Drink & Drawl

One of the artists I work with runs a local drink & draw group and I went for the first time this week. It was a lot of fun and I actually managed to get some drawing done:

I am Providence

I saw an interesting documentary about H.P. Lovecraft last week, so I thought I'd do something quick in a Cthulhian vein for Halloween this year:

My exposure to Lovecraft has mostly been through radio dramas adapted from his works rather than the original stories themselves and I didn't really know much about Lovecraft himself. He was a strange but interesting guy, which is what you'd expect from someone who specialized in stories of unspeakable tentacled horrors that lie dormant within the Earth.

His family tree went back to the founding families of Providence, RI where he lived all but a few years of his life. "I am Providence" is the epitaph on his tombstone, and R'Lyeh is the lost city built by his race of ancient space monsters, so that's where the epigram comes from.

Happy belated Halloween!

"What in tarnation!?"

Quick panel for an art jam at work:

Fantastic Ninety-Four

Jack Kirby would have been 94 today:

Devil or Dandy?

I'm not sure how I stumbled onto it, but I was reading about an urban legend from London in the early to mid 19th century, Spring-Heeled Jack. Depending on who was telling the story he was either an actual demon or just a dandy gentleman dressed in a devilish costume. In either case, he could jump over high walls and gates (hence the 'spring heels') mostly for the purpose of scaring lone travelers in the dark of night.

From the newspaper and magazine illustrations of the time its obvious that the artists had fun drawing him, each with their own twist on the character. I especially like the ones that make him look like a Victorian Batman prototype rather than a monster. I've always loved the hand drawn designs of periodicals from that time so I made my own Spring-Heeled Jack newspaper spread:

Nice Soup Strainer

While cleaning up the studio I found this little 7"x10" oil study from last year. I never could decide if I liked it or not - I guess that's why it was under a pile of papers:

Cardboard Conan

Conan sketch on part of a broken down Amazon box:

Hero or Scoundrel

Just a quick notebook sketch:

Love is in the Air

Kaw! Kaw!

2011: A Birth Odyssey

Got to see the first ultrasound images of my baby this morning:

Very wiggly, but also very healthy.

Under the Wire

It's been a very busy week between digging out from Snow-mageddon and putting in some extra hours on the game we're finishing up, but I still wanted to sneak in a quick drawing this week. I follow a blog that a group of comic book artists put together called Comic Twart (don't ask me what the name means) where they do weekly sketch challenges. One of their recent topics was minimalism - everyone drew a picture of a character trying to capture their essence with as little visual information as possible. I thought that would be perfect for a week where I'm very short on time, so here's minimalist Two-Face:

I could have pushed the minimalist aspect further, but I wanted to do at least a little rendering.

Dusty

Even though I'm really busy at the moment, I'm trying to get back into the habit of regular drawing and posting. I'm going to try some sketch challenges just to get the ball rolling. Illustration Friday's theme of the week was 'dusty':

This one took about 2 lunches to finish.

Keepin' it Loose

I decided to keep this guy loose and sketchy so I can move onto other things:

We now resume our scheduled programming...

I hadn't realized just how long it had been since I had posted anything here - sorry about that. The end of last year was very hectic and stressful and kept me from working on very much 'fun' art. Things are looking up on many fronts though, including a new job.

I've been getting adjusted to working on a Cintiq art tablet, which is kind of like a giant iPad, so I've been messing around with it during lunch trying to get my bearing. Nothing spectacular, just some quick doodles, including this one:

Not much to look at yet, but hopefully, I can keep plugging away on this one - I think its got some potential.