Just when I thought I was done with Mermaids

And the new process continues! I used to bemoan the loss of my beloved scanner, but my new workflow (enabled by today's camera phone optics) makes it a thing of the past.

Diana's Adventures in Tikiland...

I picked up the new Making of Moana book recently, and it's friggin' inspirational!  It triggered this Tiki-inspired Wonder Woman that I hope you find giggleriffic.

Sunday Evening Mai Tai

What better way to spend a lazy Sunday evening? Most of this was done on my trusty iPad Pro with my even trustier iPad Pencil. I took each element into Adobe Illustrator in order to generate vectorized versions for easy scaling, then composited everything in Adobe Photoshop. Hope y'all digs.

Mer-Batgirl!

Mer-May seems to have had an effect on me.  Crossed with my love for Bronze Age comics, this is the kind of design that pops from my brainstuffs. The original pose was a quick gesture from my sketchbook.  All illustration and digital painting was done on iPad Pro with Apple Pencil in Procreate. The final layout/design is a combination of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. Hope y'all groove on it.

Happy New Year!

2016 is going to be my year of tribute. I'm going to share my homages to the pop culture icons of my youth with you, my fellow groovies.

One of the great tragedies of contemporary media is the death of Saturday morning cartoons. I used to schedule my Saturday morning based on the 2-page illustrated ads in my favorite Bronze Age comics--making notes in my Han Solo/Chewbacca spiral-bound notebook as to precisely what time to switch from ABC to NBC to CBS in an effort to watch ALL my favorite cartoons! I went through phases--sometimes it was Hanna Barbera's funny animals (from Yogi Bear to Scooby Doo to the Wacky Races to the Laff-A-Lympics); other times it was action/adventure (Just wait 'til you see my homages to Filmation's Tarzan and Flash Gordon). 

I've been doodling Jabberjaw, The Hair Bear Bunch, and Speed Buggy, and will post as I finish! My goal is to make an homage map, of sorts--I'll draw all the characters in detail, but the backgrounds will be really abstract for each one. Once I have anywhere from 20-100 characters done (I think of additional inspiration each day), I'll composite them into a single large poster scene. I don't really know why I'm doing it, since I can't really publicly sell licensed characters--but I'm getting a lot of joy out of it. I draw stuff that makes me giggle, and I'm giggling my butt off doing this!

Is there something you'd like to see? Let me know, and I'll perhaps work it into my schedule. I've decided to stop short at the Smurfs, Transformers, He-Man, GI Joe era--I don't have as much of a connection to that stuff. I guess I was too cool for school for a decade or so, and didn't come back to Saturday morning cartoons until Batman, the Animated Series began.

Santa on the 26th!

Santa deserves a break too! I imagine him on a beach somewhere, frollicking with all kinds of critters! Most of the characters were drawn in Procreate on my iPad Air, with a Pencil By 53. Then the whole thing was composited in Photoshop. Doing my best to put together a series of holiday illustrations--with an odd twist, of course.

Late Halloween

I did this piece way back for Halloween--but neglected to include it here. Next year, I'll get this one ready for Halloween cards or some kinda decorative display.

This started as a doodle in my sketchbook, then took a photograph of the sketch with my trusty iPad Air 2. Production past that point was done with a combination of Nomad brush and Adonit JotDot Pro in Savage Interactive's most excellent Procreate app. I realized what a cool Halloween greeting it might be, but it needed a cooler backdrop. I made an interesting fractal background in Frax, then dropped it into Tiny Planets to swirl it up a bit. Then it was on to Percolator to get those groovy stars in the fractal pattern. Back to Photoshop for final production--some overlay effects for drama. The haunted house was a hodgepodge of references from different haunted houses I found on the interwebs, and did the linework in Illustrator.

Then I realized the piece needed a floating pig...

Happy late Halloween! Maybe I'll get to X-mas before February!

Paleo Kara, cover version

This will likely be the last of this series for awhile.  I have a ton of projects that have been patiently waiting for my attention.  Worry not--more to come as soon as I clear my plate a bit!

Paleo Babs!

I'm having so much fun with these pieces!  The figure is hand-drawn in my trusty Moleskine, scanned and colored in Procreate for iPad, composited with a photo I took on the Big Island of Hawaii in Photoshop!  What an excuse to visit the nostalgia of old comic books with new illustrations!

Devil Dinosaur meets Tigra!

Another love letter to the comics of my youth! They just don't make 'em like they used to.

1,000,000 DC Diana

So, who's seen the classic Raquel Welch film 1,000,000 BC?  It shaped my 8-year old mind into the strange and wonderful place it is today.  I love dinosaurs, ape men, iguanas with cardboard fins stuck to their backs, and of course, beautiful and powerful paleolithic cavewomen!  I'm on a roll, combining all that with some of my favorite DC comics layouts from the 70s.  Keep an eye out--more to come!

Saber-Tooth Froggie

Just when you thought you'd seen everything, along comes something new...  Done in Procreate with both an Adonit JotDot and a Nomad brush.

Monkeys will be monkeys

This is the piece that started my fascination with the critters that live beneath!

Easter Bunnies WIP

I'm setting a personal goal for myself--get a fun holiday piece done in time for Easter!  Here's the original art, directly from my latest sketchbook, and I'll be cleaning it, coloring it, and adding characters over the next couple weeks.  Keep an eye out--I'm going to have prints and stickers ready to rock and roll by April...

When Pigs Fly

 

This one's a little more cheesecake-y than I normally post here, but it made me giggle, so I figure it deserves to be here as well as my Furkini Atoll brand!  Lines are hand-drawn, but I painted it in Procreate on iPad with the usual Nomad brush!