Halloween Costume Bebop and Rocksteady

Happy Halloween!

Here is the sketch I made for Laura and my costumes as Bebop and Rocksteady, for our TMNT costume pizza party.

 I think it turned out pretty accurate.

Leprachaun-Dragon

Yesterday at work right before I was getting ready to leave Jace asked me to draw a Leprechaun Dragon. I asked what is that? He said I don't know you figure it out. So I drew this before I left for the day.
After I drew it I realized I spelled Leprechaun wrong, so I decided when you combine Leprechaun's and Dragons you change the 'e' to an 'a.'

Christmas Card 2011 Mr. Royal and the Electric Mayhem Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone!
Well this year I just barely made it under the wire for the getting the Christmas Card done "on time" this year as in I got the card done before Christmas.
This year no one really had any ideas on what should be going on in the card. Then Laura, Alex, Uncle Ricjard, Nathan and I saw the Muppet movie for Thanksgiving so my mom threw out the idea that we should all be Muppets in this years card. So I drew us all as our own Muppets.

 (Rough Sketch with us as Muppets)

 I also had the idea to make us into Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, the Muppet Show band.

 

I decided to ink this version and make it clearer what was going on.

Every one liked the Dr. Teeth version better so I went ahead and worked on that version. I found it really hard to find time to devote to working on the card this year with school, work and being a procrastinator. 

I wish I had thought out the layout better, but over all I am really happy with how the card turned out.

Lub Kiss

It has been too long since I posed anything so I thought I would quickly share a little doodle I did for Laura.

Drunk Stab Part 1

This is from when I was just doodling all night because I couldn't sleep or my computer had a virus. I don't really remember. Though I started drawing things in a kind of new style, really pushing the cartoony look. I came up with the guy running around with a knife and an open bottle of booze and it looks like his night isn't quite over yet.

I think next I will be working on the girl on the right, I have been want to do something with a sun burnt girl with really bad tan lines, I think it will look fun and sexy.
First I work with the default pen tool with the white fill and the black out line so that I can capture what the sketch looks like. I started blocking out shading on the jacket and on the boots.
The idea was to get rid of most of the outlines and just let the blocks of color make the image. I'm really happy with with where it is at. What I want to add is a little more shading, some little details like buttons and adding a background. This was really fun and I'm excited to work on it some more.

Papa T

I was commissioned by my friend Pat's mother to do a portrait of her father as Mr.T, since he appears to have been obsessed B.A. Baracus from the A-Team. This was a birthday present for her daughter, who found it rather hilarious that her Papa was so obsessed with Mr.T. in the first place.

I sent these initial sketches to Nancy and asked which one she liked, and she said that they were all too awesome to pick. She told me to pick which ever one I thought would work best; the last one was my favorite so I went ahead with that drawing.

Pencils
At first I had started the drawing on another piece of paper that reacted poorly to water, it would just instantly buckle when I applied the watercolors. So I had to start over and as I drew in Papa T and I decided it needed something more. And what would be more appropriate than a giant explosion?
Ink
I had decided to add some bullet holes to the inked version to make it look like the A-Team logo. I also decided to carry this onto the matte and cut bullet holes into the matte and colored the insides with ink.
Paint
I wish my scanning bed was a little bigger it seems that everything I paint is just a little too big for the bed. I couldn't get a good scan but here is the general look. I had planned this painting to fit in this gold frame that I had in my possession for a while. I figured that a picture of Mr. T could be in nothing else.
Matte and frame
Originally on the matte I had painted the words "I pity the fool" in gold letters in a stencil font. However, I didn't take into account that the frame covered the matte so much and it cut off the bottom of the words. I didn't really know what to do about it, Laura suggested that I just paint the whole matte gold, which turned out awesome! I think Mister T would approve.
Nancy really liked it, Kelsey really liked it and they told me that Papa could recognize himself, so I count it a success.

She Bags logo: Tea Cup Skull

Some of my lady friends have started a social club, where they drink tea, discuss books and talk about their alternative life styles and they have decided to name themselves the She Bags. The idea that they liked was one with a kind of sugar skull and a tea cup.
Skull and tea cup/ tea bag sketches
They liked the one on the upper right. Which wasn't really surprising because they had sent me some reference pictures on what they wanted and that one was the closest to the reference.

The skull and the Tea Cup.
I got rid of a lot of the filigree that I did in the sketch and replaced it with flowers, for some reason when ever i try to do filigree kinda stuff in illustrator it comes out looking very sloppy. I added flowers that were in a Kalocsa Embroidery style instead which I thought would work better. I haven't heard back from them yet. One lady said she loved it and then another said that there were too many flowers. I'm waiting on hearing what kinds of changes they want before I do anything else.

