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.