Continue reading »]]> I wanted to find a unique way to show samples of my artwork that would stand out, so I decided to create a hard-cover book that I could use at conventions and professional meetings. The book features samples of my artwork from 2007-2011 including illustrations and personal work.

The books are Print On Demand through Blurb.com, who do a high quality job and create a very slick final product.

You can order the hard-cover book (with an on-line preview) HERE

This is the 4th book I have made through Blurb.com and I have been very happy with the results. The books are always printed beautifully and come to you looking very professional and slick.

Now, one of the best things about Blurb.com is that they are constantly updating their services aimed at their target audience: artists. So they have made their own software BookSmart more customizable, but also finally have an option for folks who wanted a more professional options. This year they introduced a plug-in for Adobe In-Design that not only generates the templates for a book/cover, but also a way to correctly output a PDF to upload. This means that you can pretty much layout the pages any way you want and can use files in formats like Photoshop .psd that BookSmart can not use. Considering I have lots of art as high-resolution .psd files, that means I could place them and not have to convert them to .jpg files first.

Uploading the final book as a Adobe PDF was easy to do and the website will let you know if any of your images are too low-res for print, but I would always make sure to carefully look at your PDF yourself to make sure there are not unexpected surprises which sometimes do not show up in In-Design.

If you are familiar with Adobe InDesign I would definitely consider using the plug-in since it was a lot faster and more powerful, but the BookSmart program is really good if you want something pretty nice.

To find out more about editing your book at Blurb.com visit HERE.

Continue reading »]]> The other night we had the second InkDrinkDraw event in San Francisco. The events are the brain child of George Webber (No Cash Comics) and myself and are monthly artist events that encourage creativity and comradery.

To find out more, visit the InkDrinkDraw page!

For this month’s meeting our theme was drawing faces. As artist it can be easy to end up drawing similar characters over and over again. These exercises were designed for us to work outside our comfort zone and try new things.

We started with a warm-up exercises where we drew a page of shapes and then passed them around and had others make them into faces/heads.

Here is the sheet that I got back after everyone had drawn on it:

Then we did a handout that George found through Deviant-Art called 25 expressions which is a popular meem. DOWNLOAD IT HERE There are other versions of the sheet on-line, but with facial expressions in more Manga (Japaneses Comics) vibe.

Here is an old west prospector characters that I drew based on the head-shape sketch by Jeff Plotkin.

Next we changed gears and did an exercises of evolving/devolving a character based on a photo. This was something I saw in How to draw comic book heroes and villains by Christopher Hart , but the samples were actually drawn by the late great comic artist Gray Morrow. See more of Gray’s work HERE.

My first attempt was using a photo of classic actor ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle which I sketched on my paper and then worked to modify it till there was still a hint of the character, but maybe not obvious unless someone was looking for similarity. I like the result, even though the drawings are kind of rough and lopsided.

Here are a few more I did…

Last I did a few more drawings based on the Shape Heads that were drawn on my sheet at the start.

These ones below were drawn riding BART home from the city.

Want to give the exercises a try? Here is what we did.

1) Shape-Heads: Each artist participating drew some basic shapes on a sheet of paper. Hearts, stars, rectangles, squares, circles, ovals, wedges, etc. Pass around the sheets of paper and have different artists make the shapes into faces. For ours artist did more then one per sheet sometimes and the artist who drew the shapes also added a few as needed.

2) 25 Facial Expressions: Next we picked a Shape-Head from (1) or had someone else pick one for us. We then filled in a pre-printed handout that was labeled with all the expressions to draw. It’s OK to draw hands and bodies in the shot too. DOWNLOAD HANDOUT HERE.

3) Face Evolution/Devolution: Take a sheet of paper and some photo reference and draw on the Left side one of the faces, trying to capture a decent likeness of the person. Moving to the Right take the head you just drew as reference and modify it into a new character by changing some details. Then draw one or more heads just using the second drawing you did and trying to make it into something new.

4) Take your Shape-Heads and try to draw them again with a body, different expression, etc.

Continue reading »]]> SEE THIS YEARS SCHEDULES WHEN I AM DOING SKETCHES FOR THE SKETCH-A-THON this year.