She Bags logo: She Bag Bombshell

Some of my lady friends have started a social club, where they drink tea, discuss books and talk about their alternative life styles and they have decided to name themselves the She Bags. They had asked me to do a logo and one of the ideas that I had was to make a pinup girl with a teabag head.

This is my preliminary drawing. I really liked how it turned out, I think I will keep working on it and refine it. They however, picked a different one for me to work on.

Animation Mentor Go!

I just started Animation Mentor today and will start posting animations up on this blog sooner or later. This week's assignment was to update my profile so people get an idea of who I am. Stay tuned for Animation! Here is a Sketch to tide you over until I start animating.

Ero's Character Drawing and Expression sheet sketch

Here is a digital painting of Ero and sketches for his expression sheet.





















I started out coloring Ero, yellow/orange, I kinda liked it but when I started to think about how all the backgrounds were going to be browns, yellow, oranges, and reds I knew that the character would get lost so I changed his color back to green.








Here is Ero's expression sheet.
Left to right top level: Neutral, eye roll, glare, wince/strain, quizzical look
Left to right bottom: bored, happy, fear, sad, angry

A Boy and His Pig

I spend a good chunk of time every day looking for jobs; when I run across postings that want an art test, that always stimulates me to create something different then I usually would. Here is one Laura found in Portland craigs list for a a children's book illustrator. They wanted a test drawing of a boy kissing his pet pig.
Here are the sketches that I did.



































After I showed Laura the first page of sketches she said that the kid had to have a stripey shirt. The guy didn't express if this was a city kid or a country kid so I tried to keep it pretty neutral with his clothes.















With the last page of sketches I started to play with shapes and I also started looking for reference of kids kissing other animals like dogs.




















I took some of those sketches and I drew them onto water color paper and inked the drawing and painted it. I only painted 2 because the guy wanted just one example of the boy and his pig. I picked the two pieces that I felt represented two different takes on the same idea. I decided to not add any back grounds because I felt that they would take too long and that there wasn't a setting to put them in so I thought these would work well as like a little corner illustration of the boy and his pig.


















I really liked this one I liked the relationship of the boy and his pig where the pig was bigger then the boy. This is the one that I sent in, and I also sent in the one I made in Illustrator.


















Here is the version that I did in illustrator, I think the way that I did the shadows gives the whole piece and really soft edge to it and makes it feel very warm and inviting. I like how all of these came out. I have yet to hear back but you never know.

Drunken Rabbit Sees a Pink Elephant

Here is a little doodle I did a long time ago to make Laura laugh. This prompted me to look into the origin of the "seeing pink elephants" which comes from Jack London in 1913, who describes one sort of alcoholic in the autobiographical John Barleycorn as "the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants. He is the type that gives rise to the jokes in the funny papers."




















One day I decided to developed it into a full illustration. I originally wanted to turn it into a paper texture piece, but I think it works better like this. I might go back into it and add some lighting effects though (mostly highlights on the rabbit and the pink elephant and then perhaps add a moon beam). I wanted to play with color and have a complete background, which I usually neglect because I find them difficult and I usually just muddy up my illustration with backgrounds. Though I think due to my color choices and the changing levels of details I was able to create a cohesive illustration.

Jay Z as King Koopa

In late 2009 I was commissioned to do a picture of Jay Z as King Koopa by a friend of my brother's.

















This one was simple enough, I just placed Jay Z's head on to King Koopa's body


















With the second sketch I was going for more of a King Koopa and Jay Z fusion and I leaned on the Jay Z side. I think this turned into an awesome design for a hat and coat that I would love to own.

















This one I tried more of a half and half (i.e. more human proportions on King Koopa and Jay Z's face) and it turned out to be the approach that I felt looked the best.
















Here is a refinement of sketch number 3 with some sketches of Princess Peach and Beyonce as, which I played with for a while, though then it seems like Mario is trying to steal Jay Z's girl instead of vice versa and I couldn't play Mario like that. So instead I left it as Princess Peach but I made it seem like Princess Peach liked Jay Z Koopa better then Mario, which I felt worked for the piece.


Here is the final version on Paper Bag















This was a fun project I hope I get to work like this in the future.

