The Walking Dead Themed Wedding Invitation

So I had a request for a "Walking Dead" themed wedding invitation.  I loved doing it and it was a lot of fun, as you can see I played with the color, I thought that the dusk colors gave it a bit more of a dramatic feel to it.  Zombies of course are easy to draw in the background because the blue hue pushes them back anyway.  If you like this and want to order one check out my Etsy page @ http://www.etsy.com/shop/WeddingLantern.

Superhero Couple

Another one of those crazy invites that I decided to color.  It's just a superhero couple!  Lookout world.

Doctor Who and Companion

Well I have been doing a lot of these invites and the best part is that I get some amazing people asking me to do some really cool invites.  I recently did a Doctor Who version and change it to just be a doctor who in the Tardis in space.  I had fun with this one and I think it turned out nice!

Super Air Traffic controller!

I have a friend who is an air traffic controller and just got a new job so i decided to give him a present.  I had this idea to start doing a bunch of these careers as superheroes type thing, do a "supernurse" or a "superteacher", they might sell?  Maybe?

Lego Doctor Who and Tardis

So I made myself a Lego Doctor Who.  Me and my lovely wife have the hobby of collecting and putting together legos.  Well we bought a Doctor Who at the C2E2 convention but never had a TARDIS, so I decided to make one.

Chubby Pink Alien Slug?

Well, I don't really get a chance to draw too many "creatures" so I decided to venture out of my normal comfort zone and try something new.  I decided on an alien slug.... I have no idea why.  It just kind of happened as I was drawing, I envisioned this big happy, pink, slug.

Alien Girl

I got some sketchbooks at the Chicago Comic Convention and got pretty excited to try some new styles, so I made a "space girl".  I had fun with it, the ability to make these super expressive poses and the big feet grounds the character.

Cartoon Frankenstein

I've been messing around with a new loose more cartoon feeling style.  I've never really drawn a monster or aliens so I decided Frankenstein is the way to go

World War Hulk

I really don't just draw the Hulk, I just really learn a lot whenever I draw him.  You really have to understand structure and anatomy to make Hulk moderately successful.  I also tried working on the colors, I wanted it to be a warm color scheme, so i looked at a lot of photos of sunsets and dusk.  Check out my etsy page.  Weddinglantern.

Me as the Hulk

Just goofing around with a new style of drawing where I scan my sketch directly into photoshop and ink directly over it.  I'm still trying to get a better handle on it, I'm still at the learning stage.  I've done a lot of art over the past few weeks, it feels good.

Something Old

I occasionally will be going through my old stuff looking for something (in this case it was the Illustrator image of Michelle!)  and I'll run into something. In this case it was one of many images I did for Capitol Records.  I worked for Capitol/EMI Records as a freelance artist for a bit doing album covers, artwork, and advertisements.  It was way fun but i learned quickly don't ever trust record company execs... they have a tendency to not pay you.

Illustrator Wedding Invite

Another one of the invites I've done recently was this one based off my friend Michelle.  It's an Illustrator style where you almost "posterize" an image.  difference is I do it myself because it allows me more control and to be a bit more expressive.  I love doing this style Rob taught me I put this up mostly as an example so I didn't put as much effort into the words as I should have.

Anime Wedding Photo

So I'm going into the wedding business.... we'll see how this works.  Before I can get started I need some examples of my work so I started to just make examples of wedding invitations.  I obviously have the one from my wedding but I also have this new one.  It's an Anime Wedding Invitations.  We'll see how this goes!!  Check out my etsy page if you like it!!  Weddinglantern.

Wasteland

So I love the comic Wasteland and was inspired to draw a pin-up style of Michael. I recently figured out how to make Ben-Day dots in photo show using the Bitmap settings so I've been messing with it. You really get a comic feel using the dots and I find it super fun when creating black and white images. I posted both the grayscale version and the Bitmap version, you can really see the difference when you zoom in.

Wedding Waldo

So for my wedding I decided to make a "Where's the Couple" based loosely off of "Where's Waldo". It took me a lot longer than I originally planned but I'm pretty satisfied. The color came out a bit purple on the print out, but that might be the printer, I'll maybe have to color correct but I really think this turned out well.

Summarizing and Synthesizing Information Reading Poster

Here it is, the last official literacy poster, however my Building Vocabulary one was terrible so I'm going to have to go back and re-do that one. This one comes courtesy of a Whilce Portacio Iron Man drawing that I saw. This one is Summarizing and Synthesizing Information. I will tell you right now that angle took me forever! I am pretty happy with it although looking at it right now I feel like I should put words in the book.

