Costumes from last weeks convention

I know you've all been just dying to see some of the costumes from Archon last week. I took a lot more photos than I realized, ha-ha-ha! One of these days, I'll get around to writing more in my posts again, but not today. I'm leaning toward the idea that maybe it's better to do more posts with fewer words than sporadic posts with a lot of rambling thoughts anyway.

Over all, I was really impressed with the costumes this year.
The girl in the brown dress was actually a vendor, and was really caught off guard when I asked for her picture. Ha-ha-ha!
That little girl Captain America was super cute. Her mom said that she was getting frustrated because everyone kept calling her Wonder Woman. She was looking all over for the adult Captain America so she could get her picture with him. I wish I'd been there for that meeting! :)
The Twilight Zone costume was really cool.
Lot's of Dr Who's this year. The white mage from final fantasy was also really nice.

The girl Cosplaying as Kaylee from Firefly was a dead ringer. And check out that awesome Ghostbusters costume!
A couple more Avatar characters, the greatest nintendo controller ever, and... r2-d2?

It was a great con, I sold some drawings got to meet a great local comic group that hopefully I'll be doing some work with soon, picked up a couple of commissions, and go to drink free beer with my friends. Not too shabby.
Until next time, take care and be good!
Your friend,
Jeffrey.

I Hate It When This Happens

So, I was working on an design for work this weekend.  I got the illustration drawn, and most of the design set up, and then went to put the logo into it... It wasn't supposed to be a soccer design. Oh, man, I was not happy.  Ha-ha-ha!  But that's what I get for not checking all of my elements before getting started.

 

So I started over.  Amy mentioned the other night that she doesn't know where I get new ideas for stuff everyday.  This one came from Donald Duck playing golf. There's really no huge secret to where ideas come from, mostly it's just watching a lot of stuff, and remembering it later.  Ha-ha-ha!

Until next time, take care and be good!

Your friend,

Jeffrey

Happy Fall!

It's been a super busy work week, and until tonite I haven't had more than a minute to think. Still, I'll be lucky to get to bed before midnite.  Ha-ha-ha!

At any rate, I don't have much time for a "real" post, but thought I'd share some of the drawings I've been working on for my day (nite...late nite) job, celebrating the end of that aweful summer heat..

 

A jack-o-lantern...

 

and a turkey playing soccer.

That's it for now. Until next time, take care and be good!

Your friend,

Jeffrey

Some Of My Personal Work

Just a quick post to show you all a few things that I made for myself lately...well, they were actually so that I would have something to put in I Am What I Am on Main Street a local shop in downtown St. Charles where Amy and I have been Featured Artists this month. The link is to an interview we did with them for their blog.
"Walking in the rain"
"Bullfrog Ridin"
"Just One More Thing"

I did a longer write up about them, and the process over on the Handmade Family Blog and I actually documented them pretty well, so go check it out! I should have these available on my Etsy and Big Cartel shops as well by the end of this weekend. I'll keep you all posted!

Until next time, take care and be good!
Your friend,
Jeffrey

Awkward Super Heroes! Yay!

It's pretty super-hectic here, lately. Between work on my 'zine (which is due at the beginning of next month), work on lapel pins, work on covers for my friends at hex, and finally transitioning Abby into her 3's and Olive into her first year... like I said, hectic. Ha-ha-ha!

Still, I am getting stuff done, and there's developing a backlog of stuff to show you all. These guys are mostly just quick and dirty little drawings I did the other night, and then slapped some color on this afternoon. I kind of wanted them to look like awkward kids dressed up as super-heroes.
Abby is obsessed with Captain America, and we don't know why. She got a toy of him in a happy meal, last fall and just couldn't stop talking about him. Who knows why some things strike kids fancy.
I think pigeon-toed Wolverine is very funny.

Until next time, take care and be good!
Your friend,
Jeffrey

Influence Mapping

So there's this meme that's been going around the interweb in recent months, started by fox-orian on DeviantArt. I'm pretty late to the party, but it looked interesting to me, and I enjoy looking at art. Ha-ha-ha! I tried to stick to sizes as far as how big an impact these guys have had on me, but... honestly, there's only so much space, and it's hard to quantify that sort of thing.

So, here we go!
1. Arthur Adams: I have a giant-size issue of "The New Mutants", where the kids go to Asgard, and have some adventures. Wow. This guy is just awesome, I remember reading that issue over and over again, and copying the drawings out of it when I was a kid. His linework, and just sheer ability to put so much TEXTURE into his drawings has always just floored me.

2. Scott Fischer: I found Scott a couple of years ago on conceptart.org. I love his realistic-cartoon style. I think about his drawings a lot when I'm drawing cars especially.

3. Mobius: There was a time when I tried sooooo hard to draw like Mobius. The perfect balance of detail and simplicity. Noise and quiet. and his linework is beautiful. He is probably the single biggest influence on my drawing style.

4. Alan Lee: When I was a kid, this painting creeped me out. I checked out the fairies book by Lee and Froud from the library, and could hardly look at it, because I didn't want to see this painting of the pooka. Alan Lee's watercolor and pencil drawings are just beautiful, and they helped awaken a love of fantasy in my young mind.

5. Todd McFarlane: Todd seems to get a lot of crap these days from comic fans. One of the things that I learned from him is that comics are both about graphic design and drawing.

