Lazy Sunday

The Verge

A prequel to the previous post.

Smoke & Ink

Just drawing out some characters and scenes of a comic I'm perpetually dreaming up... More on this track in a bit.

The Red-Headed League

A couple illustrations of a Sherlock Holmes story for Scholastic.

Bowling for Time Travellers

I had a dream the other night about bumbling time travellers. It was highly entertaining. Mostly it was funny, but there was also this creep professor who wanted the secrets to time travel to use for his own evil ends. He chased around time travellers and cracked their skulls with a white bowling ball. Not the most logical weapon, I know, but it worked pretty well for him!

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.

En väldigt svensk smak: A very Swedish flavor

Much to my possibly misplaced delight, Kalles Kaviar is once again stocked at the friendly neighborhood Ikea.  I got hooked on the stuff while visiting a friend in Sweden a couple of years ago.  The company itself admits it's an acquired taste, but what's not to love about squeezing creamed salmon roe out of a tube?  Here is an ode to Kalles I drew up for a lark: The Nordic goddess Freyja enjoying a light lunch (did you know Freyja was a cat lady? Thanks again, Wikipedia.).  Oh, and I've also been watching Vikings on History Channel (ed note: so good.), which is likely what sent me in this direction.

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.

ceremony

This was featured at a pop-up gallery in LA as part of promotion for Universal's Snow White & The Huntsman movie.  It's sort of a stream of consciousness piece.  You know, SYMBOLISM.

oracle

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!

Dr. Heidegger's Experiment

Much as I enjoy drawing pretty people, grotesques are so fun to do.  Best of both worlds in Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story illustrated for SCOPE Magazine.  Youth is apparently wasted on the old, too.

Delicacy

Boom.  Another week, another challenge met.

Eva Ibbotson covers

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

a little gore

Title pages for recent issues of Scholastic's SCOPE Magazine:

Graphic Classics: Edgar Allan Poe

Two spreads from Poe's "Hop-Frog, or, The Eight Chained Orangutans."  Click to enlarge:

This was a kinda nostalgic project for me.  The full circle, for those interested: Graphic Classics took a chance on this once-starving illustrator for their very first issue and my very first publishing job about 10 years ago, for the very same Poe story. Back then, Graphic Classics was in black & white, and I only produced a handful of spot illustrations rather than a full graphic novel.  How far we both have come... le sigh.

BOO!

Ghosts.  An interior illustration for Eva Ibbotson's "Ogre of Oglefort," due out August 18th, from Penguin. (pre-order!)

drawing monsters, part II

Cover image for THE WEEK:

drawing monsters, part I

I've been rather enjoying myself recently, as I've been asked to draw a lot of total jerks.

Here is one recent example:
 

Dorian Gray for Scope (a teen-focused magazine).  Detail:

Good times.