Merry Christmas, One and All

For one of my figure drawing sessions at work this month, we had Santa model for us, and I decided that it would be great to bring out my gouache paint set and make a postcard out of it

Our Santa is a pretty cool guy, the kind you would drink a beer with, If you were a beer-drinking kinda guy.

This is the staff of Cordovan School of the Arts.

Shane Lewis

I've been copying Shane Lewis lately. His blog can be seen at http://stlewis.blogspot.com/
The frog on the top is my demo for a class in which I taught some five year-olds how to watercolor a Shane Lewis frog. I had a bit too much water when I was painting the eye, which resulted in a happy mistake that made lit look like a crying frog.

redesigning the Manos characters

Attempting to Impress Employers

Card Game Illustration

Lately I've gotten back into playing Cardmaster Conflict (cardmasterconflict.com for those of you interested in a new online hobby) and I suddenly realized after playing the game for five years that I could do some illustration for the site. I emailed one of the admins and they wasted no time in letting me help out with their new expansion set that's coming out.
The biggest challenge that I've found with illustrating for them is that the final images are all 123 by 50 pixels when they appear on screen during gameplay, which is an odd aspect ration to start off with, and then really low resolution, which means that I have to be extremely conscientious about my composition.

Stuff you haven't seen yet.

Oaktopus

A friend of mine requested an Oaktopus to put on his band's flyers. I decided to go with a Mignola-esque inked look for it, and then I decided I liked the image enough to color it, and then I decided to try out Corel Painter's watercolor functions, which I had never put enough effort into to get it to work well, but I have to say that I really like it now that I've given it a second chance.