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Man, it's been too long. Way too long. I've had a really busy and distracting Summer - compounded by sketch-laziness and you get a serious drought of drawblog updates.

As of late though, my studio work has been focusing on a little book project I am just now finishing up. It is relevant to this blog in that it is a book of my pencil work - chock full of it, to be exact. Mostly professional stuff, preliminary drawings for paintings, thumbnails sketches, and some finished pencil illustrations - there's also some plain old sketchbook stuff and I have included a smattering of my drawblog entries as well. With luck, I'll be sending that off to the printer sometime in the next week or so to have ready and available by November. I'll let you know more details as they come in.

For this entry, just to get something, ANYTHING, posted, I'm showing a Magic: the Gathering sketch I did for a card called Berserk. Don't worry though, I do plan to finish my alphabet of mythological figures - I'll come back to that when I can!

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R is for Raktavija

This gargantuan Hindu demon teamed up with other demons to deal an assortment of horrors all over the place. Raktavija had the grisly charm that if ever his blood was spilled, another Raktavija would spring up from every droplet! Eegads, that's a problem! He sounds like a really infuriating level boss for an old Nintendo game or something. Anyway, Kali was eventually sent to deal with this bullshit bastard - finally coming up with the idea to drink all his blood and then kick his ass into oblivion. Nice.

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Q is for Quetzalcoatl

The plumed serpent god of ancient Central America drew an enormous cult of followers in the Aztecs. And as everyone knows, the Aztecs didn't need to look far for a good reason to sacrifice humans. Quetzy himself, in fact, gave the Aztecs reason enough to wage war on, well, pretty much everyone, simply to capture lots and lots of people to sacrifice to the snake-bird god. What a pleasant era to live in Central America - it must have been so much fun.

Sorry for my long hiatus from the alphabet - I had a bottleneck of projects and then a week-long trip to Colorado. Still have lots of work but I think I can squeeze in some mythological beings now and again.....

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P is for Polyphemus

The Cycloptic shepherd son of Poseidon lived upon the island of Sicily - where, bringing in his herd of sheep one fine day, he happened upon Odysseus and company goofing off in his cave. Polyphemus trapped the Greeks in the cave and began to snack upon them as if they were delicious Feta-flavored jerked beef. Ah, but clever Odysseus got the giant Cyclops totally wasted on wine, stabbed him in the eye, and escaped the cave clinging to the underside of Polyphemus's sheep.

To this day you can still hear the Cyclops bellowing curses at Odysseus - for he will never again be able to look at his stack of "BUSTY ONE-EYES" magazines.

Origins!

Check out my lame no-sketch post!!!!! Well, I'll go back and delete this sucker in a couple days - I just wanted to tell everyone (most notably those of you in the central ohio region) that I will be manning a table at the Origins gaming convention at the Columbus Convention Center from thursday through sunday. I'll have a whole heap of my artwork there as I try and trick people into buying it if only to use as litter liners. There should be some nice artists there including Guest-of-Honor Wayne Reynolds who does some supremely fun and detailed fantasy work. I don't know how much admission is but if you have the time and a fistful of dollars, swing by and check it out.

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O is for Oceanus

A sea god in Greek mythology, Oceanus was the son of Gaia and Uranus (hee hee hee....your anus....). As the personification of the river of the same name that circled the Earth (from which all other rivers flowed), he was the father of all other sea gods and nymphs except Poseidon. Dude did some fathering, eh? Child support must be a bitch.

I wasn't too interested in Oceanus at first as he was described as being an old man with bull horns. Wha? Upon slightly more research though, I found out his horns were actually crab claws and he had the body of a fish or snake. Sweet. You had me at crab claw horns......