Ballpoint Pen Sketches and my cat Bea

I make a lot of sketches and cartoons of my cat Skelly, but today marks the first for my newer cat, Beatrice. Since she's young, she's still very active and adventurous. As you can see in the drawing, she often gets in trouble for her antics. It's a good thing she's very good in nature and likable.

This was drawn in ballpoint pen.

Robots and Cats, Water and Maps Part2: Colors

So our two friends are still adrift at sea, but at least some color has come into their lives.


This picture is a follow up to yesterday's post (which can be seen here). It was colored in Adobe Photoshop by first adding a worn leather texture to the background, and then flatting colors on top of that (which is just a fancy schmancy way to say that I colored in the base colors on the characters and props without adding highlights and shadows), and then I digitally painted them with my wacom tablet.

As I type this, my cat, who also happens to be the muse for the cat in this picture, is walking on my keyboard and purring. So, hopefully I cleaned up all of his creative writing.

Robots and Cats, Water and Maps

What will Skelly and Bucket do? They have been rowing for hours and it turns out they are looking at the wrong map! You should never let a cat be your navigator.

This sketch is done in ballpoint pen of two characters I love drawing. I still snicker when I draw the underwear on the robot. I'd like to color this one soon, so look for that to be posted here before too long. I hope you enjoy.

Where the Wild Things Are Sketch

Here I've posted a ballpoint pen sketch (that I tinted brown digitally) of Where the Wild Things Are fan art. It's one of those doodles that just sort of grew, and since I was away from any reference, some of the details are off, but I like it anyway.

It was nice doing a tribute to a book that captured my imagination as a child. I remember being both enthralled and scared of it at the same time.

Illustration Process: Musical Dinosaurs

For today's post, I'd like to show some of my process on a still unfinished concept piece for a children's book I'm working on. This assignment involves illustrating musical dinosaurs, which in itself, is already a funny thing. Let's get started. :)

The first pic is a digital collage I made from a painting I did a few years ago. It had a lot of nice texture so I thought it would make a good abstract backdrop for my dinos to make noise in. I tinted it all blue to unify it.

Next, I take my digital tablet and start drawing in white. I don't always work this way. Usually, I'll make some sketches on paper first and scan them in, but this seemed good for this.

Now it's time to tighten up the shapes. A good silhouette is very important and will give you a gauge on the readability of the forms. This step also gives me a chance to round out my shapes and make sure my lines are all flowing. The idea is to make the viewer's eye flow across the piece. I've also reduced the opacity of my initial sketch so that some of those scribbles would still be visible behind the figures.

As I add the linework, I try to preserve the overall integrity of the shape. I'm a fan of smooth brush inking, and after some experiments in Adobe Illustrator, I tweaked a brush to get similar results. It's time consuming, but worth it. It's also worth a word of caution that digital art can very easily render flat and lifeless, so extra care is put into line exaggeration and compositional flow.

 Now it's on to the colors. I changed the linework back to black because the figures were getting a little lost against the busy background. I've also started adding scanned in textures from a canvas painting to my dino on the left.

...And, that's all I have for now. I'll post more on this piece as it nears completion. I hope you enjoyed the process explanation.

Thanks for looking!

A Letterpress Style Owl

Today's entry was inspired by a magazine article I read about creating letterpress effects digitally. It involves simple shapes, a limited color palette, and a worn ink-pressed look.

This little guy looks cute, but I bet he'd scratch your eyes out if you were to try and steal his lunch. Owls are tricky like that.