She Really Grinds My Gears

A friend of mine enlisted me to embellish on a tattoo he has had for the last 15 some-odd years. It's the Loony Tunes Marvin the Martian holding a "FORD" flag and drinking a Coors. Just kidding - though I have indeed seen tattoos as mindbogglingly idiotic as that. No, the tattoo has a couple people getting run through gears and he wanted a few more around the edges. Here's one of the less "gear-mangled" figures I did for that - polished up a little bit to put on this here draw-blog.

Limited Edition AGGREGATES!!!

I posted a couple of these L.E. drawings a couple weeks back but the post was skimpy and lonely so I decided to delete that one and make it a foursome for this much NEWER post - though really I don't have anything new to say. Other than check out these fun drawings!

Well, my workload is getting into a thick spot now. Time to buckle up and saddle up and soldier on and put the pedal to the medal and bite the bullet and separate the men from the boys and all those other things people say when they have to stop getting distracted by Facebook and blogs and go do some friggin' work, fer Gad's sake.

But on the edge of this madness, I'm able to scan some drawings from my recently sold Limited Edition Aggregates (my book of fantasy pencil drawings). I've sold nearly all of them now. I might even be done with the Limited Edition thing before Christmas! If you have interest in buying one of my books with a signed and numbered original pencil drawing on the title page, ya better make your move!

Diminutive sketch of a diminutive fella

I did this ho-hummer sitting at my daughter's little art desk that we have in our main living room. She wanted me to sit and draw with her and she handed me a sheet of paper and one of her wonky school-grade pencils. I always thought it was my trusty old .5 mechanical pencil that held the powers to drawing but I guess any old utensil will do. Until things go wrong and the drawing looks terrible - then it IS the materials, not the artist.

Totally Nordic

Just a little doodle out of my sketchbook for ya today. This was actually something completely different at first but I thought it had more of a viking marauder essence than what it was supposed to be so I took it that direction just for fun.

The Girl with the Dragon Familiar

I just finished a little side commission. Nuthin' very big - just a single figure and her little dragonlet familiar. But it is for a project for which many "name" artists in the fantasy game world have contributed - pretty interesting from an art stand point. Anyway, the final painted piece will be posted on their website next week I believe. Until I can post that link, check out the sketch.

Ghoulraiser

This is a sketch I did for the Magic: The Gathering card "Ghoulraiser" for the freshly released gothic-horror set: Innistrad.

There's nothing particularly fresh about this scene. Just your ordinary zombie-with-a-shovel helping his pals out of the dirt to go clubbing. But, along with the previously posted "Daybreak Archer", it's one of the few preliminary drawings I have done lately that is a little bit more refined than a thumbnail. The other preliminary drawings I have done for this set were fairly loose thumbnail sketches that I took straight to the paints. That sort of approach is not my usual process but this particular set called for more attention to composition, mood, and atmosphere more than details. Which was a fun departure for the most part.

Tweety.

Haven't posted anything in way too long. Luckily, I had this doodle of a weird fat bird in my sketchbook that I drew up after getting some inspiration from fellow artist PA Lewis's similarly themed blog. So I went back and fleshed it out a little bit to make it more than just a little scribbling.

If you're into fantastical pencil drawings and sketches, I beseech you to check out PA Lewis's drawings and artwork (hyperlink to her awesome blog of pencil drawings above!). She has some of the most elegant, lively, and whimsical drawings you will see this side of Claire Wendling. Just so delightful to the eye......

Daybreak Archer Sketch

This is the rough drawing I did for what became "Daybreak Archer" for Magic: The Gathering. It was drawn smaller than I usually do when I'm trying to work out a composition for a painting but sometimes that helps. If things aren't working right in the drawing phase, I'll switch sizes to get a different look. Usually I go down in size since the images for Magic are only a couple inches wide in the end product anyway. Plus, going down in size will simplify shapes and it ends up making it easier to piece together something that works. That's what happened here (though this isn't quite "thumbnail" in size - it's about 6 inches wide I think).

