So I started doodling these huge headed, sort of caricature people the other day. I did a bunch of them and am going to do more but for right now these are just the choice nugs. They started out as just faces that I then added tiny bodies to and, arbitrarily, tentacles. However, I've since developed a whole story about them; one that I may or may not flesh out later on and write. We'll see. At any rate I'm super happy with how the colour one turned out and I might colourize the guard. My computer crapping out was sort of a mixed blessing photoshop wise because I've had to go back and remake all my custom brushes with some pleasant successes.

I really started rushing the last part of this piece; the bottom and the rendering of the kid. Plus I just noticed that forgot to shade the leaves blowing in the wind.

Sketch for my latest piece. I apologize for the clipping at the edges but it barely fit on my scanner.

Bunny's Close Encounter

This is one of a few water colour pieces I did at the con last weekend. There was also a Spiderman and Venom painting that I did however I only got a pic of the Spiderman. I'll post that when I get it off the camera.

So the Toronto Fan Expo wrapped up yesterday and a good time was had by all. Thanks to everyone who came out to enjoy the day, the celebrities, the art and especially the people dressed up as strange characters I couldn't identify. I love a few of you and I like most of you.

This piece was a long time coming. I'd drawn the first sketches for it back in the winter of 2008 and had attempted to finish it for the comicon of that August. It wasn't into the following winter that I finally finished it and the crappy scan that I got last week has marginalized its greatness. Oh well. Once I've constructed an adequate photo area, these problems will be a thing of the past. Or I'll find some new way to screw up the photos.

This piece is a really old collab that I did with Thadeus Maximus. He drew it and then I transposed the line drawing onto larger paper and went to town. The photo didn't turn out great and I can still see some glare from the flash. I have yet to construct a suitable space for photographing work; something I need to remedy for the near future.

I posted the sketch that this piece was based on a couple months ago. I changed the orientation of the figure because I noticed a lot of the ones that I had done recently were facing left. As far as the scans that were done at Oakville Blueprint, this one had the least amount of detail loss.

I while ago my friend and esteem colleague Darryl Graham asked people to do a portrait of him. I don't know why. Maybe because he was selfconscious of that thing where when you look in the mirror the person you see looks different from the one you see in photographs and he wanted to be sure of the extent of the contrast. Who knows? At any rate, I worked exceptionally hard on the portrait and have just recently had it scanned. Unfortunately, the scan blew out a lot of the subtle grays into pure white which is the story for all the scans I had done at the store. I shouldn't have expected perfection though; all they're used to scanning are blueprints.

Potential covers for the book.

This is a character I re-designed for someone not long ago.

So the Toronto comicon ended a few hours ago and we're all home safe and sound, soon to wash the strange, basement-of-convention-centre smell off our bodies. I enjoyed my time there though I felt brain dead from the excessive inactivity, if that even makes any sense. It was a nice pretext to the zanniness of the Toronto Fan Expo if nothing else.

There was a "Lift Jesus Higher" rally in the same building on a different floor that inevitably birthed some off-colour jokes on our part. I found it strange that it was referred to as a 'rally' because when I think of that word I imagine a large meeting of white, hooded figures who "don't like coloured folk."

I did a lot of sketching at the con but only one I worked out at length, one that will be my next piece when I finish Darryl's portrait. I decided to work in a different format than all the other work I've done in the last year; the new format for the piece above is going to be very tall; something like 7 x 28.

A quick sketch for a new piece.

Here's the finished version of the early sketch posted below.

     I haven't posted anything for ages. Literally ages. Generations of people and entire cultures have risen, flourished and then blinked out of existence since I last updated. I believe that I said in the very first post of this blog that I was going to make a good effort to update this regularly and I hardly think that once every two months is regular. I could chalk it up to being too busy however that's a lie; I just haven't finished anything recently. My plan is to work smaller; not excessively smaller but small enough that each piece doesn't take months on end. Pffft, like I work on them every waking minute; if I did that they'd be done in weeks which I guess is still a long time.

     The above pic is a tonal study for a piece I'm working on.  It's just a little something a dreamed up (dreamed or dreamt? I never know now since that movie I Dreamed of Africa) that's a little less dark than what I usually dive into. That could be a good thing. I may, MAY, post it when it's finished.