IF: Lonely

Holy smokes this one took me a while!  I decided to try something different for a change: my patience.  I typically don't like taking more than a day to work on any single piece.  I get too impatient and/or start second guessing myself.  This time I had an idea and stuck with it.  Even though my mind was telling me that it was stupid or that it wouldn't make sense or would be too hard to see.  I had also skipped the past couple IF themes so I thought I owed it to whoever to put more effort, or at least time, into this week's piece.  Even after I had finished all those freakin' lines I felt like there was still something missing.  I figured out at the last minute that I needed to put the cap for the marker ( that's what that little black blob is) on the window sill.  For whatever reason, that seemed to complete it for me.  I know there are bigger issues that I should have corrected like, "where's the glass for this window?" or "aren't the shutters supposed to open to the inside of the room?".  Oh, well.  At least I got the marker cap.

Illustration Friday: Suspend

Click to make bigger.  You can almost taste the energy.

Here's my entry for this week's Illustration Friday theme: Suspend.  This was a fun memory from elementary school.  Every recess we would run out to the monkey bars and play the game of "chicken" until some kid lost an eye.  I remember the bars being red hot from the sun and that most of the time kids would give up from their hands burning before the kicking could even start.  One of the techniques we would use would be to get a fist full of sand and rub our hands together to really rough 'em up and give us extra grip on the bars.  Good times.  I bet more people would be involved in presidential debates if this is how they were handled.

Illustration Friday: Refresh

So here's my entry for this week's Illustration Friday theme: Refresh.  Etch-a-Sketch was the first thing that popped in my head.  I just got back into town from a frustrating, out-of-state business trip and I had a ton of gobbledeegoop swimming around in my head.  I just wished I could shake my head and make all the nonsense disappear.  But, drawing this seemed to work just as well.

Illustration Friday: Space

Here's my piece for the theme: SPACE.  If you look it up, it turns out that NASA apparently had quite an issue getting their space monkeys to survive the trip mainly because of parachute issues.  Parachute issues!  You'd think they would have tried it out on watermelons first if they were trying to work out the parachute bugs.  So I'm sure the chimps (or rather rhesus monkeys) would have turned down the offer given the track record, had they been given the chance.  

Strip Search

Here's a quick attempt I made at a graphic novel excerpt.  I was facing writer's and artist's blocks and wasn't sure what to do so I just did what I know.  Sittin' in an office, hatin' on my job.  Keep in mind this doesn't look like me (I don't even have close to the amount of hair this guy has and I don't smoke)and my office isn't that big, nor do we have that many employees.  But I do work off a flat screen monitor.  I didn't bother drawing perfect frames or worrying about spacing.  I just drew it quick, inked it and later on colored it in.

Click to make bigger.  Bigger make read better.

Silly, no?  Here's some other "excerpts" I did when I had a free minute on some note paper.  There's no more than what you see.  I just made it look like they're part of a bigger story.  One of these times I'll have an idea good enough to expand on.

I always thought that it might make a neat story if Nosferatu never died in the movie and instead lives quietly alone in an apartment complex.  Then his neighbor would bring him terrible news articles and he'd go get vengeance on the villains.

Here's me and my partner in crime, Nick.  We work on animated shorts under the name: Illumation.  Here's a peek at our story development process.  Basically we just jabber on at each other until one of us says something worth making... like Eagles!  You can check out our blog at http://illustrationanimation.blogspot.com/ for other fun nonsense.

I know, I know.  The whole "aliens and their lack of sexual interaction" joke has been done enough.  It seems like we're always making them way too interested in our asses or we make them out to be a bunch eunuchs.  Oh, well.  I gave her a belly button though so you know she didn't come from no egg!

I'm sure I'll send more of these down the road.  Maybe next time in color!

Pug Pun



It's inconvenient 'cause they're always squirming.

It's been one of those days where you have more work on your plate than you have time in the day and so you just don't do any of it.  I took a minute to clear my head and this is what came out on my whiteboard.  My sister has a pug who's always trying to pull this kind of crap.  Now I have to get back to what I've been paid to do.

UPDATE- The previous picture I posted said "Ya got pug in yer eye!" but the phrase I was going for was supposed to be from "Here's mud in yer eye". So I made a revision. If my dad ever read these things he would have caught that. That's why you do your research before you just start sketching things.

The Funny Side of the Force

I know Chewbacca was taller than this.  But I did get Han's red stripe.

I had a funny picture of a sad wookie in my head and I was trying to figure out what exactly would make him unhappy.  It just so happened that one of my dogs "sprang a leak" earlier that morning so I thought it would be funny to see Han Solo scolding Chewbacca.  He seemed to yell at him for everything else.  And I doubt the walking carpet ever used a restroom.  This seemed like a completely reasonable situation to me so I took a break from my work and put it up on my whiteboard.  And for all the Star Wars geeks out there, I made sure to look up the proper spelling of Chewie.