On occasion I will ditch the thumbnails and jump into drawing out an image at full size or nearly full size. For me sometimes the little rough thumbnails aren't helping and I need bigger pieces and some important details put in before I can "see" where it's going. When that happens, it is usually because I feel a certain facial expression (or a similar "mood" detail) is the key to the whole image. If I can just nail down the right face, I can piece in everything else.

What's that you ask? Was there a background for this piece or was the mysterious bow-gunner just on a field of white? She's in a forest - the trees were added much later in the process and so never were part of the original drawing.

Hey look! An ELF!

I recently was commissioned to do a drawing of an elf warrior for a birthday present. The giftee and his girlfriend, upon stopping by to pick up the drawing, got the added bonus of not only getting to see my luxurious and swank studio and the blank space on my trashy easel where my latest painting would have been if I was allowed to show it, but also get regaled in tales of my dog's bloody adventures in vanquishing fat groundhogs from our yard. And I learned that lightning is beneficial to gardens. How's about that?

Rust-knocker

I get rusty quickly and frequently. Sometimes just switching from one job to another is enough for me to lose focus - and suddenly I ain't drawing what I want to draw. At least not very well. My common remedy for this is to keep drawing that fucker over and over and over again until something starts to look right. But sometimes even that isn't opening up the right circuits for me and I need to just numbly move the pencil around and draw ANYTHING to kinda kick-start myself. So, every once in a while (though not nearly as often as I should) I'll sit down and just freely doodle a bunch of crap all in a big amorphous blob - warm up that muscle memory. This is an example of one such page.

I apologize for the lack of posts here in August - been a busy month. But I should get in another one or two new drawings before August closes out.

CHAKAAL!

Thought I better squeeze in at least ONE post in July before the month closes out! My lapse in posts has been mainly because, well, it's Summer, baby. And even though my workload isn't particularly harrowing and burdensome, I'm still busy with Summer stuff - including a welcome trip to Colorado to hike n' camp around Rocky Mountain National Park - topped by seeing Soundgarden at Red Rocks. Needless to say the entire trip was tantamount to a religious experience.

Enough about that though - I'm adding on to my Groo series with the fearsome, carnage-dealing swordstress Chakaal - who is, of course, Groo's perpetual love interest. I would have drawn her all the way down to her feet - but I ran out of room in the sketchbook!

More Groo characters to come!

Rufferto!

A series of drawings based on Sergio Aragones' Groo? Why not. Here's Groo's steadfast and loyal companion, Rufferto.

For the love of the FRAY!

"Now Groo does what Groo does best!"

Comic books had quite an impact on me - despite the fact that I didn't get into them until 7th or 8th grade - and I really didn't collect TONS of comic books at any point. Besides the comic book follow-ups and sequels for sci-fi classic franchises The Terminator, Aliens, and Predator, (and then Hellboy and BPRD later on) the only other comic I was really into was Groo the Wanderer - which, besides being awesome, were plentiful and none too expensive to buy back issues for. And so I ended up with about 60 or 70 Groo comic books before my desire to keep buying comic books fizzled.

They're still really fun to go back and read and, of course, Aragones' artwork is endlessly detailed and masterful. So I thought I'd do my own version of the cheese dip loving marauder as tribute. If you have never seen what Aragones' Groo looks like, pictures are easy to Google - or you can just check this GROO ANIMATION TEST that makes me pine for a hand-drawn Groo movie.

Enjoy!

AGGREGATE Sketch

Finally wrapped up my 2-month stretch of intensive work - lot's of Magic, World of Warcraft, and even a cover for Shadowrun all put behind me - generally pleased with the results. Perhaps now I can get back to adding some good stuff to the Draw-Blog. but first, I need a breather.

To get back in the game, here's a whimsical and simple sketch I did in one of my Limited Edition AGGREGATE copies (only 19 left, by the way!).

