now hosted on a site built in Wordpress, that I’m hoping to update and tweak continuously as I learn more about it and about developing for the web. It will be a long process. 

Now, let’s get to some doodles. 

I used this charming little trouble maker from the excellent Halloween anthology film Trick ‘r Treat as my Skype for Business profile photo on Halloween. It got a lot of comments. 

A picture of Wonder Woman I drew for a friend’s daughter. The colored version turned out awesome. I made sure to scan it with just the outlines done so she could use it as a coloring page, too. 

This is from another art project I’m working on for my nephews. My sister sent me a message to tell me that her boys like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and they like zombies, so she asked me if I could draw ponies for the boys, but make them zombies. Yes. Yes I can. 

Zombie Rarity. This is substantially restrained, considering my original concept. I was going to have her wearing a pony flesh cloak, made from the skins of the cutie mark crusaders. It occurred to me that might be a touch too far. 

Zombie Rainbow Dash. I’m not sure she’d still be able to fly with her wings decaying like this. 

My personal favorite is Twilight Sparkle the undead necromancer. This is the only one that really looks like a monster. When my sister originally asked for this I told her she would need to help me calibrate the final product. I can do scary, but still cute, or I can go all the way to Walking Dead and the stuff of nightmares. At first she said go for it, then she saw this. After that it became “It would be nice if they still have their personalities, but they’re zombies.” Message received. Stuff of nightmares is off the table. 

This charming fellow is a lot of fun to draw. Between the cape, and the chains, and the ridiculous gauntlets and…what are those, boots?…whatever, with all their spikes, it’s just a ton of fun. I could happily fill a sketchbook with nothing but Spawn and probably still enjoy drawing him at the end of it. 

If I could put a subtitle to this post it would be, “The Best of Intentions are Complete Bullshit.” Even so, I have been doing quite a bit of drawing, and I have some fun things to share. Here we go! 

I’m with Hiro on this one. I fail to see how Baymax fails to see that it’s awesome.

I was at lunch and thinking about my wife when I drew this. With two kids it’s rare to get time to draw. Want to find time to snuggle AND draw? Forget about it. 

This might be my favorite drawing of the last couple of months. I love the colors. The kimono looks great. From an emotional standpoint there is a solemnity to this that I find…peaceful. I should do more like this, now that I’m reflecting on it. 

The Netflix remake of Voltron, Voltron: Legendary Defender is incredible. Hunk is my favorite character, and indisputably the heart of the show. He’s big hearted, strong, funny, and smart. He does the right thing, even when it scares him. Hard not to admire those qualities in a character. 

This is a minor spoiler so if you haven’t seen the show, stop reading.

That said, I very much doubt this will be as much a surprise to most people as it was to me, but here we have a strong female character. I like that I can watch this show with my daughter and point to Katie “Pidge” Holt as a fictional role model. She’s brilliant, all-but fearless, and dedicated to both her blood relatives and the adopted family she’s found with the other paladins. If the character were less well written, the reveal of Pidge as a female would have reeked of tokenism, but she was so established as a valuable member of the team before that moment in the show that you as an audience could immediately accept it. The writers were brilliant in their handling of that moment in that, with the exception of Lance, none of the other characters were surprised, and, in fact, all-but completely brushed it off as “yeah, you’re a girl, whatever. You going to suit up and pilot your lion now?” 

Love this show. Can’t wait for the second season.

It’s been too long since I posted something here. It really, really has. The last ten months or so have been…eventful. I’ve been at my new job long enough now that I can’t really refer to it as a new job anymore. I took my family to Denver for a vacation, to surprise my mom on her birthday, and to celebrate Christmas with my family. That was the intention, anyway, the end result was really a fiasco deserving of a National Lampoons “Vacation” movie. Since then my son has started preschool, my daughter did summer camp and then started kindergarten, and everyone has been sick off and on since March. It’s been fun. 

Through all that, I have been drawing, so let’s skip the pathos and move right to the doodles. From now on, I’m going to try to put up one of these posts a week. I draw to unwind at night, much like some people watch TV, or take a bottle of wine in the bathroom to drink in the bathtub and weep, so it’s not like I have a shortage of sketches, doodles, and drawings to share. 

I don’t doodle much at work anymore. My job now doesn’t present a lot of opportunities for me to swivel over to a notebook or handy sketchbook and put down a few lines in a sketch that develops over several days. Most of my drawing now has been done on lunches or when I get home at night while watching Voltron: Legendary Defender with the kids. Have you seen it? If you have Netflix you should watch it. It’s great.

One of my daughter’s Christmas presents was a giant plush Octavia from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. To give her something to do one night while we were in Colorado I drew the character from the show so she could color it. 

This year, introduced both of my kids to Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. It’s hard to imagine someone with Belle’s curiosity and sense of adventure settling down to be a minor noble over some small provincial town. I really see her as someone who would seek out a way to have adventure as a way of life. So, why not be a musketeer? Freaking love this. If anyone out there would like to write fan fiction about Belle’s adventures in a historical fantasy version of Europe in the sixteenth century, I would so read that!

Drew the most recent version of Batgirl, also as something my daughter could color. Did this with art pens I got as a Christmas present from my sister. 

The new Batgirl is great. It’s this really interesting take on the character as a realistically written, modern twenty something attending university at a technology institute, who also has to deal with leading a double life, but issues of post-traumatic-stress-disorder as well. Barbara has made an amazing recovery from the events of The Killing Joke, but it’s left scars on her. Really, I’m happy to see the character move on from that story. It establishes her as an independent and capable hero in her own right, and not just a token female victim; one of Batman’s many innocent bystanders. 

My kids both love Star Wars: the Force Awakens. I couldn’t resist drawing myself with a lightsaber. Also, my daughter has learned how to tattle. It’s not a thing we’re encouraging. 

I’m dipping my toe in the pool of Halloween spirit with this Inktober entry. 

Sketch for the day is “Honey Lemon” from Disney’s “Big Hero 6.” We watched the movie again today, and I think she’s becoming my favorite of the six heroes. Hiro is the main character and the one we’re automatically supposed to identify with and cheer for, so that’s a given. I think I like Honey Lemon because she’s putting herself in a situation where, based on her personality, she’s completely out of place and at incredible personal risk. Despite the terrifying danger she does it anyway to help her friend’s brother find justice. She even manages to save everyone’s skin once or twice.

Listening to the Penny Arcade guys play Dungeons and Dragons while drawing a cosplayer rocking a human mage costume. It’s possible I miss gaming, maybe just a little.