Welp, I’ve gone and dug myself a hole again.

See, I have in mind to do a little project. I self-published *coughKINKOScough* two trades of a comic in college, but I haven’t done much with the form since then. Of course now I’ve got a comic idea in my brain, and it’s not letting go. Unfortunately, this idea is relatively specific about the drawing style it wants.  And it’s not a style currently in my repertoire.  Dammit.

So I’m going to expand my repertoire. (And yes, that does hurt, even if you go slow.) I’m going to accomplish this by the time-honored tradition of copying until I understand how the hell the artist does whatever it is they do.

Today, I’m embarrassing both him and myself by attempting to learn the ways of Mike Mignola. Well,  Fritz Leiber as done by Mignola, anyway.

Sometimes, my fiance and I WoW together. These are our mains, gettin’ down with their funky selves.

I think I’m getting a closer handle on a consistent ‘WoW’ style, but this one is still a ranging shot. While I like it, particularly the poses, it’s too busy. I expected the shading to help direct the viewer’s eye more than it actually does. I was being too cautious about contrast…again. (Can I just hire someone to hit me with a wiffle bat inscribed with ‘too subtle’ when I do this? Please post resumes in the comments.)

This is also the capstone to my Valentine’s Day self promotion week! So if anybody wants to commission an illustration or a piece of jewelry for their significant other, drop me a line.

This was for my brother’s wedding invitations. My brother has for all of his adult life had very long hair, and well, 98.5% of your typical depictions of a groom just weren’t going to cut it.

Originally this was just a pretty drawing. Then one of my friends saw it, and exclaimed ‘Oh, that looks just like [me and my significant other]!’ As I’m a pretty firm believer in letting my art be what other people think it is instead of trying to keep a stranglehold on meaning, (plus it did sort of look like them) I said ‘sure’.

Years later I digitally inked it, and now the person in the suit sort of looks like a crossdressing lady.

Sure.

I think we’ve reached the point where I have to warn the diabetics in my audience: this week’s posts may require you to increase your insulin dosage.  Please consider checking your blood sugar after reading your RSS feed.

Just a reminder- all this sweetness and light is a gentle suggestion from me to you. Commission me to make Valentine’s Day illustration for you or your significant other! Or both! Or hey, a piece of jewelry if you’re into that sort of thing.

Leave me a comment with your email if any of the above piques your interest, so I can get started well in advance. Because overnight shipping charges are a bitch.

Confession Time: I was one of those teens who was afraid to dance.

I thought that everyone was watching me. And I didn’t know what to do, because weren’t there moves or steps or something? Also I don’t like this song, let’s wait for a good song.

But I did learn to dance. Mostly,  I stopped caring so goddamn much. It helps  if you’re willing to get a little tipsy, and if you have a friend who will (loudly) verbally encourage you. But the main point is that dancing is a form of play- and most adults suck at play. We take it too seriously, and try to think too much in words, rather than kinesthetically.

And that’s why couples who dance are always precious and beautiful, even if they’re just shuffling around the floor. Because when you are playing with your favorite person in the world, joy just rolls off of you.

Trust me, I hate when people do this.

By ‘this’, I mean start celebrating an upcoming holiday three weeks before that holiday’s date. (I always wondered what fall/early winter holiday would get squeezed out in the merchandise wars… turns out that at my local mall, Thanksgiving didn’t happen this year. The decorations went straight from Halloween to Christmas.)

Nonetheless. That Valentine’s Day thing is going to happen soon, so I thought I’d attempt to pique your interest in commissioning Valentine’s Day illustrations from me. To that end, all this week I’ll be posting romantic drawings.  My inner five year old is rolling on the floor mock gagging at the prospect of a full week of mushy stuff, but she’s not the best with business skills.

Price depends on level of detail, so leave a comment including your email if you’re interested, and we’ll talk specifics.

Just a couple of troll boys, playing around.

Okay, so trolls are hard. They have weird pointy faces, lanky proportions, and tusks. I meant to have the further troll have sort of a playful smile on, but there’s no way that’s happening with the tusks in the way. Also they have two fingers per hand, and physics-violating ears. On top of that I had a sudden attack of insanity, and thought it would be fun to draw them in a Capoeira exchange.

This was not totally out of the blue. Okay, so World of Warcraft noobs, here’s a brief tutorial. Part one: There’s this playable race called trolls. They have a decidedly Caribbean cultural flavor. Part two: all playable characters in WoW can dance on command, to the great amusement of the parties playing them. (And the discomfort of others, as this allows female collections of pixels to dance 97% naked on big city street corners in order to get ‘tips’. *twitch*) Each gender of each race has a specific dance, and the male troll dance is clearly based on Capoeira.

As martial arts go, Capoeira is particularly hard to draw. As an outsider, it seems that the art relies greatly on momentum switching, acrobatic athletic feats, and constant motion. This makes finding good reference material extremely difficult, because paused video tends to be fuzzy and most amateurs can’t take good pictures of a subject in motion.  It also makes my fallback (pressing my friends and acquaintances into services as models) quite impossible, because they don’t bend that way.

I realized recently that I was falling into a familliar trap:  I’ve been drawing only female WoW characters.

Well, other than perhaps the murloc. But I’m not sure I want to know how to tell boy murlocs from girl murlocs. Eesh.

So I decided to fight my natural inclinations, and bring you not only a male character but a burly male character. Plus I’ll admit to wanting to show off my digitigrade legs skillz.

I’m not thrilled with the shading on this attempt. I was trying to re-create the magic from the Alexstrasza drawing, but couldn’t really get it back again. Ah well. This isn’t bad per se, it just doesn’t seem nearly as engaging. Here’s what it looked like before shading.

Crap. I think I like it better this way.

I’m posting early this week because along with many people my age, I’ll be visiting the outlaws for Christmas. As I’m of the Jewish persuasion I didn’t think in advance to draw anything particularly festive, so, uh…

Today’s post is a present for a guy I’ve been chatting about art stuff with on the internet. Because I am actually kind of a slow adapter to technology, (I don’t know how to post pictures to the forum we’re on) and because I thought it’d make a good post (*cough*lazy*coughcough*) I scanned some old comic character studies for you.

I’m testing out three stylistic choices here: the ‘diary’ approach to telling a story, using the city itself as an atmospheric character, and unconventional panels. Scott McCloud would be so proud.

Keep in mind these are a rough draft, so neither the text or images are of a quality that I’d want to publish. This is a just a place to let this character flail around a bit, so I can find out who he is. Some of it’s a bit inconsistent, but that’s okay at this stage. It’s like when you go to the shelter to get a pet: you can’t tell what they’re like at all when they’re in a tiny cage. When you take them home and give them space and some time to relax, that’s when you find out what you’ve got.

Text from the panel is typed below the image.

-Sometimes I wonder… whose hands do I have? Whose nose? I’m not going to seek him out or anything like that, but I still imagine sometimes what I would do if I met him on the street. Probably punch him in the mouth and mount his teeth on my wall.

- I’m a nice guy. Really. I just have the damnedest time convincing people of that.

-There are times when I sort of enjoy a good hangover.

- Mary. She’s what they call a ‘sensitive’. A bit clairvoyant, a bit telepathic, definitely psychic. She hates it when I smoke.

-Her job is to diagnose the problem.

-My job is to pull her out.

-The scientists. Creepy little bastards.

-They test everybody about once a month. They make a special fuss over me, because they don’t know how I do what I do.

They keep telling me to stop moping. It effects the test.