ANGRY TROLL LADY KILLS 8 TOURISTS AT ANCIENT RUIN SITE

"There's a really angry blue woman mutilating some tourists!" said Marcus Antanapala to the emergency dispatcher. He made the call after a bluish, tusked woman with ridiculous cleavage erupted from a ruin site and rained terrific clawed blows down upon the idiotic onlookers as they attempted to take pictures with their cell phones.

"Does she have tusks, armor protecting her knees and forearms, a fairly big rack, and is exuding a sense of total 'Grrrrawesomeness'?" asked the dispatcher.

"Um yeah. How'd you know?"

"OK, sir. She's a female troll from World of Warcraft. I'll send a black-n-white to check into it. Have a nice day, sir."

Guy that fights dragons.

Just a heads up to everyone - I'm about to enter a maelstrom of furious work that'll take me into June. The chances that I get some posts up on my Draw-Blog in the next five or six weeks may be as slim as Donald Trump is annoying and douchey. Luckily, I still have a reserve of preliminary drawings I can tap for just such occasions.

That said, here's a portion of a drawing I did for a Magic: The Gathering card called "Silver Knight". Almost all of the cropped out parts were extensively overhauled in photoshop after I scanned it in. I even changed his helmet and a few other details once I started painting it, too.

To see the final piece, you'll have to "friend" me on Facebook or wait another 43 years when I finally relaunch my website.

SUNSHINE and WARM WEATHER ANTHEMS

Ah Spring. Lovin' it. Spring in Central Ohio is usually, day-to-day, either gloriously sunny and summerlike - or gray and cold like November. Knowing that the latter is heading out the door like a stumbling, oafish drunk that has yorked on someone's shoes and generally overstayed his welcome, I choose to focus on the sunshine and the upcoming long, lazy days of Summer - the realm of cookouts, camping, roadtrips, fresh veggies from the garden, and blessed vacations. And as I sit here listening to cheesy (but potently nostalgic) hair-metal of yore on Pandora, I am reminded of the music of the season, songs that became part of the soundtrack of Summer. Even though the days of completely carefree gallivanting are over, I still love songs that remind me of Summer whether they are literally from Summers past - or new songs that just sound like songs that should be played while driving with the windows down on the way to a beach. Summer anthems, baby. Here's just a tiny smattering of songs that, for whatever reason, stir my zeal for the sunshine months:

Peggy Lee - "It's a Good Day"

Steel Dragon - "We All Die Young"

Walt Mink's whole album "Miss Happiness"

Johnny Cash - "Ring of Fire"

Hans Zimmer - "You're So Cool" (True Romance soundtrack)

Coldplay - "Clocks"

Delta Spirit - "Trashcan"

U2 - "Beautiful Day"

Poison - "Every Rose Has Its Thorn"

Pretty much anything by The Sundays

OneRepublic - "Good Life"

The last one by OneRepublic I just heard on the radio earlier today and is what inspired this post. And laugh all you want at Poison - but how can you sit in a car on a beautiful day and NOT sing along to that?

Share with me your own Warm Weather Anthems and crack a cold one, friendo - those days are comin' up fast.

Btw, the drawing above is another oldie - plucked out of my White Wolf vault - I believe it's from a Mage: The Ascension book. I had to go THAT far back to find an appropriate pencil drawing to accompany this post!

And one last thing for those of you that don't know yet - I has me a little book called AGGREGATE and it has all sorts o' fun pencil drawins in it. Have interest? E-mail me! - steve2@rottface.com

A LI'L CLASSIC D&D FOR YA

I unearthed a fairly old drawing of a scale-mailed halfling trying to look tough in some ancient and perilous cavern. I'm too lazy to go find out which long-forgotten D&D book it was in. Geez, I make it sound like this was from the 80's or something! No, it was probably from around 2007(?) - but it seems like decades ago. Nothing special here - just a little spot illo piece that I thought was worth posting just for fans of really classic D&D subject matter.

Subsequently, the final painting I did for this piece was a big pile of crapola. It was one of those instances where I had something in mind, it didn't work, and I wasn't able to recover. Such results I colloquially refer to as "turds".

