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.

Illustration Friday "Caution" - Experimentation

This week, to illustrate the word "Caution" for Illustration Friday, I decided to go with a topic I'm quite familiar with, teaching undergrad chem labs. It's a little dramatized - the earlier labs here are actually designed pretty well to prevent the possibility of any dangerous unintended results. When stuff goes wrong, it's usually just someone didn't follow the procedure to the letter and is getting results that don't make sense and they lose a few points for the week. I'd like to recolor this sometime, and make the panicked running instructor into an avatar for me, I drew it a little too small in this version to get much detail.

For Monday Artday - Big Ol' Moon

Since I've become addicted to websites that let you post art, I've joined the blog Monday Artday. It has two overlapping, biweekly challenges, where you illustrate a given word. It looks like fun, but there is some pretty great artwork on it, so I feel kind of like I'm showing up in an NFL locker room with a nerf football. For "Moon", my first thought was drunken college kids mooning someone, but I figured I'd keep it classy and do a collage. I'm kind of excited with all the textures you can do in Photoshop, either with the built in filters or by blending in a textured photo, so that's basically all this picture is. It includes textures from my ceiling, towels, play-doh, and a couple chairs. I tried to make the textured shapes all resemble moons within the big moon.

And since the picture is taking a long time to upload, I'll let you in on another artistic secret of mine........Goose Island Oatmeal Stout is delicious!

Mojizu, Rookie Wizard

Another Mojizu creature is up - Rookie Wizard! It started out with paint, I tried to fix up some mistakes and add detail and outlines in photoshop. It didn't turn out quite as awesome as I intended, I'm just trying to get each one better than the last (Qazax and Idle Octopus were rated like 3 points out of 10 by votes). I was envisioning lots of folds in the wizard's robe that just looked dumb when I did them, and I wanted the skull to be sort of translucent, but in the end I think this looks pretty good. It did turn out a lot better than my first all digital attempt, where the big grey skull looks less than intimidating!

What the crap?

Apparantly I'm not the HTML coder I thought I was (extreme amateur) as my special animated swf banner no longer shows up, and even the little list of links I had isn't working. I had messed with the "Link List" widget and tried to make it so you could put the hyperlink followed by a short descriptive text in normal font, but now I see only ________ and ________ so ____ that.

Illustration Friday Impatience - "Sneak Peak"

Is there anything that makes a kid more impatient than knowing there's a big present that can't be opened until "later"? I must admit I was also impatient in creating this - I smeared marker and pen all over the place. Not the most technically sound piece, but it's good enough for me today!

8 Arms of ACTION....well it has 8 arms anyway

Another Mojizu submission - Idle Octopus! I guess he sets a bad example for the kids, so I'll give him the PG-13 rating right now, and if some terrible parent lets them stumble upon this website and see him it's all their fault now. This is a really cool site, there are a lot of cutesy, simplistic designs mixed in with some incredibly detailed monsters. A lot of the artists are actually pro illustrators or designers, and it really shows mine up.

Mojizu, wacky character creation

While surfing people's Illustration Friday entries, I found someone's link to Mojizu, a place where you can submit wierd characters and others can rate them. I have sketchbooks loaded with doodles to colorize and turn in to that, and the first one is.......QAZAX!!!!!!!