I will be participating at the Cartoon Art Museum Sketch-A-Thon at this years San Diego Comic-Con, July 21-23, 2011. While I am scheduled as a featured artist in the list below, I will be working the booth as well and should be there a good chunk of the time, so come on by and say ‘Hi’.

Thursday, July 21 through Sunday, July 24, 2011
$10 Suggested donation per sketch

The Cartoon Art Museum is pleased to announce its programming for this year’s San Diego Comic-Con International, to be held at the San Diego Convention Center from July 21-24, 2011. This year marks the fifth annual CAM Sketch-A-Thon, which features a host of artists donating their time and talents to support the museum in its fundraising efforts. This year’s roster includes professional animators, graphic novelists, newspaper strip cartoonists, political cartoonists, comic book illustrators, webcartoonists, underground cartoonists and self-publishers, providing the Cartoon Art Museum’s booth one of the most diverse artistic populations at Comic-Con.

Artists will draw for visitors during one-hour sessions at the Cartoon Art Museum’s booth, #1930 on the convention floor. In exchange for a donation of $10 or more to the Cartoon Art Museum, supporters will receive a customized convention sketch from a professional cartoonist.

Thursday, July 21

11am-12pm: Kraig Rasmussen, Rick Lucey
12-1pm: Brian Kolm, Steven Kunz
1-2pm: Mike Dubisch, Brent Schoonover
2-3pm: Dirk Tiede, Brad Rader
3-4pm: Anthony Hon, Andrew Farago
4-5pm: Chari Pere, Scott Shaw!
5-6pm: Seamus Smith, Jamaica Dyer

Friday, July 22

11am-12pm: Brian Kolm, Mick Gray
12-1pm: Karen Luk, Debbie Huey
1-2pm: Ron Yavnieli, Kimo Yancey
2-3pm: Raina Telgemeier, Dave Roman
3-4pm: Tom Gammill, Mell Lazarus
4-5pm: Seamus Smith, Michael Capozzola
5-6pm: Kraig Rasmussen, Frankie Addiego

Saturday, July 23

10-11am: Brian Kolm, Larry Marder
11am-12pm: Jon Macy, Brad Rader
12-1pm: Rachael Moore
1-2pm: Seamus Smith
2-3pm: Michael Gross, Michael Capozzola
3-4pm: Kostas Kiriakakis, Jamaica Dyer
4-5pm: Keith Knight, Brian Kolm
5-6pm: Kraig Rasmussen, Mia Morgan White

Sunday, July 24

11am-12pm: Seamus Smith
12-1pm: Carolyn Watson-Dubisch, Mike Dubisch
1-2pm: Rachel Dukes, Megan Rose Gedris
2-3pm: Kraig Rasmussen
3-4pm: Michael Capozzola
4-5pm: Andrew Farago

Continue reading »]]> And the rest of the art I created at Wondercon 2011 (April 1-3), this time all original characters by me.

Octopus – click above for a bigger image

Some creature thingy – click above for a bigger image

Steam punk women – click above for a bigger image

Archer – click above for a bigger image

Fantasy women – click above for a bigger image

Batman Tiki – click above for a bigger image

Cat – click above for a bigger image

Dead pirate – click above for a bigger image

Dragon – click above for a bigger image

Continue reading »]]> Wondercon this past weekend was really great. I got really good response to my NEW art prints and I did quite a bit of art while I was at the table. Some of the art was commissions and some was just to kill time during lulls. Over this week I will post some art and photos I took at the convention and share some of what happened too.

All the pieces were penciled in blue and then inked with a brush and acrylic ink then colored with watercolors.

For today’s post is some of the art I created at my Artist Alley table.  I was asked to draw some well known characters and this batch is all DC Comics related.

note: all the characters in the art below are ©DC Comics

Green Lantern is on many a mind at Wondercon with the new block-buster movie coming out soon. Sorry the photo is washed out.

SOLD

Flash drawn in someones sketchbook. NFS

Green Arrow. SOLD

Blue Beetle III. SOLD

Blue Beetle II. FOR SALE $20 (including shipping) – contact me if you are interested by comment below (email space is hidden and I will use it to write you back)

And last, but not least is Superman. I really was pleased at how this one came out.