Post-CONTEST Post

So, the very first drawing I did when I came up with the album cover contest idea was this drawing here. It's based on what I thought was the cover of an album I have. Turns out, long long ago when I first bought the CD, I had reinserted the little album book with the inside artwork facing out and had never switched it back. Only when I looked it up on the ol' internets did I get reminded that it ain't the cover! So, anyway, simply for shits-n-giggles, this drawing is a tribute to the INSIDE cover of what album?

Oh what the heck - first to guess it right gets an envelope full of free crap.

NAME THAT ALBUM COVER!

Here it is, folks! Here are all ten album cover tributes! Be the first to "comment" the correct album title and band(artist) name for all ten and win the original artwork pictured HERE. And also bask in the glory of winning a contest for which you successfully employed your nearly useless knowledge of album cover imagery. Hoozah!

The drawings are listed from ONE (first) to TEN (last) so make your list accordingly when you submit it. There should be no need to make a random guess here - I picked albums based on the uniqueness of the cover image - thus, there is no doubt when you put the drawing and the original cover side by side. If you're uncertain, why, you're already on the internet - you can find out if you're right in like, two seconds.

Good luck!

NAME THAT ALBUM COVER! - set1

All righty, folks. Here is the first five (of ten) album cover tribute drawings. As stated before, I have taken ten existing album covers - carefully chosen for their iconic/memorable imagery (but not too iconic and recognizable!) and reworked them in varying degrees of artistic license. But there is no doubt that they are referencing the source material - none of them will "kinda" match a particular album cover. Side-by-side with the original, it will be obvious.

Once again, feel free to make comments and crack wise, but keep your answers/guesses to yourself until I have posted the last five images which will be next Tuesday (March 29th) at 11:00pm Eastern Standard Time. First person to "comment" the correct band/singer and album title for all ten wins the original artwork shown in the previous post.

Good luck!

CONTEST PRIZE:

So, should you have the best eye for recognizing album covers through my re-envisioned pencil drawing guises (as explained in the previous post), here is the glorious prize that awaits you:

A handsome 9"x12" acrylic painting depicting an angry minotaur and his magical warhammer of pollution! More specifically, it is a painting done for the M10 set of the Magic: The Gathering TCG and is called "Canyon Minotaur". I personally like this little piece though I get the idea from MTG gamers that the card itself isn't stellar. Alas, you don't win a little Magic card with minimal collectible value - you get a one-of-a-kind painting with which you can brag to your buddies and family how you dominated Prescott's little contest to win! Boo-yah!

Anyhoo, that's what is at stake. Expect the first set of skewed album tributes to be posted Monday March 21. Though you are welcome to make comments, I encourage you to keep your guesses and answers to yourself until after the second set has been posted.

See you on Monday!

NAME THAT ALBUM CONTEST!: rules and regulations

The other day I was checking out and otherwise waxing nostalgic on cool album cover art and found myself contemplating that the days of album cover art notoriety and recognition (much like music videos - stupid MTV programming....) is waning thanks to music downloading and the death of music stores. I love album cover art as much, I'm sure, as all of you do - and I've been wanting to do a couple homages on my draw-blog for a while now. Well, I came up with an idea and am now currently finishing up a series of TEN sketches that pay tribute to various album covers.

The pencil drawings will be tributes to the original album covers but will not be exact representations - I'll have trimmed them down and put my own personal skew onto them in varying degrees but there'll be no doubt that they are a pencilly homage to their real counterpart.

In order to win the contest, you will have to be the first to name all ten albums (and the bands/artists, too!). I will post two sets of five spaced by a week or so. Upon posting the second set, the first person to list all ten in the "comments" column will win the original artwork.

To answer your skepticism, none of the albums are mega-obscure bootlegs or German imports or anything like that - but they're not anything as immediately and universally recognizable as "Abbey Road" or "Thriller" or anything by Christian-metal supergroup Stryper either. You may get some right away but have to get an audiophile pal to help you out on others (I don't want this to be TOO easy!).

