Category: Art

Cartoons, webcomics, sketches, 3D art and other artwork.

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Current WIP – Working with Digital Paints

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This is a screen capture of my current commission. It’s far from finished yet, and I can only see now, after having spent a couple hours slaving over it today, how badly I need to fix this guy’s chin. Seriously, did he just have a root canal?

Anyway, this piece is a bit of a departure from me. In the past, I used DAZ Studio or Poser to set up 3d models of people, which I then rendered and Photoshopped to make this kind of artwork.  Since both DAZ Studio and Poser work like crap on my system these days (no, I don’t know why, but I suspect it’s because they’re both bloated all to hell with features I don’t need), I am making the move to straight up digital painting.  It’s a slower process, but I think the results will be better.

I’ll post more updates as I go. This piece has been interesting to work on.

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Possible T-shirt Design – Tentacle Witch

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Hey! This is just a real quick post. I finished up a bit of line artwork on Monday and I like it enough that I’m considering making it a t-shirt design. Would anybody be interested in this? I’ll probably go ahead and do it either way, but I’m interested in hearing what people think. I’m switching up the things that I do, and am focusing on a particular style of drawing and cartooning, so I’d love some feedback! Let me know if you like this

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The Tentacle Witch by Helen E. H. Madden

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ACW Episode 154 – 100 Years of Girl Scouts!

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In case you didn’t know, today is the 100th anniversary of Girl Scouts in America! So today’s cartoon is dedicated to two of my favorite Girl Scouts, Princess and Pixie. Happy Anniversary girls, and keep on rockin’!

Visit http://www.girlscouts.org/ to find out more about how you and your daughters can join Girl Scouts. Trust me, it’s work, but it’s worth it!

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Random Art – Self-portraits

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I recently bought “Doodling with Jim Henson” (which almost, but doesn’t quite, sound like the name of a PBS porn flick) and have been slowly scribbling away in the book. If you haven’t seen this title (the book, not the porn flick), it’s a look at Jim Henson’s scribbles and sketches and the importance he placed on doodling to create art.  The bulk of the book is a series of doodling exercises and prompts, two of which I’ve done and am presenting the results of here.  Both are self-portraits… sort of.

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My inner dreamer is a bit freaky.

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My inner dreamer also has lots more time to draw than I do, thus she embarks on far more ambitious projects.

Anyway, these were drawn with blue Micron pens. I love Microns, love, love, LOVE them. They’re perfect for cartooning.  And I’m enjoying this book, though I can only get to it occasionally to do some doodling. However, as I do more “Doodling with Jim Henson” (seriously, cannot get the cheesy porn music out of my head when I say that title), I’ll post the results here.

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Flashback Friday – Hotel Phoenix

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I went digging through an old portfolio case of mine to show my oldest daughter a drawing I had done when I was about her age (she’s almost 9), and I found this. This is a drawing of the Hotel Company phoenix. Hotel was part of the Second Battalion of the Virginia Tech Cadet Corps, and I was a member for all four years I was at Virginia Tech. I think I probably did this my freshman year, being wrangled into doing it as a way to show the pride our Rat class took in our unit.  (We were constantly under orders to show pride in our unit, and I am only just now realizing how perverse that sounds.)  This drawing is a combination of pen and ink, water color and colored pencil. Not one of my better works, but my oldest child was impressed as all get out with it.

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Flashback Friday! Weird Alien Vampire Dog-Thingy

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Not really sure why I drew this. For some reason, when I look at this, I think of that one episode of Star Trek where Kirk gets split into two people during a transporter accident. There was this weird green dog, which I think had a horn, that was also split into two while everyone was trying to figure out what happened to Kirk, so maybe that was the original inspiration for this. I do know it was definitely supposed to be a dog of some kind, very sheep-doggish in nature, but also alien. But that’s all I can tell you.

And look at how yellow that paper is! For once, I didn’t bother to color correct the image before putting it up, just so you could see that this really is from an old, old sketch book of mine.

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Something New! Sketch Card Art

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I’ve recently started doing some sketch card art. While at Marscon this past weekend, I met a couple of sketch card artists, Becka Shols and Gina Canady, people who actually draw original trading cards for companies like Topps, and had a wonderful discussion with them about the joys of drawing in such a small format. These cards are about the size of your standard business card, but that’s only a little smaller than the size of my standard comic panel, so drawing on something that small is natural to me.

Mich had originally suggested to me that I try the sketch cards as a little something extra to offer for sale while working at my artist table at cons. But apparently there’s a lot more I could do with sketch cards, and I have to admit, I’m sort off addicted to them now after having drawn a handful. Here are some samples of what I’ve done so far:

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The mustaches were inspired by my new zine, “Mustachequerade.” I start work on issue two of “Mustachequerade” this weekend, and plan to offer it for sale at Farpoint next month, along with what I have left of issue one.

So what do you think? Do you like the sketch card art? Let me know!

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Flashback Friday! The Queen

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I’m still going through the same sketchbook, which I must have used during my early teen years. I’m not sure what inspired this image. She vaguely reminds me of the wicked queen from Disney’s Snow White, but for some reason, I drew her as African American with some sort of basic tribal face markings. It’s a bit odd, and the proportions are all wrong, but I like the drawing. No idea why her eyes are closed, nor why she has that expression.

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Flashback Friday! Merman

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Welcome back to Flashback Friday! I dug this out of the same sketchbook as the previous two Flashback entries. This is some sore of mer-creature. I’m trying to decide why I thought a mer-creature needed both a blow hole and eyebrows, and why the eyebrows needed to be dark blue. I don’t know. It has sort of a “Land of the Lost” feel to me, and I think that was probably part of the inspiration. I loved the alien creatures in “Land of the Lost,” just as much as I despised the human characters. To this day, Holly and Will just grate on my nerves. But the Sleestak and Altrusians were very cool, in my opinion.