Character-Building

Been working up a storm of character designs lately, some professionally, and some for personal projects.  Here are a few.  Above is the line-up of a kind of cowboy version of the Labours of Hercules.

 A spritely punk from a personal project.

A moto-girl for a racing game proposal.

And, finally, a (semi-personal?) character design for another game proposal:  It started with the game-play modeled after Snake, and I built the story on top of it.  The furry thing's name is Dash, and he's an alien pilot who steals fuel orbs for his spaceship from these dust mites that work in the mines of his planet. The story was deemed a little too complex by the PTB, which I get, but I made the artist's mistake of falling in love with this guy, so it gave me a little sad when he got rejected.

Bubbles and Wormholes

I've seen enough science fiction to know that time travel energy is always blue.  More like science FACT.  A couple recent examples, for Scholastic's Storyworks: A time traveler meets the inventor of his time machine.

And for Oxford University Press, a dotty professor builds a time machine out of something only slightly less cool than a DeLorean.

vampire dreams

A couple weeks ago, I had a dream about vampires employed as corporate assassins.  It was pretty neat.  In it, I met this little girl and we had a deep conversation about the fragility of life and stuff.  I drew her!

a new year in monster drawing

I spent the holiday break thinking of ways to incorporate more monsters into artwork for 2012.  This is one!

just in time.

Phew! This painting sat in a corner unfinished and mocking me for two years before I was challenged by a friend to finish it in under a week.  I won't get into what the consequences for not meeting the deadline would have been; suffice it to say, DIRE.

Eva Ibbotson covers

Three soon-to-be reprinted covers for Penguin/Dutton Children's Books:

don't be a-skeered, he's just misunderstood

This was a sweet gig to land.  Penguin has asked me to do covers for some reprints of a few Eva Ibbotson novels.  If'n you are unfamiliar with her work, she is a British author of some witty and winsome fantasy tales for the young'uns.  This first cover is for a new book of hers called The Ogre Of Oglefort.

It's nice to get back to my roots and draw some good old-fashioned monsters again.

Update: Eva Ibbotson sadly passed away October 20th, making this her final novel.  She seemed a pretty awesome lady, as noted here, and I'm honored to be an illustrator to her fantastic writings.

new arts

Hello, and welcome to my art blog. I will be putting more new works up here shortly, thanks so much for stopping by!