Cartoons, webcomics, sketches, 3D art and other artwork.
Huzzah! My “Fear Me” t-shirt arrived today. Zazzle did a great job with printing this one up. Here’s a pic:
And yes, those are my actual boobs inside that t-shirt. Love how the shirt fits, by the way. I can’t wait to wear this to the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear!
If you would like your own “Fear Me” t-shirt, they are for sale at Zazzle.com. Remember, the profits go to DonorsChoose.org, one of the charities supported by the Colbert Report.
Look what I made! The “Fear Me” t-shirt is now up for sale on Zazzle.com. After receiving many excellent suggestions as to where to donate the profits for t-shirt sales, I decided in the end to give the money to DonorsChoose.org. First, DonorsChoose.org is the charity promoted by the Colbert Report. Second, it’s a charity that supports education, and this t-shirt is about the dangers of educated women. Third, it meets the standards of accountability for the BBB. And fourth, they accept donations through PayPal, which made it easy for me to send the money straight to them, as opposed to having it come to me first and then I send it to them. (I like not having to be the middle man.)
The shirt is available in all colors, though for the red t-shirts, I obviously had to change the text color to bright orange as opposed to dark red. If you buy the shirt today, you can still get the Columbus Day sale price (14.92% of the price of the order). Just use the code 1492COLUMBUS when you check out. And remember, the profits go to a worthy cause. DonorsChoose.org lets you make donations to classrooms in need, and there are plenty of classrooms out there that need help. So go buy a t-shirt. Or skip the t-shirt and just make a donation straight to DonorsChoose.org instead. Either is all right with me!
Okay, here are the three options I’ve come up with the t-shirt I intend to wear at the rally. I can get a red t-shirt done at Zazzle.com, although it’s a very dark red, so I may end up changing the text to white. Or I might just go with the design on a black t-shirt in red lettering, or black or red lettering on a white t-shirt. But here are the basic ideas. They all use the same “Fear Me” text, just different fonts and a little artwork on the third one. Which one do you like?
So I’m going to the March to Keep Fear Alive, and decided I need to have something fun to wear. I’m not going as my greatest fear, but as the greatest fear of a lot of people I’ve met – an intelligent, aggressive woman. Now before you all get excited, no, I will not be going wearing a corset, thigh high leather boots, and carrying a whip. I know, you’re disappointed. This is a family event though, so I thought I should wear something a little more family oriented. Like a custom t-shirt to go with my favorite pair of devil horns (oh yes, I must wear my horns). Through out today and tomorrow I’ll be posting potential t-shirt designs for folks to look at and let me know what looks best. Here’s the first. most simplistic design so far…
I think it gets the basic idea across, but I want to do more with it. We’ll see what I come up with.
By the way, visit http://www.keepfearalive.com/ to find out more about the March to Keep Fear Alive on 30 October. Or if you’re like my traitor Hubster and you plan to go to a certain other event, you can visit http://www.rallytorestoresanity.com/ and pretend you’re sane. Like I would believe that.
Any way, fear me.
Love it when a book I did cover art for gets released. Evelyn Applegate’s Land of a Thousand Dances is now available in ebook format from Logical-Lust. Here’s the cover I did for it.
I’m very pleased with the way this one turned out, and I’m looking forward to reading Evelyn’s book.
I’m currently working on some cover art for Logical Lust. This time around I’m trying to avoid using the 3D models from DAZ except for reference purposes. So far, seems to be working okay. It may take me a little longer to do the cover, but the result looks far better than the airbrushed Poser images that are so common to ebook covers these days.
The background is a simple combination of gradients and photo textures, and will probably be reworked as this progresses, but for now I like it.
Will continue to post shots as I work.
Have I shown one of my robot drawing here before? I think I have. I don’t know what it is with me and robots, but I like drawing them. I usually do them with a brush pen in a little sketch book I keep in my smallest bag. Gives me something very portable to work on no matter where I’m at. But then I did a robot in ArtRage on my desktop, using the watercolor tools, and that looked rather nice, so now, a month or two later, I’ve started doing another one, only this time actually painting it with real watercolors on real paper.
