Sketchy Sunday: Coots

Tiny little doodles of park birds... I think these are coots? Anyway, they show up in the pond now and then, cute little waterfowl, black, with white bills, and they make a noise like a creaky hinge.

Whatever Wednesday: A Few More Deer

Remember the group of deer sketches I was posting earlier? Well, here's the rest of them! (This is the same gang of deer posted here and here...) Yep, lots of deer! That was such a prime sketching opportunity, usually when I stumble across deer I get a few seconds before they bounce off into the underbrush. In this case either they were too engrossed in acorns to notice me or the rock I was half hiding behind was darned good camouflage.

Sketchy Sunday: Samurai Silliness

Super quick live-action doodles from a performance of the "Samurai Sword Soul" improv group at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden (Yes, I have a ton of sketches of that troupe. They're incredibly goofy but also incredibly sketchable.) Here's a bunch of samurai doing their samurai thing... (More sketches from the same performance here.)

Life studies for the Calendar of Tales

Here's a batch of life studies I did for the soldier dude in my crazy January illustration for Neil Gaiman's Calendar of Tales project... (The second illustration here.) Mostly I was trying to sort out the hands and foreshortening and lighting, since you can't see most of the figure in the final. (And, yeah, that's basically me in a leather jacket trying to look badass with a deadly remote control.)

Oh, and while I was doing these a bird landed on the fire escape outside, so of course I had to stop and doodle the bird in the margin...

A Calendar of Tales: January and July

Well, I went and got involved in yet another contest-type thing, despite a complete lack of time, but but but... It was Neil Gaiman's Great Big Group Project! So I wanted to play, too.

It's the Calendar of Tales project. Neil gave twelve prompts, and people wrote tweets inspired by the prompts, and then Neil wrote stories inspired by twelve of the tweets, and now people are making pictures inspired by the twelve stories... There are links to all the stories here.

This is my illustration for the July tale. A tale of a lonely wilderness of books and bears and Aurora Borealis... (There are snatches of Homer in the northern lights, barely visible... I figured the celestial stories in this world should be something ancient, and it's hard to get more ancient than Homer, right?) This was one of my favorite stories of the bunch because, well, World of Books! (It reminded me very much of my apartment. Heh.)

This was my illustration for the January Tale, which has soldiers, and sharp scary things, and peril in every second. I did most of it in a frenzy of productivity on the last day before the deadline, and finished it around six a.m. and I was fairly delirious by then, so yeah, it got kind of crazy and experimental.

This is the dude I drew for the January illustration, I wanted to post him separate because you don’t end up seeing very much of him in the final image. This was totally an excuse to mess with traditional media ink and play with big sumi-e brushes (I love my sumi-e brushes, can you tell.)

And just for larks, here's the crazy mess I made for the bands of spiky stuff in the January illustration. It was meant as a texture sort of thing but looks kind of neat by itself. I wanted something gritty and messy and layered and sort of abstract-expressionist-looking, so what we have here is a lot of acrylic and cut-up bits of paper bags all glommed together into a… well, mess. Gotta admit that was fun.

I also got carried away and did some life studies for this, which you can see here...