Zombie Ophelia

Horses

Doing some horse gesture sketches from photos for a commission. It's been a while since I did horses. Edit: drew horses. It's been a while since I drew horses.

Also, I think I ought to inform you about Icelandic Horses. They are hairy and awesome.

Sheep

A quick sheep sketch from a stock photo.

Faces

Goblin Officer

I don't think I posted this guy here before. If I did I apologize.

Page 2 - Panel

I didn't scan anything tonight. Well, nothing that I can show on a blog anyway. So here's a panel from the next POW page.

Hallowe'en Character

First design for Hallowe'en comic character.

Hallowe'en Comic

Thought I'd give POW (Panels of the Week) a try this time around 'cause it's Hallowe'en and it must be time for a Hallowe'en comic!

(I forgot to post this yesterday. Lost a Life Point in Health Month. Bleargh!)

More Office Animals

Birdhouse

An old birdhouse that used to sit in our yard.

Photoshop, about an hour.

Girl

Just a quick sketch. No ref.

Naginata Do

Digital painting from one of my own reference photos, shot at the Heritage Festival last year (I think). A naginata-do demonstration.

Photoshop, about 1 hour.

Parc La Fontaine 2

I got the name of the park wrong in my sketchbook.

Anyway, more life sketching from Montreal.

Influence Meme!

I didn't draw any of this stuff! But it's where my art has come from. :)

Insect Armor

I was working on this for last week's Chow but didn't get it finished up. I'm trying to do more delicate inking digitally. I do a better job inking with pen & ink but I have big problems with skew. The pen version of this looks nicely dynamic but of course as soon as I flip it I see it's completely out of balance. Bleah. This, on the other hand, is reasonably balanced but has other issues.

Anyway, I signed up for Health Month and one of my rules is to post a drawing every day this month! Thank goodness for the "scheduled" feature on blog posts. :P :)

Office Sketches

More office animals!

Ashandra

I'm working on improving that bard picture. I got a really nice paintover on CA that helped me realize where I'm going wrong. But in the meantime, another older image I've started repainting.

I was feeling kinda down today. I was looking at the stuff near the beginning of the blog and I don't feel like I've improved much in the way of inking or pencils. Then I remembered that I've mostly spent the last few years on improving my acrylics, digital inking and digital painting. So I guess I don't have much cause to feel bad...

(But I do anyway, because that's what Artists Do Best).

Cafe Neve

Neil really liked going there for coffee. We went there pretty much every other day for 2 weeks.

At one point we decided to have lunch there (try the green salad with bacon MMMM) and I got a chance to sit and sketch for a bit.

St. Denis

Sketched this while sitting on the patio of Le Saint-Bock in the Latin Quarter of Montreal. They have good beer there.

I think this is one of the Frites Alors restaurants that I sketched out. It was dark, and I was somewhat beered up.

Knight

Goblin Fountain

A twitter sketch that I thought warranted some better treatment.

Apology

No joke, just a little blurb I coloured up.

Chained Idol

I found this statue thing chained up behind a building that houses art studios.

Wrestler WIP

A pic I was working on last week.

Twitsketches

Octopirate

For Sketch... I mean... Talk Like A Pirate Day!

Really zippy sketch.

Mouse Knight

Did this speedpainting as a paintover of someone else's pic for the C&C forum on Concept Art, but now I feel kinda bad about posting it over there. I'm not sure it would actually help the person much and I don't want to discourage them. If anyone has thoughts about it I'd like to hear them.

In the meantime, I am posting it here because it's got nothing in common with the original apart from the general pose and idea. And it is a thing I did.

Firebrand the Gargoyle

Final pic for CHOW 213:

Ended up with a mashup of Coyote from Gunnerkrigg Court and Wind Waker. I think I'm pretty happy with this guy, though.

Gargoyle Designs

Rejected gargoyle designs for CHOW 213 (8-bit character redesign):

I picked Firebrand the Gargoyle from an 8-bit character lineup. I thought I'd redesign him as a kiddie-game character but eventually went with another approach.

Witch Girl

I ought to post more stuff. I'm always working on something. Not always bothering to post it until it's done, and sometimes it just doesn't get done.

A work in progress:

Speed Painting

I feel like I've been too busy lately to do much drawing. Here's a quickie (30 min) painting to remedy that, at least a little.

From a photo I took a few years ago. Played around with perspective a bit.

Parc La Fontaine

It is danged difficult to draw people out in public without them shuffling around or noticing what you're doing.

Parc La Fontaine, Montreal.

Old Factory

Did some sketching from life while I was on vacation this summer. These are the remains of the Five Roses Flour factory on the waterfront.

Big, rusty, and looks absolutely gorgeous in the light of the setting sun.

