Caricatures

Alan RickmanIan McKellen

I really miss SCAD.

I'm temporarily working at a local company in Hillsborough so I can get enough money to go to the NY Comic Con in February. I'm so excited!

Team Fortress has to be one of my favorite games to play. While I'm not too great using the Spy, he's got a profile that's fun to draw!

I got to see the first Ben Folds Five concert in ten years, which was great! Not only that, but I took my sister with me, and I think she appreciated it. The concert was held at Memorial Hall on the UNC campus, which had great acoustics.

But I am sooo tired right now. And tomorrow I drive down to South Carolina to visit my fiancee, Nikki! It'll be a long drive, but I'm so excited to see her! I haven't seen her in a month!

Valve Fanart & I leave Savannah for good! :(

I have less than a week left in Savannah before I leave for good. So many memories at SCAD. More than likely, I'll return to Savannah, but only to visit. I can never be thankful enough for the faculty and fellow classmates that motivated to push myself to work harder.

In other news, I got into the Orange Box again. So here's some fanart of Valve creations.

Antlions
Heavy from Team Fortress 2 looking . . . er, strangely contemplative. And sitting in the dark, apparently.

Elite Combine solider

Soldier class from Team Fortress 2

Barack & Harley Quinn

I did these sketches last week, so I apologize for not putting these up sooner. I decided to do a caricature on someone famous, so here's ol' Barack Obama.

If you want to get a sense of what I like to draw, here it is: Goofy caricatures of otherwise very serious subjects and dark sketchy drawings.

Below is Harley Quinn, made to be more along the lines of the Dark Knight look. I tried some harlequin suits, but nothing really seemed to work in reality.

As the Joker has self-inflicted scars, I think Harley would be crazy and enough of a Joker obsession to maim her own face for him. I imagine she's an unhinged fangirl, so her "costume" is pretty Spartan. Nothing too out of the ordinary aside from self-made tattoos and homemade T-shirts (this one has "Joker" in a heart with red paint splattered on it). I thought about cutting her right eye open a bit to damage her tear ducts, enough to make it so that she would always appear sad, despite what she was feeling at the moment.

This pose hopefully conveys absolute disbelief. Batman just took her down, and while expecting the Joker to come in and save her, she watches her "lover" flee from the crime scene.
More to come soon (probably fanart) as I've been in the mood to draw, but nothing so far that's decent enough to post here. :P

It's now just me and Mardig in the house. It gets very hot in here since we have to use the A/C sparingly. But it is nice to have an empty house to do brainstorming (I do it out loud).

NY Comic

Really sorry about not posting. I'd like to lie and say I've been real busy, but . . . ah, it's actually been pretty boring here. My roommates are slowly leaving. Soon it will be me and Mardig alone for a month. It's pretty disheartening that most of the people you grew up around and knew for four years are moving on to successful careers . . . especially when you're stuck in Savannah.

Well, I have been fairly productive. I don't want to overload this post with too much art, but I will post my finished final I did for New York.


This project had to be inspired from our trip to New York. I kept having this image pop up of doing some sort of comic that dealt with a large monster parading around NY. Then I wanted to give it a personality and sympathetic quality. Well, it all meshed up into this. Hope you all like this!

NY Sketchbook

I promised to finish the NY post, and I resolved to do just that!

Well . . . er, kind of. I seem to have misplaced my flash drive so instead I'll present some sample pages that I did from my New York trip.

I discovered it can be difficult to locate your hotel when it's your first time in a big city and you have no map. In my defense, the 30 30 Hotel was squeezed the middle of 30th and Park while I was aimlessly looking for the other 30th street. I think I passed by the same hat store at least five times.

Sketches of Times Square. I think this is where I first realized the horrible Photoshop job done on the Wanted movie promo poster.

While I was in utter awe of New York City, Times Square was the least impressive to me. Maybe because I had seen it a million times in TV shows and movies, but I think it reminded me of Las Vegas a bit too much. I like the personal touches of the city, and while Times Square is unique in its own right, it's just too tourist-y for me.

I was hoping I'd have a little art nerd entourage like I did my first night in NY when I went with my roommate Matt and a cool girl named Elena. Instead, I ended up alone wandering the streets for a quick dinner. I ended up at this little Indian restaurant. The owner seemed a bit testy, but the food was good. I loved that the TV was tuned in to Indian news. You just don't see that diversity in Savannah.

As mentioned in this journal, I went with my group to Marvel. I was surprised by how small and cluttered their office was. But they seemed to make the best of it. While meeting the editors was the foundation of our trip, I believe the pinnacle of it was meeting the artists. We spent a whole day with Kikuo Johnson and Paolo Rivera. I spent a lot of time watching Paolo paint because he's one of the few comic artists who practice the medium.

Paolo's blog: http://paolorivera.blogspot.com/
R. Kikuo Johnson's website: http://www.seabread.com/

And to explain the drawing below, the Marvel office was compared to a dive bar and DC to a wine bar. The comparisons were just as DC was indeed dolled up quite nicely, and Marvel's office was lacking in design period. (but Marvel's receptionist was a lot more friendlier)

Back from NY, Part 1.

It's been a little less than a week, and I've finally gotten around to uploading these New York pictures.

New York City was a blast! I'm a small-town hombre and I never thought I'd like big cities. I could only see the large masses of people moving down the sidewalks, cars honking incessantly, and pick-pocketers running off with my wallet.

Such was not the case in NYC. I've never been in such awe of a city before. I was overwhelmed by the large skyscrapers and innumerous glass windows, the smell of fried dough wafting from the street vendors, and the stores crammed as much as possible into one block. I even liked Queens, which apparently is saying something, because it had personality. The first time I walked down into my first dank, dirty subway of New York, I felt right at home. I loved this city already.

To best sum up this trip, I'll provide some photos I took.


This was my hotel room in Hotel 30 30. For being named after its location, it was incredibly difficult to find. It didn't stick out at all, no one knew where it was, and only one of the streets was actually 30th. It was in between Madison and Park Avenues. As you can see, my hotel room was very tiny. Not that I mind, but it's definitely the smallest room I've ever slept in.

This was my friend Elena at the Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum. It was an overpriced tourist trap, but we definitely had fun. This was an exhibit that talked about a man who was born without a lower torso. Next to his wax model was a photo op set-up where a mirrored box gave the illusion that you had no legs.
This was some sort of Oriental ship made entirely out of jade. (according to the sign)


The skeleton of a six-legged calf.

The skeleton of a wooly mammoth. I mostly took this picture for bone reference.
First photo of Times Square. I actually didn't like Times Square at all. It was way too glitzy and electric for me. Too much "Hey! Notice me! Buy things! You're in Times Square!" Probably my least favorite place in NY.
Inside Chris Duffy's office. He had a lot of upcoming comics posted on his wall. It's nice to know that, even though the magazine was for kids, the art was great and I had to laugh at the jokes.
View from the conference room in Nickelodeon Magazine.
Our professor/chaperone John Lowe talking with Cliff Chiang. I was amazed that Cliff (and the artists we would later visit) had amazingly clean work spaces. It's amazing how much more professional you look when you have a clean workspace.
More from the streets of NY.Inside the DC Comics waiting room. There was a sample of "kryptonite" in the room.
Here's Superman, who stopped by briefly to talk with us SCAD kids.
On the 3rd floor of DC Comics' building, there was good ol' MAD. Here are some of the original covers posted on the wall.

More pics later.