Literacy Poster

I've got to be honest, I think this one was the most fun to do. I wanted to do one with a more "warm" color scheme than the previous ones. I have a really bad habbit when I start coloring things to get very blue, and I've found that the blues are sometimes the hardest to print. I was having a hard time finding out what I wanted to do with this one, after all how to you show "Inferring"? So like most of these ideas you just keep the question of "Inferring" in your head and whenever you have a spare moment you think about it. As I found with this poster, sometimes your muse comes in the strangest places. In this case it came from GI Joe. I was discussing GI Joe's with my friend Patrick and how when he was a kid he would play with his GI Joes by making a giant maze from books and the Joe's would have to find their way out. Fast forward me driving in my car and that thought comes in my head... Strategic readers use what they know, along with text clues to make inferences about the text.... or navigate the text.... you navigate through a maze. Instantly I thought of Indiana Jones and how in the "Last Crusade" when he's using things he knows about the bible to navigate through the trials at the end. When watching a movie the artist in me always loves those big establishing shots of places and I thought of the scene in "Last Crusade" when they are standing on the cliff looking at the Canyon of the Crescent Moon. Hence the cliff, and the maze, with the temple in the center.

I found besides the idea, the hardest thing about this was making the labyrinth itself. There is no reference out there for something like this and I found myself really having to wing it, using what little reference I could find.... a lot of the "Prince of Egypt." Anyway, I hope you like it, I really enjoyed making this one.

Chaos in Monitoring your comprehension.

So my new poster is done... and a day early! It is monitoring your comprehension and this might have been the toughest to come up with the idea. Eventually you talk it out enough with other people and an idea eventually comes to you. This one was too much fun to do and now has the honor of being the image I've done with the most amount of layers, 187 layers, by the end of it Photoshop was crawling. Well, things turned out great, onto the next poster, enjoy this one.

Off Topic: 3D Ultrasound Babys

Okay, so one of the things I noticed the older I get is that people love to show you photos of their kids, doesn't matter how long it takes, or if you're busy, they love to share them. In recent years, technology has given you the ability to see your 3D baby while it's still in the womb. People, you need to stop this, wait the few months and just snap away when you finally have the baby. Probably the biggest reason is that these 3D Ultrasound Baby's are just plain creepy. It lacks a certain detail and makes them look like some sort of ocean dwelling mutant child. Plus, you don't get the details in the closed eyes, they end up looking like one of those cave fish that don't have any eyes. So with that said, I present to you a short game... it's pretty easy. Can you tell the difference between a 3-D Ultrasound Baby or a Blind Cave Fish?

Literacy Poster

NEXT POSTER! Okay, so some of these are getting hard to continue to be creative. Honestly next months (monitoring comprehension) is driving me nuts trying to find out what I'm going to do. This one I made in a factory and actually is heavily influenced by the work of Diego Rivera.

The Next in the Series

As you know by now I'm doing a series of posters for my district revolving around Literacy. This is the most recent, it is by far the simplist but I think it gets the job done.

Literacy Posters

So I've been doing these literacy posters based on my districts Great 8 Reading Initiative. We do one a month, I've been doing my best and so far I like these posters but the next few are going to be rough. This one is "Visualizing What You Read." Honestly I think this is the best one I've done so far.

Literacy Poster

My Principal asked me to start doing these literacy posters for kids as part of our "Great 8" initiative. Essentially it is 8 steps to reading better that in my opinion the kids don't really understand. So like most non art people he thought I could just rip something out in an hour... which I could have but I wouldn't have wanted that hanging in the front office. I decided I'd take up the challenge, think outside of the box. So I included the original sketch in this so you can see my ideas, the Pirate was a last minute add. Well after I did this poster I thought it also worked well as just a regular reading poster... so here it is, hopefully this makes up for all of the times I drew Psylock and Rouge in lesbian scenes. I looked at a lot of Chris Sanders work during this (Lilo and Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon) so I shout out to him. This is also my first attempt at hammering out line art it's a little rough (shuttle) but over all I'm happy with it.

Scott Pilgrim!

If you haven't read Scott Pilgrim it's really a fun, quick read as far as comic books go. The original Scott Pilgrim is very cartoony with big eyes and not a ton of detail... it gets the job done. I decided to make it my own a bit and do a bit more of a "Comic book" style Scott Pilgrim. I chose the scene from the first book where he takes on the first of Ramona's Evil Ex Boyfriends Matthew Patel. So I give you "Scott Pilgrim vs Matthew Patel." I put an original Scott Pilgrim drawn by Bryan Lee O'Mally and then you can see my version.

It's Jason...and he's got a knife!

