Another Digital Doodle

Here's another ArtRage/Photoshop doodle. This piece is entirely digital but strangley still looks like my brush and ink type work.

Sketch In ArtRage

Here's a sketch I did for a class using the free painting program ArtRage, a really fun program and probably my favorite for just noodling about in. It's limited but those limitations make it fun for me.

My Spectrum Piece.

I got a letter last week telling me that this is the piece that got into Spectrum. Looks like my drawings are getting more popular then my paintings.

Thumbnailing Hell

I mentioned on Twitter the other day that I'm in thumbnailing hell and the brilliant Sam Bradley totally ran with the idea.I love this picture Sam!

Bogged Down

Here's another character for a Harry And Silvio story called a Cloud Alien. I'm feeling pretty bogged down right now. My mom's sick and in hospital and will probably be there at least a month. this is a chronic thing but I don't think you can get used to it. I get stressed and really tired when stuff like this happens and I'm really struggling with work. Right now I'm mostly scanning and doing computer stuff so I don't have time to draw which is depressing but just something I need to get through. Something that brightens my days (ironically) are the 1950's horror comic books. Loving those books right now.

Silver John

Please forgive this flawed drawing. I'm reading John The Balladeer right now, a book by Manly Wade Wellman about his hero Silver John and I really didn't like how he looked on the cover so I was sketching him in my sketchbook closer to how I saw him.According to Wellman he's supposed to look like a young Johnny Cash. the Silver John stories are supernatural horror fantasy stories that take place in the Apalachians of North Carolina. This North Carolina is populated with all sorts of starnge creatures and witches. I highly recommend tracking these books down, your best bet is a used book store.

Cloud Dwarf

An unpublished idea for Harry and Silvio...

Living Between Wednesdays

    My favorite place to go and get insight into comic books is Living Between Wednesdays. A well written blog done by four people who love comics and have fun reading them.So go visit them and tell them how awesome they are.

Up To Things

Life's gotten in the way and I haven't been posting as often as I like. First I got sick then my mom got sick. On top of that illustartion, teaching and parenting have kept me on the run. Or in the case of being sick, in the bed. However, there's always time for good music and books.

I've listening to Elizabeth Cotten a lot. Run out and buy this album, it's magic.

And I'm discovering Manly Wade Wellman for the first time and he is incredible. His John The Balladeer book is easily becoming one of my favorite books. It's a series of fantasy stories set in the woods and wilds of North Carolina. 

Monster

The final painting for the book cover.

Monster Inks

Tjhe inks for the cover I spoke about earlier...This cover is a lot of fun to do.

Flemish

A silly drawing I did a few years ago.

Mayor's Award Photo

Here I am accepting the Mayor's award last night. The presenter in Gloria McCluskey a city councillor. I think I look as stunned as I felt.

Lovecraftian

A drawing I did a few years ago inspired by one of my favorite writers H.P.Lovecraft. I find really dark stuff hard to do but I'm pretty happy with this one.

Mayor's Award

I won the Mayor's Award for Excellence in Illustration tonight! I didn't expect to win this at all and was totally shocked when my name was announced and very, very happy. Thanks to everyone for their well wishes, awards make me terribly anxious and I was extremely grateful for  the support on Facebook and Twitter.Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Valkyrie

A Valkyrie from a college ptroject on Norse mythology and folklore. Looking at this piece now i can see the direction I was going in combining drawing and painting.

Monster Pencils

Here's the pencils for a book cover I'm doing for publisher Raw Dog Screaming Press. there's a lot of amazing talent published by these guys and I'm honoured to be doing this cover. this project has one of my favorite writers attached to it: Jeff VanderMeer.

Comic Panels

A couple of panels from a fantasy comic I did a few years ago.

Tibetan Nomad

This started life as an ink drawing based on one of Daniel J Miller's amazing photographs of Tibetan nomads. Yesterday I saw an artists process online(I can't remeber who the artist was`Have since remembered! It's Nic Klein).He would do a black and white painting and then add colour in Photoshop, which is what I tried here.This is an incredibly fast way to work and dos retain the mark of a human hand which I really like.

Jorinda & Joringel

A pretty silly sketch I did while reading the Grimm tale Jorinda and Joringel. mostly I wanted to see what a witch whose " nose reached down to her chin," looked like.

Rocket Raccoon: Covered!

My "cover" of the classic Mike Mignola cover to the 1985 comic book Rocket Raccoon was accepted to Robert Goodin's amazing blog Covered. The top is the finished ink, gouache and photoshop piece and the bottom is just my inks.This comic had a huge impact on me as a kid. After years of reading what I would later learn were just Jack Kirby knock offs when I read this I thought"this is how they should make comics!"

Tombstone Pete

Self Portrait With Apparition

Still having fun with brushpen and here playing with textures made by Golden absorbent Ground and playing with it in Photoshop.

Pentel Refillable

My friend Tracy E Flynn, a wonderful artist in the tradition of Frank Frazetta sent me a Pentel refillable brushpen and I just love it. Here's some doodles.

Allerleirauh

A little sketchbook sketch from one of my favorite fairytales Allerleirauh. It's about a girl who is about to be pressed into marraige with her father so she runs away and disguises herself in a mantle of furs. From there it becomes a Cinderella type story. She hides in a castle where everyone thinks she's a furry monster who cooks soup really well.

Fritz Eichenberg

These amazing , expressive illustrations are by Fritz Eichenberg, a German-American illustrator. My father in law found two of the books he illustrated at garage sales: Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.  Eichenberg's family was persecuted by the Nazi's(they were Jewish)and they fled to New York City, where Eichenberg spent most of his life. I'm totally enthralled by these amazing images and I'm surprised he's not very well known, every piece is amazing.

Cecily Briggs Character Sketch: Fish Creature

One of the bad guys from Cecily Briggs.

Draugr

Here's an ink drawing I did my second to last year of university for my final project in that class. I did about 50 drawings from Scandanavian folklore. The Draugr is like a mindless zombie brought to life by witches.

From Wikipedia" an undead creature from Norse mythology. The original Norse meaning of the word is ghost, and in older literature one will find clear distinctions between sea-draug and land-draug. Draugar were believed to live in the graves of dead Vikings, being the body of the dead."

Top Secret Picture

This is a sketch project that is a long way off but I wanted to share this in any case.

High School Comics

This is a panel for a supernatural comic book story I did in high School. It's also one of my first attempts at drawing with a brush. I finished high school in 1994, before web sites were so ubiquitous. Looking at this drawing made me wonder how my life would have been different if I had had a web site and blog all the way back then.

More Gothic Spookiness

Here's another piece from the same time, also an homage to the Ravenloft game. I think a lot of my favorite older pieces are ink wash.