Tuesday, February 23, 2010

First full digital art

Hello, everyone! Not a whole lot to report. I am picking up a second job nearby since my hours at the restaurant have been cut. Been drawing a lot (and I apologize for not posting most of it) and trying my hand at digital penciling. Not exactly as fun as using a pencil, but I now have clean lines to fill in with color, saving a lot of time. For example, I did an age chart for Zoey and Milly. Didn't think these two were going to appear again, but I have fun drawing them, so here they are. My first completely digital drawings.


Zoey is the more child-like of the two. She's a bit ditzy, but has a good heart. She likes to dance in her room and tell poop jokes. Her favorite movie is Princess Bride. After college, she mellows out, meets a great guy named Dave and becomes a mom while working at a software design firm.

Milly is the more independent-minded of the two. After being kicked out of nearby public schools, her parents sent her to a Catholic boarding school for a few years. Although incredibly bright, she often got into trouble for voicing her opinions and vandalizing Wal-Mart. She is highly creative, and after dropping out of college, she spends her days selling homemade appliances, starting a political blog, and hosting study group sessions for the local college.

Saturday, February 13, 2010

February stuff

Well, how about that? It's a February miracle! It snowed in Hilton Head! And the snow sticked to the ground! Granted, by the next morning, all evidence of the light dusting of snow that had fallen the night before disappeared. But it was enough to excite us all. I'm not exactly a stranger of snow, having grown up in North Carolina, where it's expected to get some sort of wintery precipitation, albeit as little as an inch. However, snowing here occurs almost as often as a presidential assassination. So you can also understand the paranoia and hype about roads closing and shutting down the bridge so there wouldn't be any road fatalities. Well, unfortunately, I still caught two cars lying in a shallow ditch which goes to prove that us Southerners still don't know how to drive in winter weather.

In art-related news, I've been checking out John Kricfalusi's animation blog (of Ren & Stimpy fame). It was both inspiring and a bit eye-opening to show just how terrible cartoons were in the 70s and 80s and just simply amazing they were back in the 30s-50s (namely Looney Tunes). Of course, I had to watch old episodes of Ren & Stimpy, which still astounds me that that show was able to get away with half of the stuff it did. I was inspired enough to draw some old Street Fighter characters in a more animated style.

Of course, my good friend Kate reminded me after I drew this, that I had violated one of the big "no-nos" of animation: "twinning," which is making any part of the character's pose symmetrical. Note the amateurish mistake made by yours truly on the legs. Ah well. It's a learning process.

Today is Valentine's Day (I'm currently writing this at 1:30 am after finishing cleaning the rat cage), which means for those of us working in the food and beverage industry that we have a long day ahead of us. That also means that my wife and I can't celebrate Valentine's on the 14th, so we went ahead and had a nice dinner at Carrabba's a few days before, and Nikki made a wonderful french toast with cheese and fruit for breakfast the next morning. I made her a card with some familiar figures on the back.
Anyway, not much else to say. We're planning on going to a She + Him concert in Savannah next month, and in April we will be visiting my parents near Durham, NC. There we'll see a tour of Wicked, and who knows what else? I'd like to take a day trip to Asheville, but that may not happen given on how little time we have to spend up there.

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Man, I miss money

I didn't mean to make this a monthly blog. If you reach back into the first entries, I meant to do this as a weekly blog. Such is life I suppose. But I intend on bumping up my posting quota. My good friend Katie is setting up a comic jam of sorts, and I'm working on doing some guest work for my friend Joe.

Aside from that, I've been a bit on the ropes financially. Winter's come and that means reduced hours at my day (or I should say evening) job. To make matters worse, Bear Delahunt, the guy who ran the comic store (and a new friend at that), has left in order to set up somewhere else. So in between him setting up a new shop and my winter hours, there's not a whole lot to do but to keep up the job search.

Don't want to leave any visitors artless, so here's some Street Fighter fanart.


Big shoutout to my family, as well as my in-laws, who visited us this month. I hope we didn't bore you to death or appall you with our lack of furniture. Heh.