Imagine that. I haven’t painted with water colors since I was in college, say 20 or more years ago? And yet I have kept in my art supplies all this time a complete set of Cottman watercolors, unopened until this afternoon. Today was the day to finally open it. And here are the results so far…
What prompted this foray into traditional art was the kids’ desire to paint. I keep buying watercolor sets for them (you can see Pixie’s set in the picture there), and they go through them like crazy. They go through art paper even crazier than that, especially since most children’s art paper is NOT TOUGH ENOUGH to withstand the usual technique of over-saturation my girls use when they paint (i.e. they get the paper and everything else in the area sopping wet). So I finally broke down and bought some actual watercolor paper. I got cheap stuff, to be sure, since I know how fast it will go, but since we had the paper, and I had recently unearthed my paints, and then found my brushes, I thought, why not? And so I sat down with the girls today and started painting a robot in a tree.
I’m hoping we’ll do more painting this week. I already have a pretty good idea of what the rest of the painting should look like, but we’ll see how this goes. Again, I’ve been doing digital art for so long, I’ve almost forgotten how to do the traditional stuff. Ah well, the worst I can do is fuck this up and then have to start another one.
Contentment is a backyard barbeque/pool party with your best friends and their kids. When I arrived at the party this afternoon, I realized, Pixie has never celebrated 4th of July anywhere else but at this particular party in this particular backyard. She was only a month old the first time we went, and Princess was 3 1/2. Every year, the hostess (the mother-in-law of one of my best friends) says the same thing. “My goodness! Look how big they’re getting!” It was a lazy afternoon, full of splashing in the pool and chatting in lounge chairs while we ate burgers and dogs. Fireworks will come later tonight, in the form of some sparklers that we picked up at a roadside stand. Kids have never had sparklers before. Running around in the twilight, chasing fireflies and waving these brilliant wands of shimmering light – that’s one of the strongest, most colorful memories I have of summer, when I was Princess’ age. There is no better way to spend the 4th, in my opinion. Hope you guys all enjoyed yours.
I’m pretty proud of this piece. It’s a book cover for a client of mine. The author and I discussed doing a noir-style cover, sort of roughly painted, showing a dangerous woman looking into a mirror, with various mementoes of her life scattered on the dresser. This actually started out as a 3D render via DAZ Studio, and then went through a great deal of work in Photoshop to get the painted effect. Here’s the 3D render if you want to see the difference between the two.
One of these days, I’m going to learn how to straight up paint a cover like this. I did paint a few details in, here and there, and I collaged in a few pieces onto the dresser.
So, what do you think? Thumbs up? Thumbs down? Let me know!
We are continuing to do our five minutes of drawing in the evenings, though I will admit we can’t seem to get it done every day. Between homework, required reading, baths, etc., even five minutes can be a challenge to fit in. Still, I made sure to sit down with the girls this past weekend to do some drawing, and we decided to draw our new kittens. Well, two of us drew the kittens. Pixie drew this…
From left to right, this is a mommy, a baby, and a daddy. I can clearly see each figure, and I’m rather impressed by Pixie’s work! As for Princess…
She did opt to draw the kittens, but whipped through it very quickly as she was more interested in playing with her subjects than drawing them. Still, you can see Toothless and Hiccup, over which is Princess’ hand with one of the small fuzzy mice we bought for them. She did this in about 2 minutes.
As for me…
I drew a cat as opposed to our cats. I had thought I might be able to semi-accurately represent at least one of the kittens getting ready to tussle, but the moment I drew the eyes I knew it wasn’t happening, so I went with generic cat. Hey, you’ve got to be flexible when drawing straight in pen. I also think this drawing illustrates the fact that a mediocre cartoon can be saved by a decent punch line.
Finally, one last note. Princess had to go to church on Sunday with her dad. Here’s how the Hubster kept her from squirming in her seat during mass.
Yep, that first sketch is Mr. Squarepants, as drawn by Princess. The second is an angel, a bird, and the Communion wine and bread for the mass, so you know she was paying at least some attention to church today 😉