I have no idea how this will go - someone might get them all right away or maybe it'll be too hard. If the latter is the case, I'll start dropping hints - but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Ok, so there's that. I'll post the artwork that'll be up for grabs by Thursday and hopefully the first salvo of draw-blogified album tributes by the beginning of next week (as well as let you know the exact day and time I will post the last five images!).

Until then, start thumbing through your 8-track, vinyl, cassette tape, and CD collections to get your juices flowin'!

WIN AN ORIGINAL PAINTING!!!!

First of all, the above sketch has nothing to do with anything. I just felt like I needed to post a piece to fill in the vacancy - even if it IS a drawing I did many years ago.

Secondly, I am announcing an upcoming contest that I will be putting on this here Draw-Blog starting sometime later this month. The prize will be an ORIGINAL PIECE OF ARTWORK which I have yet to pick out. Most likely it will be a Magic: The Gathering illustration in hopes to loop in as much interest as I can get.

What kind of hoops will I require you to jump through to win this contest? Well, you'll have to stay tuned to find out but (hint) if you're a music lover, you may have an edge.

AFRICAN ART MONTH! 6

Well, I didn't get to post nearly as many pics as I wanted to in this series - my schedule got busy and bottlenecked quickly - but that's the way it goes.

For this last piece I thought I'd do a little "two-birds-with-one-snowball". I'm doing a painting demo at Morehead University this week and needed something somewhat interesting for that - and I needed one more good post for this series, as well.

Among so many other really cool and inspiring things found in my collection of books about African tribes and such are the tribes that incorporate mud into their hair styles. I found a handful of pictures of Namibian people with this gorgeous reddish clay mucked into their hair into different fashions - and so this girl was inspired by some of that - except I made her clay-mucked hair even more organic and weird. Should be a fun one to paint.

Again, if you're in the Kentucky or southern Ohio area, come check out some of my original fantasy paintings hanging in the Strider Gallery at Morehead University. They're only up for another five days or so. I'll also be doing a presentation about my work and career on Thursday - (plus the demo but I think that may be exclusive for the art students perhaps?).

Also, and as usual, if you like the pencil drawings you see here, you may very well like my book of pencil work: AGGREGATE. Wanna buy one? Contact me at: steve2@rottface.com

See you next month!

AFRICAN ART MONTH! 5

Sorry about the long lapse in posts - been busy as well as enjoying a bit of solar radiation down in Florida.

As I try and bust out four paintings in 8 days, I'll have to dip into my reserve of older sketchbook drawings yet again. This is another from 7 or 8 years ago with some African flavor. Her hair is more Hopi indian - but I have a big book on just African tribe hair styles and there are a few that closely resemble that Hopi look. I don't think any had exclusive copyrights on the hair though.

Hopefully I can squeeze in one more drawing before the end of African Art Month and the beginning of a new series that will be part of a contest to win a free original painting of mine - so spread the word!

On a side note - if you happen to be within reasonable driving distance of Morehead University in Morehead, Kentucky, I have 12 fantasy paintings on display in the Strider Gallery through March 3rd. The paintings are from a handful of jobs from the past 6 years or so - all framed up and looking sharp. Come on over and take a look!

AFRICAN ART MONTH! 4

This is an old piece - done about 7 or 8 years ago.

I love the idea of giant, ungainly masks and ceremonial garb.

AFRICAN ART MONTH! 3

There's no specific allusion to dragons that I can find in African lore - (the closest I can find are Rainbow Serpents, of which there are MANY for all corners of the continent it seems) - but dragons are so ubiquitous in the mythologies of mankind that I am sure one is out there. Heck, maybe rainbow serpents are essentially dragons - I mean, anything longish, toothy, and covered in scales can pass for a dragon, after all.

Anyways, here is my take on what an African icon of a classic (European?) dragon might look like.

