Congrats to the Wedding Zombies

Congratulations to my friends Catey and James DeSantis who tied the knot on this day in Las Vegas.
Here is a drawing of the happy couple as a pair of zombies.This was done on the inside of the card Laura and I gave them congratulating them on their wedding.

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.

Two Cups of Tea

Here is something I did for my friend Catey for her bridal shower, which is today. Laura is one of the brides maids and was helping out with the festivities of the bridal shower and had me design an invite. The theme of the bridal shower was a tea party, which made Laura think of the song by the Star Fucking Hipsters, Two Cups of Tea. One of the lyrics is "Two cups of tea // one for you and one for me."






















This was always designed to be a painting but I started out by sketching it in Illustrator because I wanted a nice and clean template for the cups and the pattern going around the cups. The sketch I made in illustrator ended up being too flat for Laura and she sent me some tattoo pictures of tea cups for reference. Based off of those I sketched out these tea cups and added a ribbon to it with the song lyrics in the ribbon. I was really happy with how the painting turned out














This is a used tea bag that was meant to hold the the info for the bridal shower. In the end it was not the right size to fit all of the information. So I added it around the illustration, using the tea tag for the RSVP information.

We ended making these into postcards to send out to invited guests.

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.

Christmas Card 2007

It seems that despite the fact that I had this blog way back in 2007 (I think) I didn't bother to post this on my blog even though I posted all of my old Christmas cards from the five years before that. So Before I let another year pass without posting it here it is.
In 2007 my mom asked me to do a family portrait being tired of doing Santa jokes from the years before. In 2o07 I also met Laura and my mom recognizing how important Laura was to me and how much i loved her offered to have me put Laura in our family portrait. Letting her know that she is part of our family.






















Here is the sketch that I started with the idea being that it was

























Here is the final version of the card that was sent out to every one.

Christmas Ornaments

This week I painted two Christmas Ornaments for Arts Benicia. This was designed as a fund raiser for Arts Benicia, where the artist members were invited to come and get a blank ornament and decorate it to be sold for their gallery and education programs.





















Here is the first one, a Daruma Santa, or more a blue eyed whited haired Daruma. I figured with this one I would try and be more commercial with a Santa-esque figure. Though I don't know if appropriating a Daruma for Christmas was the most socially sensitive thing to do, I liked the idea and the colors are similar to Santa.
My second idea was going to be for me and for fun. For my second ornament I decided to do a skull and tentacles. After I told Laura what it was she told me she hoped it didn't sell so that she could have it for herself, no such luck.





















Here it is half way through painting it.





















Here I am painting the tentacles on the skull in the Arts Benicia gallery.





















A close up of me painting a tentacle.





















Here are my ornaments on the tree during the Holiday Parlor Tour. I volunteered to help out Arts Benicia and their very talented program coordinator to set up the room, which involved me helping to carry lots of heavy things up a flight of stairs. The event wasn't much of a sucess, where as we didn't sell too many ornaments, just three. One was mine! I sold the skull one the day before the event to one of the Arts Benicia board member who loved it.

Consensual Tentacle on Paper Bags

Surprisingly I have not done a post on this Blog about the resurgence of the web comic that I draw co-write with with Scintilla San. Check out Consensual Tentacle every Monday and Friday for new comics about alternative people and their oh so normal problems.

Gilda Green

She works in the I.T. department of some big faceless soulless corporation and hates her Job. She spends her free time with her beau August either at their apartment, at the bar, or on some wacky adventure.

August Edwards

He is a struggling artist who is currently unemployed. He is based off of my dear departed friend Patrick "Pathetic" Herrman.

Paper Bag Yokai

I have fallen in love with the Japanese demons known as Yokai; they are so different and strange and have interesting back stories and modes of attack, they demand to be drawn. Here are a few that I drew on paper bags.

Here is Rokuro Kubi, this is the Snake-Necked Rokuro Kubi, who by day is a normal woman but at night her head leaves the room with her long neck and hunts for grubs or human vitality of Qi.

Here is Tofu Kozo, which means Tofu Boy. He temps people to eat the tofu and some times it kills them, some times it does nothing.

Here is my favorite, Azuki Arai;, he is a strange Yokai who lives in canyons in high mountains. Azuki Arai is the Bean Washer, he sings a song while he washes his beans.

"Wash me beans, or catch me a human to eat ... Shoki-Shoki! Shoki-Shoki!"

This song confuses passers by and makes them get lost and at times has been know to make them lose their balance and fall their deaths in their attempts to catch a glimpse of this Yoaki.

King Potato

I have an odd obsession with potatoes, I like eating them, talking about them, and drawing them. This is just one of my many odd obessions (which also include fezes, handlebar moustaches, and the color blue). This is one of my pieces about a potato. As my last name is Royal I decided to create King Potato.















I originally did this as part of my Steam ID as King Potato. I drew this rather quickly and when I did it I thought it was sufficent and I might have even liked it. However, I now feel I could do better so I did.





















Here is a doodle I did on a post-it.






















The final version after I created the image in Illustrator and then textured it in Photoshop. Long live King Potato!

Gloom Cupcake

This is a painting that I did for Laura; she likes cupcakes (baking & eating them) and skulls. Our mutual friend Amaya used to call Laura "Gloomcake"; this gave me an idea and I started to do several sketches of cupcakes with skulls on it. I liked this one that had the little plastic skull cut out on the top. I'm not particularly pleased with how the little yellow light burst off the skull turned out, but I think it came out pretty cute regardless.