Gnomes: PIG RACE

In December I was commissioned to do a painting of gnomes hunting for mushrooms for a friend of mine and it turned out really great (I forgot to take photos, so I still need to ask for a photo of that particular work). When working on it I did five different sketches for the piece, and I quickly became obsessed with drawing the gnomes with pigs because pigs are used for hunting truffles. One of them was of gnomes riding pigs in a race.















Here is the sketch of the gnomes riding pigs in a race.



















And the final painting.
This is a photo so the colors look weird, I'm not the best photographer. I am pretty happy with the results; I'm trying to to have more of an emphasis on lighting and tone in my newer pieces, so I did some small lighting effects. This is the 3rd painting I have done using watercolor pencils (I forgot to take pictures of the other 2) and they give me really good results. I'm really enjoying painting and drawing gnomes right now, so I'm sure there will be more to come in the future.

I have submitted this to the art of a community show for Arts Benica which runs from January 21st to February 28th. This peice, which is framed, can been seen as well as purched at the Arts Benica art gallery at 911 Tyler Street, Suite 144, Benicia , CA 94510. Any one who can should come up or come down and check out this art show it is really great.

Christmas Card 2009

This year I ended up making two Christmas cards. My mom just asked for something funny. So in October I came up with theses sketches (previously seen on my sketch blog), they all had to do with global warming or the bad economy, things that are on my mind. Plus one about Santa being tattooed which was just fun. (If you are having trouble reading the dialogue on my sketch blog I wrote out the dialogue for clarification)










































My parents weren't too crazy about the ideas that I came up with but I guess it started my Dad's mind a turnin' and he came up with "Things may be a little tight this holiday season what with the recession and all. But there is a barrel of love and good wishes from the Royals." So with that in mind I just started working in Photoshop.























Here is what I came up with. I got it done pretty quickly for one of my Christmas cards (which usually take forever for one reason or another) I finished it in about a day. Yes I know "recession" is misspelled, I based it off of my Dad's spelling which is also not very good. My mom liked it when I showed it to her, but then I showed this to Laura and she didn't like it and thought I could do better. That the elves were ugly and they should be cute, so then I decided to show it to my friend Chris Vear, who felt that the back ground could be more detailed and that I could incorporate the text elements better. So I decided to just redo it to incorporate their suggestions.










Here are the new elf sketches that I did trying to keep them simple cute and homeless looking.













I compiled all of the sketches along with some of the roughs I had done fro the older version and I created a new back ground sketches adding more posters on the walls. This is the sketch that I took into illustrator and made into the card.






















Here is side A
I wanted to try and not do heavy black outlines and to not shade it so that they looked like little cut out characters. I took the finished Illustrator version into Photoshop and added paper texture to everything and added some blues to make the elves look more somber. Some of the lines got a little washed out; I should have paid a little more attention to my contrasts. There are a lot of things that I like about this piece and a lot of things that I think could have been better. I learned a couple of things and I think the second one definitely looks better then the first one. Though it took me way more time so we got off to a late start and I never got around to sending out my cards to my friends. Sorry guys, I still love you.


















Here is side B
We based the idea of doing a post card off of this weird troll post card my mom found, on the back of that post card there was an illustration of the troll kids just sitting there so I wanted to do a similar thing. So here is the back of the post card with my homeless elves dumpster diving.

Christmas Card 2008

Christmas Card 2008!
This years card my mom and me decided that we wanted to put my Grandpa on the cards.


















Here is the one of the many sketches that I did in October for my Daily Sketch Blog for my mom to pick what was going to be on the Christmas card. This was in fact the first Sketch that I did, the other ones were all "A Christmas Carol" based where my Grandpa was Scrooge, because he enjoyed saying "Bah, Humbug!" during the Christmas Seasons as well as he hung a sign in his front yard to that effect. In my rendition of "A Christmas Carol" my mom and dad were the ghosts of Christmas past, My brother was the giant ghost of Christmas present, and Laura and myself were the ghosts of Christmas Future. My mom and I both liked the concept, however some of my illustrations made my mom uncomfortable with the way i portrayed my grand father so she picked the first one I did where i had my Grandpa as father time and my new baby (second) cousin Reece as Baby New Year. This was very appropriate because my grandfather had passed away a couple of weeks before Reece was born, so it seemed like what happens with the changing of the year, the old pass one into our memories and the new is brought in with limit less possibilities.























I brought the sketch into Photoshop and completed the sketch to be a full body shot and then I added a clock and some texture for the back ground. For some reason every one kept thinking that my grandfather was death, instead of father time, I for some reason have references from the 30s in grained in my brain.