So I've become fascinated in drawing BIG guys lately, and Jason was too much to pass up. Especially after I got a sketchbook from J. Scott Campbell and saw his Jason. So it's a little bit of an ode to Campbell with a little bit of Thas flavor. I originally thought about doing Jason from number 2 with the sack on his head but the more iconic Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th movies is the one with the Hockey Mask so that's the one I went with. Enjoy

Sage Like Advise

So I'm working on another one of my fake comic covers while I'm trying to figure out a way to solve my dust problem. Well one of the points of this blog is to let you see how I work and how I get from one point to another. I started with a bunch of basic sketches and then did what I refer to as an "inked sketch." At that point I re-evaluate and in this case I sent my inked version to my pal Rob of Livingstone Art and he did some sketches over it. I see what he was trying to do and some of the advise he gave me was 100% dead on. He was right to make the left hand appear to be tangled and struggling, that's the way a person would look. He was dead on with the tilt and leg changes. Some of the things I'm going to change about his though is I wanted to get the feeling that the garden is coming to life and swallowing her, I don't think that Rob's version captured that. Also I want the girls right arm to be the very top so I think I'm going to lower the house in the back. FYI, my version is on the left, Rob's is on the right.

The Hangover Pin-up Poster

Well I bought my first Blue Ray disc, "The Hangover"! I'm glad I watched it again because I really forgot how hysterical that movie is. So anyway while I was drawing it I was going through a period where I decided I need to start doing drawings with more than just one person in it. So sitting in front of the TV watching it I made a comic version of a Hangover movie poster. I tried playing with some lighting and such. I really didn't go too deep into the actual dark and light cuts because it just would have taken too long.

Hulk Wish Merry Christmas to Puny Human

So I made this for my best friend's daughter, rumor has it she likes Hulk. Anyway, I made the Hulk crouching down originally then decided to put the Santa hat on at the last minute. I tried to make it cute with him and a little kid, even if I think I did make her a bit too chubby. So MERRY CHRISTMAS everyone!

LOST

So I've been trying to do at least one drawing a day. Most of these drawings I'm not very happy with, however once and a while I draw something cool and scan it in and lay down some flats and some basic cuts. I try not to do too many comic drawings of superhero's so I decided to do a drawing of Kate from LOST (one of my favorite shows). I spent about an hour coloring it, an hour drawing, and hour inking. Yeah that probably seems like a lot but I've got to be honest I really learned a lot and got to look at a ton of Photo's of Evangeline Lilly. So with Christmas break coming up I should be posting much more. I included the original drawing and the colored copy.

I spend Months and Months!

Okay if you got the reference to Goonies in the title of this post I'm impressed. So this is one of the largest fake comic cover I've taken up. It's literally taken me months from the original sketches, to the reference, to the line drawings and scanning and finally the coloring. I'm happy with it, I think I may move some of the background cards around to make them look more random, but I like it. I don't know what I'm going to call it, the working title has been skycards but that was just for me to remember what they're about. What it's about it high school and college kids trying to maintain the lifestyle they had with there parents by using credit cards. Raise your hand if you did the same thing.

RECYCLOPS

Okay, so I was watching The Office the other night and Dwight Schrute dressed up as a character named RECYCLOPS! I laughed my ass off, it was hysterical so I decided to draw a more "comic" interpretation of Recyclops. I'm going to be posting a lot more, I actually have a lot of art done. Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Sly and the Family Stone

Hey there, so I've been listening to a lot of Sly and the Family Stone lately, did this sketch the other day. I tried not with just laying down some basic flats for some colors. Not much going on otherwise.

Enough already!

Okay, it's been a while. Haven't really been doing much art lately but what can I say, it's tough with all the shit going on in my life right now. I'm still trying to figure out what to get my girlfriend for her birthday, I'm sure something will come to me by this evening. Seriously though, there is this stress I put on myself to be "Superboyfriend" and get the greatest gift in the history of presents. Maybe I just need to chill out. Anyway, I figured I'd just comment on something I came upon while surfing the net. This Anti-Obama stuff. I lived through the Bush years and I was very unhappy with him, however he was the president and you just need to suck it up and deal with the moron. So what's with all the anti-Obama stuff? He hasn't even been in office for a year, and while I did vote for him I'm not 100% sold on him yet. This much I do know, he's doing a better job than Bush ever did, he's doing a better job than McCain could have, and I'm still upset we haven't pulled out of the money pit..... I mean Iraq. Anyway, hopefully I'll get some more art up, I'm feeling political so we'll see what I come up with.

Unfinished work

Well it's been a real long while since I posted anything.... guess it's because I haven't done much of anything. Work, work, work. Anyway, I figured I'd put up an unfinished project that I was going to enter into a contest but I just took too long. Enjoy it.

Part II

So it's been a long time since I put up anything new... I guess it's because I'm working on something really big.  I decided to start my most bold "fake" Comic Cover piece.  It's a big one, and involves 22 individual drawings so far.  So to show you I still care I'm going to put up an older work.  This is Part II of my "Lazarus" series, called "The Last Day in Paradise."  Imagine going to heaven then being told you need to leave.  This painting was done almost 6 years ago and I've learned a lot but there are some nice things I was trying.