Fireboy

So, for the first time in ages Seattle has been chilly enough to allow us to light a fire in the fireplace. Due to our rental agreement we are only permitted to use the Duraflame type logs. Sadly I am cheap and as a result I invested in a few of the store brand un-logs.

Funnily enough these seem to burn a little longer. Like so many generic versions of things this appears to come at a bit of a price. While the burn time is stretched out, the initial stages are more often than not just the two ends burning for about an hour. It looks weird. My lovely wife requested I make a character out of it. This while a bit odd, did turn out quite cute. I post it here for you, Fireboy:

 
Honestly, now that I think about it, he might make for a fun game idea...Stay tuned :)

Updating again at last!

Hey there!

So it has been a while since my last update here, I know I know, bad form for a blog called "Sketch Every Day". I have actually been employed at a telecom developing elearning courses this year and it ate up a good amount of my creative energies. Honestly I loved the job. It was a great chance to push good design in a framework of interactivity as well as an opportunity to formalize a lot of the tutorial and training skills I have gathered over the teams I worked on in my previous contracts.

Sadly for the time being that contract ended. I hope another opportunity on that team opens up again soon, but in the meantime I am again on the grind looking for new design opportunities. This made me realize it had been some time since I've done an overhaul on my portfolio site. At the time the current design was nice and clean, but I felt like I had to compromise a bit and use a few of my older pieces for the portfolio. I resolved not to put my next version up until I had updated them as well as adding some of my new work. This means for the moment I am prioritizing new pieces and adding more fun stuff to the site.

Until it goes live I'll start posting new work here as a stop gap. I can't wait to get some more work done, here is the first in the next wave. It's an updated Deep One mainly using a Dunkleosteus as inspiration. It was great fun to dive back into photoshop painting as my work lately has been mainly vector based. More to come, I promise!

H.P.Lovable Watercolors

As I mentioned in the previous post I worked some watercolors up for the H.P.Lovable designs. I really like how most of them came out. I think some might actually be worth putting on a t-shirt if I can find a decent service. I'll be sure to post about it if I do but for now, here are the finals so far.

Apologies for the baby-ized English, I'll probably change this on the final versions, except for the Cthulhu quote (that one I like).

 

Cthulhu

"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dweaming."

 

Mi-go

"Remember, that dawk world of fungoid gawdens an' windowwess cities isn't weawy terwible."

 

 

Deep One

"In that laiw of the Deep Ones we shaow dwell amidst wondewr an' glowry fowevewr."

 

 

Old One

"Radiates, vegetabews, monstwostities, staw-spawn-whateverw they had been, they werwe men!"

 

 

Ghoul

"Can you fancy a squatting of namewess dog-wike things in a chawchyawd teaching a smawl chiwd how to feed wike themsewves?"

 

H.P.Lovable

Saw some incredibly crazy cute drawings some time ago and thought, hey why not take some Mythos creatures and cute them up a bit. To be honest I didn't come up with the name, that was my lovely wife. I think once the series is done I'll throw the designs on some t-shirts if the designs are good enough.

The first one  was just a quick once over of the big guy (Cthulhu), a mi-go, and some tests for a Deep One. I always like drawing deep ones and didn't love any of the designs I came up with on the first pass. Per this I decided to fool around and refine it a bit.

I finally came up with one that is fairly close to the final design on the bottom left corner, but it looked a little too...I don't know, derpy I guess.



 I pushed the Cthulhu design a little bit and finalized the deep one. The mi-go seemed solid so I left it as is and tried for an old one and a ghoul. I don't love the ghoul but that's sort of a tough one to crack. I'm not sure why but I felt like the shapes are too irregular. The old one looked ok though.

Another group of refining the design. Cthulhu looks good here as does the deep one. The Ghoul is closer but not completely done but I did include a couple of penguins. If you have read the Mountains of Madness you'll know why :).



This last group was just meant to play with the designs using a more sketchy and heavy brush line. I really love throwing lots of black ink on a page and this was more just to have some fun than anything. I'll post my watercolor results next.