Twitter Sketches

Weird sketches loosely based on Twitter posts!

What are they all about? I can't remember!

Trading Post

My friends finally dragged me into a D&D game this weekend. I'll probably be sketching all sorts of scenes from it over the next while.

I quit roleplaying years ago when I realized I was only going to the sessions to sketch. But now I think maybe that's not such a bad thing. I wonder if I can convince someone else to roll the dice for me?

I Lied

I got a couple more paintings to post that I painted at ArtWalk. Here's a jellyfish:

I'm on a bit of a jellyfish kick right now.

The other painting still needs a touch of work, maybe I'll do that this weekend. Or maybe I'll just sketch at Heritage Festival while stuffing myself stupid with fried dough and meat-onna-stick.

Character Sketches

I think I'm painted out for a bit. Must be time for ink sketches!

Bolsena Gate

Something from a photo I took in Italy back in 2006 when we went on a bike tour of Latium & Umbria. We liked wandering around all the old hilltop towns. This one was a little resort town on the shores of a lake, and I think it was my favourite out of all the towns we visited.

The fact that it was a long downhill ride from the worst climb of our trip probably had something to do with that.

I think I need to work on this one a little bit longer. The gate itself is still looking a little flat. It was a troublesome painting. I thought I'd try doing an underpainting in warm & cool colours (you can still kinda see the pink peeking through the gray of the wall) but for some reason it didn't the effect I was looking for.

Poppies

Painted some poppies in my backyard to test out my plein-air setup before Artwalk. Worked out fairly well, barring an ill-timed phone call and some rain.

Hamster Bean

Not quite the next installment in the idol series. Doing a bunch of painting this week for ArtWalk, which is coming up waaay too quickly.

This one was trouble from the start. I put the design on the rejected pile partly because I wasn't sure about it and partly because it looked waaay too Ursula Vernon-ish. Not that I don't love her stuff, because I do, but y'know -- good for the Buddha to be Buddha, not for me.

But then my husband came running in with a batch of mineral violet he'd made up and you know how it goes. Gotta test it out. Can't test it out on a design you love.

Anyway, decided to use the mineral violet and some viridian. Turns out the mineral violet is also very transparent, so the initial stages of the painting were an exercise in frustration. Only after I came back to it with the dioxazine violet and cadmium yellow and the phthalo cerulean was I able to make some headway.

Eventually I got it to look pretty decent. Then it got dinged up because I decided to sand the other side and didn't protect the front well enough. ARGH. It is the disaster hamster.

Fighting Milkmaid

For CHOW 202 - the challenge was to design a fighting-game character for a world tournament that was based on some nationality.

I tried to do something Hyungtae Kim-esque because that's who I associate with fighting game characters -- even though I'm not sure he ever did a single fighting game concept.

The Passenger

"Oh the passenger
He rides and he rides
He sees things from under glass
He looks through his window side
He sees the things that he knows are his
He sees the bright and hollow sky
He sees the city sleep at night
He sees the stars are out tonight"
- Iggy Pop, The Passenger

Quick speedpaint, no ref.

Queen of Goth & Country

Trying to post more stuff regularly here. I've been a busy bee last month, since I got laid off and rehired. Lots of paintings in progress (should be more, since I'm off to sit on the street and sell them next month), lots of digital art, and a bunch of comics I can't show off here.

My goal is to post more every year than I did the year before.

Anyway, this is a sketch I did for the Monarch of Chow contest:

I've always thought goth and country might go well together, since there's plenty of emo country songs. Except I like goth music. Country... not so much. The music itself isn't terrible but that twang makes me want to beat cowboys to death with their own guitars.

Andromeda

Had to redesign Andromeda for Chow 201 over on ConceptArt. I thought Pirate Princess Andromeda would be fun to do.

I've even started writing a story for her in my head based on the myth. She gets kidnapped by her mother's crew so that they can sacrifice her to break a curse. There's no Perseus, though, so she and her best friends from pirate school have to figure out how to deal with the dreaded drooling frog-beast. It all sounds very silly.

Frankie and the Mrs

More movie monsters:

Alot of Questions

If you haven't read this yet, go do it. I'll wait:

Linky

I like this alot.

I have drawn alot, you should draw alot too!

(Something for a grammar thread on ConceptArt. I couldn't resist.)

Fennec Idol

Just finished the latest idol painting today.

I've got one more idol I want to do, a pug painting that may be more like a real (or cartoon) dog, at least one odd landscape I want to start tomorrow and then I'm moving on to banana slugs.

Plans. It's good to have 'em!

Hare Idol

Another acrylic painting. I've got one more idol on the easel right now, and two in the planning.

This one came from some reference photos I shot of some hares.

Mask Idol

Did some more acrylic paintings this year. Weird goat-mask idol: