ANOTHER UPDATE!: “Is THIS what you are Looking for” is currently snuggling in the fog with a few other entries for this week’d “Do-Over derby. Sadly “A Better Story” did not get an Honorable Mention nod. This means that once the conditions on the entry expire (I can’t submit it anywhere until 60 days has passed) I will post it someplace else (most likely goodjoe.com since the message seems to work with the website. I’ll keep y’all posted!

UPDATE: I need to learn to count . . . Looks like the Oz design was humming along well and was in the fog (no clue which of the spots though) and around lunchtime 2/1/10 it got rejected for seven colors *facepalm*. Normally I separate all my colors into individual colors layers. This time it slipped my mind. Eh well. Retooled the colors and added a background (with mixed results) and it’s up to be voted on again. Might be too late to catch up though, eh well. Also looks like “A better Story” is hanging out in the fog too. Only time will tell how this’ll go.

NOTE: I think I fixed the issue with my website sometimes not showing well or displaying a “Service Unavailable” error. Sorry about that.

The theme this week was “Heart”, be it the emotional concept, physical squishy thing, the band, or anything in between. I immediately thought of the OZ drawing I came up with. Most likely because I was already working on an OZ concept just not exactly this theme. (Had to do with tinman’s oil addition). So I had the character style already figured out, I just needed to get the rest put together. I worked on it for a few hours then put it away and tried a few other things that weren’t sucssessful. Eventually late in the night I came back to this and finished it up. I really wasn’t expecting much from it. It’s in the fog as I type this but things can change quickly. After I posted this I noticed the complete lack of a background. Even small bushes or SOMETHING. At least I have the road. But it does bug me and a few people brought it up. If it unfogs I’ll understand. Oh, I named the title wrong when I posted to woot, oops. Things like this is why I shouldn’t name stuff right in the comp.

Is THIS what you were looking for?

My Second entry is “A Better Story”. The reason I did two this week was because I thought the OZ one wouldn’t get much attention. It has and now oddly enough I have TWO in the fog. Feels weird and I almost want one to drop out. Last thing we need is a lot of the top notch artists spamming each week (though it takes a lot of work per image. I luckily don’t have much else to do at the moment). I had the rough design of this done already and was waiting for my chance to polish it up.

Here’s the story straight from the woot post.

“A different telling of an old story. This one begins where Red Riding hood meets the wolf when he was just a pup. Through an act of kindness the wolf begins to understand what friendship and love is and grows a heart. They become inseparable. Gramma even sews a doggie bed for Wolf and keeps it by the fireplace to keep him warm when they visit.

In fact the story goes that one time he protected her from an ax wielding madman that runs around the forest.”

A Better Story

And FINALLY my last image today is to tell people who read my blog (hi mom, hi dad) that I have a shirt currently printing at TILTEED. Adder from woot.com fame is a curator here. We got together and pulled my old Joust design from the depths of my hard drive. It was once a woot.com design (that didn’t print) and now for THREE DAYS ONLY (well two days now since I was late putting this up) it can be yours!!

Joust

UPDATE: I got an honorable mention. So look for this shirt at the next “do over derby”. What’s even cooler is that Taco Cat will be there too!

UPDATE: I ended up getting 12th place here. Which is fine. I really enjoyed some of the entries that ended up in the fog. The oddball I was rooting for was TACO CAT. Something about him is just awesome. Reminds me of a few characters I do from time to time (Rudolph). Maybe they should meet up sometime for lunch, hehe.

Another week, another theme . .another sleepless Thursday night.

“Panda Had Nap”

An alternative title if we didn’t have the restriction could be “Never pass out around your friends, you’ll end up regretting it”

I wanted to make a panda design since they are so lovable. However I didn’t want to make them extremely cutsie. I opted for a middle ground between cartoony and real. The initial outline for the fuzzballs went very quickly (less than an hour). The tweaking of the colors and textures and deciding on exactly HOW I was going to fill them in took up the other 5.5 hrs.

Where’s my coffee?

