Monday Artday - Fast Food Farthing

Here's the colored penny farthing, cartoony style. When I saw the term bike, the old-timey big wheeled bike sprung to mind, and all I had to do was think of somewhere to put one. I'm going to try to work more on my coloring, just coloring in the inked in spaces makes it look a little flat. About 5% of the coloring was done with my fancy new drawing tablet, my early b-day present, those things are cool.

Penny Farthing - Still the Greatest Invention Known to Man

Monday Artday is closing in on the end of its "bicycle" challenge. People have already submitted cute robot on a bike, a crazy bike that looks like it's made of squirrels and antlers - but so far, there is no representation of the greatest bike ever......the penny farthing! I must admit it was hard as hell for me to figure out the spokes, and they wound up a little arbitrary. Also some of my earlier tries had pretty wierd looking legs, so congratulations to anyone who can draw a realistic bike! I was going to post it yesterday, but got addicted to Plants vs Zombies, a pretty fun game where you plant attack plants to protect your yard from zombies.

Illustration Friday "Infinite" - Smashing Pumpkins

"Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness" is one of my favorite albums ever, and I guess going with a music themed Illustration Friday last week left my mind primed to do another. This time I tried to do a little more realistic drawing - I know the guys in this band aren't what I'd call pretty boys, but here they look a little on the mutant side. The guitarist on the left wound up looking like a fish man, and poor John Chamberlain looks like a retarded caveman. Corgan put on about 90 pounds in my interpretation as well. Oh well, I guess that means Smashing Pumpkins won't stumble across my blog, decide the picture kicks ass, and take me on tour with them. I used a ref pic of a classic poster of the group.

Illustration Friday "Welcome" - WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE

 

SHANANANANANANANA KNEES, KNEES! 

OK that's the first thing I think of when I hear welcome, now the song will be stuck in my head for days. Also, Slash must be the easiest musician on earth to draw an identifiable cartoon of. I know it's crudely done even for my drawings but.....IT GETS WORSE HERE EVERY DAY!

Graphs Never Lie, especially if they are color coded

At work, I make a lot of charts - most of them are boring and science related, and even required to be in black and white. Here's an incredibly useful one I made - if you didn't already know the 2008-09 Lions sucked, this chart sums it up for you. It shows how far they made it into the game before being down by 17 or more points, which is enough that it would take a pretty serious comeback that only a diehard fan would expect. One of the most special ones was week 12, where the Lions actually TOOK a 17-0 lead against Tampa Bay....then gave up 35 unanswered points. And if you missed this week's game vs the Saints - they were down by 17+ at 28:50 into the game.

Monday Artday - Breakfast Battle!

This week's Monday Artday topic was "Cute Object", as in add some personality and cuteness to some inanimate objects. My original idea was to do a bathroom with a happy smiling toilet, sink, and TP roll - then it could double as encouragement for my kid to potty train (however, it also runs the risk of possibly making him think the toilet is alive and scare him so much he never uses one again). But I decided to animate this BreakFast Battle instead. The characters were drawn in ink, and I finally learned how to be a little more efficient with coloring them in Photoshop so it doesn't take days. One last piece of trivia - the wooden surface this takes place on is my actual table!

Wallabies Unleashed

So here's the face of the 2009-10 Windsor Wallabies, my fantasy football team; may they fare better than last year, when the season went so bad I switched to the logo of Orlovsky's famous safety that summed up the Lions season.

Healthy Competition

It's almost NFL football season, which means it's almost Fantasy Football season for us armchair QBs/RBs/WRs/TEs/Ks/DSTs. I've been in one league run by my friend for like a decade, although it's gone through some improvements (online scoring vs manually reading box scores) and several website changes. It also switched to keeper format a couple years ago, which was the start of my downfall (check the stats on Mushin Muhammad, Curtis Martin, Ahman Green, and I think McNabb for 2004, and compare to the next year when I kept them). Anyways, I'm the Wallabies and my brother is the Mad Dogs, which obviously is the story behind this classy picture.

Illustration Friday "Strong" - How much is in there?

Living in a college town at the start of football season led to the immediate association of "strong" with "drink". This scene has probably already played itself out a million times this fall, at campuses all over the world. I was going to put some Greek letters on their clothes, but I guess getting stupid drunk in college isn't limited to Greeks. Although I used to be happy with just pencil sketches of everything, now it seems incomplete unless I ink it and add at least a splash of color, so for this one I did a real quick color job in Illustrator. Keep browsing the Illustration Friday posts this week, there was a really good one that also did "strong drink" of a guy hacking up something at a bar too.

Addicted to Filters

Maybe if I don't get my Illustration Friday pic done soon, I will just call this one "Strong Green Wavy Lines".

From The Briney Deep....

The latest submission I have for Mojizu is this Zombie Tuna. I got a five pack of different width pens to do more inking, but I seem to only like the smallest one and the biggest one. I left this one with the black ink lines - I was thinking about recoloring each one so it was a darker shade of the shape it surrounds, but decided not to do all that. I was happy to see lots more comments and a higher rating on my Rat Wizard on that site, and I am more proud of my fish!

Fresh from the Rat-Infested Swamp!

Here's another character for Mojizu, the aptly named "Rat Wizard". So far he's my highest rated submission, but still not beloved enough to be close to making the Moji War. He was drawn out with Sharpie, vectorized and colored in Illustrator, and shaded in Photoshop. One quick filter made the alternate version, with more blocked-in dark areas.