6. Lynn Johnston: One of the greatest cartoons still working... maybe the best. If there's only one cartoon that I read in the paper anymore, its "For Better Or For Worse". Fantastic design, compelling stories that we can relate to, and really excellent drawing. Wow.

7. Bernie Wrightson: When I was a kid, my parents got me the book "Dream Makers" which featured (among others) Bernie Wrightson, and Michael Kaluta. Seeing their work, and reading what they had to say about being professional artists is I think one of the big things that galvanized my career path.

8. Jamie Hewlett: I have loved Jamie's artwork since his work on "Tank Girl". Expressive, and not afraid to "go there"... He cracks me up. Also, I'm a big fan of the details he puts into his drawings, and how well the CHARACTERS show through the designs.

9. Katsuhiro Otomo: Akira was the first Japanimation movie I ever saw. It was in Japanese. Without subtitles. Not being able to understand the words didn't matter though. The pictures just reached out and grabbed me. I was hooked. In hindsight, it's good that I started out at the top, because that's a pretty high standard to hold everything else up to... there's a lot of junk out there too. Ha-ha-ha!

10. Brian Froud: "The Dark Crystal" and "Labyrinth" are two of my favorite movies. Brian Froud did most (if not all) of the concept design on them. Again, spending hours drawing goblins and fairies, and watercoloring them.

11. Michael Kaluta: One of the things I remember about Michael Kaluta is that he was talking about a painting he had done, and mentioned that the color on one part of it was actually tea. The idea that you didn't have to use just PAINT to color things was new to me at the time. Of course, tea isn't exactly archival, but when you illustrate for print, the longevity of the original isn't necessarily the primary concern.

When I think about all of these fantastic artists separately, they seem very different. Looking at them all arranged on the map though, I think they hang together nicely. Thanks for spending a few minutes walking down memory lane with me. Ha-ha-ha! Until next time, take care and be good!

Your friend,
Jeffrey

A Peek at My Sketchbook

I've noticed lately, that I have a few "go to" poses and expressions, and that to do anything different is a bit of a struggle. I read a lot of art blogs, and look at a lot of pictures, but reading and looking (while inspiring and all...) only take you so far. DOING is what allows us to learn, and to grow.
This first set of sketches are 30 second to 2 minute studies from photos. All of them were done at the Gesture Drawing Tools site, which features Male and Female figures (both clothed and not) as well as animals, and also a handy timer that changes the pictures when the time is up. No cheating, ha-ha-ha! The tree at the bottom, I found on Flickr, using their "Explore Interesting" feature. There's always at least one picture worth spending a few minutes drawing per page. I think I spent about 5 minutes on this one.
The second page are two twenty minute drawings I did at a figure drawing night at the St Louis Artist's Guild. I think I actually spent more like 30 minutes on the left one, refining it during the break between poses.

I was reading an article on Dresden Codak's blog "Indistinguishable From Magic" last nite about the importance of developing a visual vocabulary. Here is a link to the post, because he put it far better than I can. For those of you who only want to read one wordy blog post tonite, he talks about Draftsmanship, Clarity of expression, Style is Grounded in Realism, and Visual Flexibility = Mental Flexibility. The whole article is great, but something he said in the last section really hit home for me:

"Often, being able to draw new things presents us with ideas we’d otherwise never consider. Also, simply being comfortable with drawing more things means you’re instinctively more likely to try new things..."and then he goes on to say"... without an artist having the prerequisite drawing experience, he or she may not get the idea to set a scene in a 17th century pirate cove rather than a college dorm room. It’s not so much that a less well-rounded artist couldn’t draw these things, it’s that he or she is less likely to even consider it, as it’s outside the comfort zone."

So what does this mean to me as an illustrator and dreamer of dreams? Something I've known for a long time, but that I get lazy about. Nothing exists in a vacuum, and without new stuff coming in, new stuff can't go out.



I thought of this clip from the king of queens while I was writing, and the same principle applies. It also serves as a warning. Draw from life, or at least from photos. Trying to learn to draw from a cartoon limits us to just those forms, and without understanding why those forms work, we can't move forward and develop our own styles. Poop in, poop out. Ha-ha-ha!

Until next time, take care and be good!
Your friend,
Jeffrey

Roller Girls Versus

I noticed today that it's managed to be two weeks since I posted last...wow. To be fair though, there are a couple of posts by me over on the handmade family blog, so you could go check that out, follow it, and suggest it to all your friends, acquaintances and family if you want. Or you could just go check it out. There's some pretty cool stuff, and my wife is putting up content about her work too, so that's pretty rad... and I'm better about putting pictures of the girls on there too, ha-ha-ha!

Okay, on to the real reasons (excuses) for not posting in two weeks. First, we've been accepted as vendors in a local hand-made cooperative, Fusion. More on that in the next couple of days, as we're working like crazy to get ready for set-up (I'm supposed to be designing our signing right now, actually). The second reason, is this new cover for the fine folks at Hex Games... Roller Girls Versus! I decided to take a different approach to it, and it kind of blew up in my face and took way longer than it should have. On the plus side though, I think I learned a couple of lessons and maybe earned a couple of experience points towards leveling up. I'm not going to jabber any more tonite, because I'm pretty beat, and still have work to do before bed.

Here's the pencils.
and here's the colored version. I pretty much just painted over the pencils this time, but there's a lot more going on than usual. Like I said..."trying something new". Ha-ha-ha! I hope you all like it.
Until next time, take care and be good.
Your friend,
Jeffrey