Still Drawing and Vectoring!

Hey kids, I have to apologize once again for the delay in posts. I am still working diligently on other projects, some illustrative and others more game design oriented. This is not to mention the freelance gigs I've had of late, but truthfully I really should be uploading the sketches and personal work I've produced. While a good portion of it will go on my new website (I know I redesigned it again recently but adobe put out another update to muse and I really want to play with it again), most of it will be posted here first. To that goal here is the first in the new batch, a vector portrait. A while ago I saw a vector  portrait by one of my graphic design compatriots. I've worked in 3d before and thought it would be a fun challenge to do all in 2d. Fun stuff, but to be honest I don't know that I am 100% there yet on this piece.   I might still push a few more pixels around but in the meantime here's what I have so far:

Vector Portrait

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.

"Care To Compete" Logo Design Process

Hey all, it's been a while since my last post. Fear not, I am still drawing everyday, but I have not posted here as most of my projects are in flux at the moment. Also, there are a few I am keeping a bit close to the vest until completion.
In the meantime I would like to show you a little graphic design project I took on recently for a new golf charity business, Care To Compete. When I started, I was given this proposal to go off of:

This was an interesting design but I thought it could use a bit of work. My client gave me some latitude to play around as long as I maintained the essential parts. These being: two C's, a T as a golf t, and the earth. As you might imagine I had quite a lot of fun pushing vertexes around in illustrator. I wanted to provide a few options for review, some which maintained the original shape and others which I thought kept the essentials but pushed towards a softer and more elegant solution.

 My clients liked one of the new designs. This was the third from the bottom on the right, but requested a few revisions. These were fairly simple and I provided them with a some options to go with for the final review and changes.The results of the revisions are below.

The notes came back for the final alterations. The requests were: the shading on the globe on 9, the colors on 7, and the shading around the globe on 5 to be applied to the rest of the design. The results were 4 final design options with some minor differences for the client to choose from, shown below: 

They decided to go with #1 from the group, which to be honest was my favorite as well. 

This was a great project and it was tons of fun to do a little straight graphic design.  Sometimes I get so into working on illustration and formatting that I forget how enjoyable it is to jump in and do simple logo designing. I love working with clients to find a design we can both be happy with and the challenges that come with the process. In my next post I'll throw some illustrations up so you can see some of the drawing work I've done lately. Till then I hope you liked looking into the process for this one, see you next time!

Deep One Female

Hello again gentle viewer.  I have another in-progress piece for you to have a look at. I know it must seem as though I have painted quite a few of these horrid fish-men this year, but please note I come from a very fishy town in Massachusetts. Doing these abominable batrachian monsters often helps me get a feeling for the hometown I rarely get around Seattle. Hmm, I re-read that sentence and on retrospect that could seem like a negative. Trust me I have only love for my birthplace, but anyone from that lovely New England town should be able to admit it's got some fairly fishy overtones. Thanks to a longstanding longing for my town's beaches and a persistent request for art from a certain good chum of mine for use in his card game, I present the next in the fishmen paintings: 

She's not done but I figure I should be finished with her by the end of the week. Let me know if you have any suggestions for the background!