AFRICAN ART MONTH! 2

Here's another random mask drawing. On this one I was reminded of the subtleties than can separate two different styles from different parts of the world. When I first drew this, I used really bold geometric black and white patterns and a round mouth - but it quickly started to look like a Pacific Islander mask and much less like one from Africa - so I went with more of a carved texture for the geometric patterning. I'm not trying to be specific with the look as far as tribe-to-tribe styles of Africa - but it has to look African for sure. Which goes to show that you can't just slap anything together - there is a certain look and feel. Too much of this and it looks Iroquois - too much of that and it looks Innuit - not enough of that and it looks Australian Aboriginal.

I have posted African art inspired stuff before - here are links to previous draw-blog posts (some of which contain interesting African mythology):

Unkulunkulu

Ga-Gorib

Yehwe Zogbanu

Mask and Ungulate

Tribal Girl

AFRICAN ART MONTH!

February is the turdliest month. Although I started getting sick of the winter part of the year much earlier this season, February is usually the point where the memory of what it is like to go outside in a t-shirt or see the color green starts to alarmingly fade. The novelty of snow and wearing coats and snuggling under a blanket to watch 30 Rock and way-too-early sunsets has trickled away down the storm drain under that dune of car-filth blackened snow. What I need is something to help get me through this wretched stretch of Winter.

If you know me then you've probably realized my penchant for sucking inspiration from the styles and motifs of antiquated/ancient cultures. Well, since February is Black History Month, that gives me a good enough reason to indulge in some African art inspired doodling - for what is more a part of Black History than Africa? Actually, Africa is in all our histories - since humans first busted onto the scene there - but I digress.

So, I'll be posting little drawings and doodles with very African flavors all month long. They are all my own takes on different design sensibilities of the different art forms and peoples of Africa - and not anything specific (so don't go cross-referencing my stuff to see if it fits into Ndebele or Hottentot parameters!).

10 THINGS TO BE THANKFUL FOR BESIDES THE OBVIOUS - #10

I love to travel - to go places. While I prefer road-tripping and just incorporating the process of getting there into the adventure, I surely don't mind how a massive tube of metal with wings fossil-fueling its way through the sky can get you there much quicker. I kind of endure the airplane thing - it's not nearly as much fun as when I was a kid. BUT BUT BUT, it's all worth while if I get a window seat and a nice crystal clear day.

I know I indulge in hyperbole quite often - too much even, but I don't think it's too hyperbolic to say that I find looking down at geography and terrain from 30,000 feet CEASELESSLY fascinating. Honestly - the plane landing or a serious headache would be the only thing to stop me from enjoying the abstractly fascinating textures and colors of a landscape scrolling slowly by.

I once had a flight straight from Seattle to Columbus - a beautiful cloudless day. Most of the 4+ hour trip I spent with my head firmly pressed against that little oval window looking down at the crazy quilt-patterns of the plains - the strange circles and half-circles - the dirt roads that matriculate aimlessly up into the Black Hills - strange man-made structures in the middle of nowhere - the gleam of a tiny little car on a lonely farm road (wondering what the heck that person was up to at that moment) - how streams and rivers divide farmland - the weird colors and shapes of retention ponds - and trying to guess where our plane was according to that urbanized area way over there by that lake.

It's one of the most interesting things in the world to me - and that's why, with a trip to Florida to escape the dregs of Winter in the next month, I wrap up my Things to Be Thankful For Besides The Obvious by being thankful for: WINDOW SEATS.

And here's my "Twilight Zone" tribute (still to this day one of the creepiest and most entertaining things I have seen in a movie...)

INTERLUDE II

On my Rottface News blogsite, I have posted links to what some of my talented friends from art school days are currently up to. Well, I MADE these friends in college - they are still close pals today. What is interesting is how diverse our creative paths have gone yet essentially fueled by the same creative drive. So go on and give it a look.

To catch your eye, I have put up a Magic: The Gathering rough for the Zendikar set. "Soul Usher" it be. She's rubbing a medicated salve onto the warrior's scalp.

After my last "10 THINGS TO BE THANKFUL FOR BESIDES THE OBVIOUS" entry, I will be kicking off a month-long series for February that should be pretty fun - so keep checking in!

Oh yeah, and as always, if you like my pencil marks, perhaps you'd like my book? Take a LOOK.