Creepin'

Creeeeeeeeeeeepin'.

Finally managed a lineup of the characters that my friends and I made...they're for the campaign we're currently playing in. From right to left: Ben's character Gronningor, our resident grizzly tank; Helgora, Jabari's duty-bound, portal-slinging messenger; Eule, Jon's owlish bard/healer; and Gren, my scheming contortionist art thief. 

Maybe if I have some time, I'll add a couple NPCs.

Etch-A-Sketch

Just some quick character designs I'm revisiting for a future story idea. Got to do a lot of awesome research on traditional Nepalese costumes for this...studying history and anthropology while hunting for reference pictures is one of my absolute favorite parts of being an illustrator. (If there were a position akin to a visual art dramaturg, man, that would be the job for me, hahaha.) 

More to come soon...updates featuring zine submissions, comic strips and probably some party art for a few campaigns I've played in. Hang on to those hats, hapless readers!

Little Annie Oakley

A warm-up that's basically amounted to me playing with brooshes in Photoshoop. Broosha-broosh!  St. Vincent's knack for contained chaos has always blown me away: she wields that guitar like it's a goddamn weapon. 

More to come, soon. More stuff that's blended with traditional mediums...I promise that I'm not just going to use this blog to document my wince-worthily inept forays into wrapping my head around digital illustration, haha.

Sociopathic Space Gnomes

Quite possibly the best drawing I will ever make, in my entire life? Yes. These are the characters I and my friend Rez made, respectively, for my roommate Jabari's fantasy/space-opera/metaphysical mindfuck of a homebrew, called Lucid. Quiblyn and her little brother, Mongrel are both Jovys, which are basically space gnomes in the world of the game...except where Joyvs are usually cautious arcane tinkers, Quiblyn and Mongrel are like two loose cannons. She's a maverick weapons engineer, whereas he's the muscle who tests her heretical creations in the field. (She's currently working on smithing a sort've proto-tommy gun in a world where any firearms technology hasn't really surpassed flintlock pistols yet.) They're less than four feet high, but they're kind've unabashedly a pair of sociopaths. With cockney accents.

Pretzel-Rogues

Some loosey-goosey sketches of the character I made for a tabletop RPG my friends and I are playing in. (It's my friend Rez's homebrew, Creep, which is ten kinds of rad.)

Gren is a professional art thief, bent on taking full advantage of the war-torn age our campaign is set in. (He met up with the rest of the party after looting a manor abandoned by its aristocratic inhabitants before their town was lain siege to.) He's also a contortionist, which helps him get out of some pretty tight spots while thieving, or running away from adversaries. I was excited for the challenge of  making a character who was definitely not proficient on a battlefield--my last Creep character was a brawler.

Street Portraits

So I saw this guy hanging around a few doors down from the cafe I was headed towards, so I decided to make a quick drawing. He was all slouchy and languid, and looked sort've like Mugen from Samurai Champloo. (Not really.) 

In other news, Baltimore is melting. Thought y'all ought to know.

Slow Progress

Comickiiiiiiiiing! So hey, dudes. This is what I've been working on....more to come rather soon, once it's officially finished. I wish I could work on it and all the stuff bouncing around in my frizzled headspace all the time....some day, my friends. Some day.

Barnburner

Yeah, I think she won that one. A warm-up sketch from last week which essentially amounted to me super-wishing that I was boxing again.

In other news, school's out for the summer! (My last student-summer: what a strange realization.) This being said, I'm gonna make the most of it by rolling up my sleeves and getting busy making all kinds of crazy stuff. More updates to come...see ya when I see ya, dudes.

Bean Nighe

My junior independent, or mini-thesis. I've always loved the spirits and monsters that inhabit celtic/gaelic folklore, so I decided to write a story about a Scottish banshee, or bean nighe. Also called 'the little washerwoman,' a bean nighe was a portent of death, and could be seen scrubbing the bloodstained clothes of those who were soon to breath their last. Not too much is known about where the washerwomen come from, though there's a range of speculation: some traditional legends suggest that these ghoulish harbingers were once human women who died in childbirth, cursed to carry out this role for the duration of what would have been their 'full' lifespan. This story offers my own take.

Primordial Seedling

This one was for a pretty rad project. My teacher drew from a science book featuring a series of questions compiled by children about the world we live in, and the answers were each written by experts in a corresponding field. The specific prompt I got was "Where did the first seed come from?" and the answer, by a botanist, was fascinating. She discussed how some of the most primordial plants (such as ferns) reproduce by spores instead, and then when early plant life later began developing true seeds, they were similarly hardy. Most grew a tough, waterproof outer-casing: so durable that they could actually make long journeys over sea. (Think of how coconuts travel!) Pretty unbelievable.

My piece featured a gouache painting, and that graphic purple seed was done digitally, then printed on a transparency layer that went over the traditional painting, and revealed parts underneath. This presentation was inspired by a children's book about animals published by Nobrow. A gif seemed to be the only way to translate the work for online viewing, hahaha.

The Standoff...

Hey, all! I've got some nonsense to unload on you good folk over the next few days...mostly stuff that got done over my semester. (Second to last, and it's already almost in the past tense. Life is pretty good!)

This one was for an editorial assignment...I was given an article about the first amendment, and how people have been trying to bend the law to censor rap music. I like to think this judge is doing so because he's a metal-head....that is no wig, my friends.

More to come soon!

Rink Rash Abound...

Dang. I can't stop drawing roller derby girls...it's the most splendid compulsion. They're just so goddamned fierce! Like if Amazons knew about toe stops. I have so much admiration...playing in a bout is my secret life ambition. There might have to be a future comic featuring a derby team.

Anywho! More to come in the future...I still have buttloads of comic pages that just need to be cleaned up and scanned from before the holidays. (Gah! So lazy!) Stay tuned, y'all...