REMINDER: the Tiki and Creature prints go on sale in the webstore on April 6, 2011.

Continue reading »]]> Fan art I did for the ladies of the Moustalgia podcast. I had been given a promo ball point pen at Wondercon by hosts Dave and Jeff, but their co-hosts Becky and Kristin could not make it so I drew these fan-drawings for them with the pen I was given.

If you are a fan of Disney theme parks and Disney in general you should give it a listen. They have great discussions of different subjects as well as trip reports, interviews and other goodness.

Continue reading »]]> Last night, New Years Eve 2010 (Dec 31, 2009) I spent the night crawling from location to location drawing with my friends Jeff Plotkins (Here on DA>http://emperornortonii.deviantart.com/), Toni, and Rick Lucy. We started with Dinner in Japan Town San Francisco and then walked up Filmore Street going from…the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf until it closed…then to Dino’s Pizza till they closed…then to Johnny Rockets…and then walking to the Embarcadero to watch the fireworks. It was a blast.

After lots of random doodling I started to do a character evolution. It is an exercises where you start with a character, sometime based on a pre-existing element. Then you set a goal of how many steps you want to take. Each step you mix in elements of another character, theme, etc. Pretty soon you start to just mix it up from your own mind till you get to the end with what should be a fairly unique character. Hopefully. Click for a bigger image.

Character design from NYE2010

This is a final inked sketch that was drawn of a sheet of card stock and then scanned and colored when I got home. Click for a bigger image.

Final NYE2010 character design

Here’s hoping that you all have a wonderful 2010 with new and exciting things happening!

Continue reading »]]> This is a comic I drew this last Thursday June 18, 2009 at the Asian Art Museum at the MATCHA event. Most of the items I sketched from are in the Lords of the Samurai exhibit as well as the demonstration of the Tea Ceremony. I still need to write some dialog, but I feel like maybe someone else could do it better.

The panels/pages were pre-printed and then sketched out of order to start. I added colors in Adobe Photoshop later on.

The images are posted at Flickr and you can see it all HERE.

click for a larger image…

TOO BE CONTINUED?

Continue reading »]]> Labor day weekend has come and gone which, for many, signals the end of the Summer season.

Of late my blogging has gotten more sparse, so I have lots of catch up with news of my projects and cartooning classes (instead of just posting random art and interesting links). I know that folks like to know whats going on, but I find more personal blog post hard to do since I could say the wrong thing. After all the internet is forever and what you say can come back to haunt you. But I would also like to tell you folks a bit more about whats going on. I guess I am just am not going to bear my soul.

The classes I taught this summer were all really awesome. The kids in the four week-long classes all did an amazing jobs and really produced some amazing work. The kids created characters, drew comics, and created animation (both at the Schulz Museum and the Cartoon Art Museum.) I have posted some of the animation on my YouTube account and some of the artwork has been posted here on the blog too. The summer was really busy, but rewarding as well.

I have cartooning classes lined-up for the fall school year with many returning clients. I am hoping that my full schedule starting from a year ago will have provided me with some wisdom on how to do this teaching thing more efficiently (starting next week). Keeping your life/work flowing is always an interesting challenge.

Just last week I just got a new illustration assignment from a previous client with an exciting challenge for me. I am looking forward to working on it.

I am also working on some graphics for Silicon 2008 in San Jose CA in October which should be appearing on the website and other media fairly soon. Well, I am just finishing them up so you will just have to wait and see. But you can get to see some rough sketches I did for the images below.

Well, that is it for this post. I sure wish more folks, besides spammers, would comment. But I don’t keep my breath held too much. After all some of the most awesome artist in this world of ours get only a handful of comments too.

Dang nab it, being an artist can be hard.

Art Show and Parking for Silicon 2008.

Night Time and Information for Silicon 2008.

Activities/Entertainment and Science Alley for Silicon 2008.

Not sure what I was thinking, but there images I like… for Silicon 2008.

Panels and Shopping for Silicon 2008.

Continue reading »]]> Another exercise I did while I was on vacation this week in SoCal. This time it was to draw 10 creatures made up two different animals. I started with the Chipmunk/Turtle. The next one used the Turtle’s head and a new body, that of a rabbit. I continued on from there with the last drawing cycling back to the first one.