Panda Had Nap

UPDATE: I WON, I WON! Third Place Link for the shirt is on the right. Kind of bittersweet though, there were a lot of good entries I was looking forward to picking up :/

Wow, what an awesome theme. Almost too broad. I love drawing monsters so this should be easy . . . right?  Well after drawing a few snarling creatures from hell I put those ideas aside and thought I should embrace the spirit of the theme and focus on the act of dreaming. I came up with the design below called “The Guardian”. Talk about nightmare . . I worked on this drawing for 8hrs total Thursday night so I could submit it at noon on Friday.

The Guardian

Some people have asked why the girl isn’t holding the teddy bear tight. And that’s a great observation. Well, here’s my thoughts behind that.
The bear being at the base of the bed serves two purposes 1.) shows that she is protected regardless where the bear is (like a parent doesn’t have to be right next to their child be be very protective) and 2.) This helps the composition better. Initially I did have the child and bear together (like most people would expect) however it weighed the design too much to the center and left the right side a bit empty. You had the girl, the bear AND the bear’s spirit all coming from one point on the shirt, that’s just too much IMO. so I decided to spread out the story a little and have the nightmare on the left, the child in the center and bear on the right.

Enjoy! Because this derby is such a good theme it’s going to be VERY difficult to ride this out until the end and place. SO much good stuff out there right now.

Make Something Cool Everyday. It’s a lofty goal, and one I’ll fail on occasion but I think it’s an awesome idea. Here’s what it is courtesy of Adder at shirt.woot.com.

“MSCE is “Make Something Cool Everyday,” and it’s a project I saw a number of artists pick up early on in 2009 (among the most notable I saw was Brock Davis, aka Laserbread). It’s no different from any other timed activity… If you’ve done NaNoWriMo, or FAWM (february album writing month), or even seen some of the personal challenges in the Threadless blogs (365 days of slogans, the year-end 20 before 2010 challenges) you’ve got the basic idea. Just make something. Every day. Preferably cool.”

More MSCE info here

Couple of my other shirt.woot buds are trying this out too, you can find their links on the right. This will be interesting (and hopefully NOT all consuming).

And with that said, here’s not one . .but TWO characters for today.

Sketch

Not sure how I’ll arrange this in the long run (I might just look into expanding my sketch gallery, we’ll see).

~Cheers

Next up at the Shirt.woot.com contest is “Ancient Egypt”. They actually let this theme slip a week ago and I’m glad that they didn’t change it to a different one. I love Ancient Egypt. It’s so colorful and almost over the top. I loved my College courses that covered this part of history. I was almost tempted to not make anything since my brain was going on overdrive with ideas (and I had high expectations with myself based on the subject matter). Well here are my first two submissions that will be going up Friday at Noon.

The first one is called “Playing in the Sand”. I wanted to steer clear of the hieroglyphs on a t shirt approach so I came up with this. It’s a glimpse into a tender moment where Sphinx is at play instead of being the serious guardian he is supposed to be. For a huge challenge I went with a more realistic approach instead of my usual cartoony look. Because of that it took me days to finish since I’m not the best at realistic proportions and perspective.

Playing in the Sand

This second one doesn’t have a title yet. I had 4 or so cartoon ideas in the works but this one insisted on getting created. I know it’s sickly cute but I couldn’t help it I think after slaving away on the other one doing a light hearted image was just what I needed.

Happy Scarab

So I make it a personal goal to crank out a blog website . . I make 2 posts and then disappear. I’m thinking this will be the norm unfortunately.  At least I accomplished my personal goal of putting it together What I have NOT been neglecting is my Shirt.Woot doodling. Actually maybe I’m working on the drawings TOO much, but I feel I have so much to learn and test out in my desire to create a solid style. This week I’m actually in the running to get a shirt printed! AWESOME. Here it is for the curious.

UPDATE: This got first place! I’m so happy. Now I start to fret hoping it prints well Thanks everyone for the kind comments, though don’t forget to check back tonight and tomorrow night for more awesome woot entries.

Villainous Victorian Velociraptor

I’ve done other designs for the “Naught and Nice”, “Birds”, “2009 Illustrated” and “Renew”. Without filling this spot up with a lot of extra text here are my more successful ones. None of these came close to winning, but I did learn something from each one, whether it was a new shortcut in Photoshop, a new shading color that I liked or whatever. So I’m glad I invested the time into creating them.

Not This Time!

Hugs and Stitches