Snowmen

On my desk

I always love when the arists whose blogs I follow, show pictures of the unfinished piece their working on. I'm excited about the thing I'm working on now, so I thought I'd preview it even before it's done. It's a pretty low res pic, but there's not much to see yet.

Trek Girl

I wanted to take one of my sketches and do a quick digital color job, nothing overly rendered, and especially not something that would require me to totally clean my original drawing. I had done this a few times before, with results that I liked, but I wasn't sure how appealing the result would be if I took one of girly drawings and tried it. Rough sketchy lines might take away from any appeal that the coloring added. I posted the original sketch some time ago....

I played with the levels of the original drawing to get rid of the gray marker I had used, cleaned up a lot of extraneous lines around the face, and refocused her eyes just a bit. I had to reinforce some of the ink lines a bit because they had dropped out in the process. Oh, and she just needed something funny on her shirt.

Girls

Woodland Grocer

Aaaaand another thing...

Chicken gone bad.

P.Q. Pinfeather, barnyard bully and all around bad egg.

Swabs

Finish line

What?!! Something in color?! A piece that took more than 5 minutes?! I know, contain yourself. This was a done for a friend as a gift for her boyfriend. Very fun to do, since I normally just draw and paint cartoon animals. 16x20 Guoache on Illustration Board

Stuffed

Prof. Albert Ross

Another normally harmless denizen of the animal world, twisted by selfish motives to pursue a life of crime.

No doubt the experiment he's seen performing here will allow him to rob a bank, hijack a plane, or perhaps even get the best scraps of food left on the beach at the end of the day before any of the other birds do.

Muppety

Planning on seeing the Muppets sometime this week. I'm a big fan of the vintage Muppet stuff, less so of more recent endeavours, and very much cautious about new Muppet offerings. The reviews have been very good, freakishly good in fact, so I'm hopeful. We'll see soon.

Anyway, I was in a Muppety mood and I doodled these 2- not real Muppets, just something in that style. The little girl below reminds me of the beautiful simplicity of early Sesame Street muppets.

When in doubt, draw an elephant

Sorry that the posts have been so sparse since Halloween. At this time of year things get pretty hectic and the last thing I have time for is sitting in front of the computer to scan my sketchbook. So here's something to make up for lost time- a magical elephant! Why? Because you've never seen one before. Well I haven't at least.

Irkhart Q. Iguana

Moving right along

I can't believe November is here- where did the year go?

21 Days of Halloween Day 21- Sabrina

Since we're deep into reading the Harry Potter books, my daughter is going trick or treating as Hermione this year. Everyone have fun tonight!

21 Days of Halloween Day 20- The Sackman

Hombre del Saco, El Roba Chicos, Bagman, Torbalan, Ocu, Tonton Macoute, Uncle Gunnysack, Bori Baba, Father Sack, Antjie Somers, Goni Billa. All names for various regional legends about a man who would come and take naughty children away in his sack. I've got to stop reading Wikipedia.

21 Days of Halloween Day 19- Trick or Treat

21 Days of Halloween Day 18- Here comes the sun...

21 Days of Halloween Day 17- Revenge of the Cat Creature

This felt more cat than wolf-like to me, and the Cat creature episode of the old Scooby Doo cartoon scared (and fascinated) the bajeezes out of me when I was a kid.

21 Days of Halloween Day 16- Franky, my dear

21 Days of Halloween Day 15- Wolf Man

21 Days of Halloween Day 14- Cat Creature

I always pictured something like this under my bed.

21 Days of Halloween Day 13- Odosketch Ghost

Yet another version of this concept I put up yesterday.



Click HERE to see it drawn fullsize.

21 Days of Halloween Day 12- Ghostly Maiden

I did something similar last year. I think it's inspired by the lore of the Haunted Mansion, with the forlorn bride haunting the halls.

21 Days of Halloween Day 11- Witch

This is based on a sketch I did a few years ago. I originally meant to paint it in guoache, in a nice graphic style, but since I'm rediscovering my Wacom, I thought I'd try it digitally this time.

21 Days of Halloween Day 10- Corpse of a Bride

21 Days of Halloween Day 9- Bats and Rats

21 Days of Halloween Day 8- Wednesday Addams

Click HERE to watch it full size on odosketch.com .

21 Days of Halloween Day 7- Flaarsnackle

21 Days of Halloween Day 6- Creeper

Creeper
by Eric Scales

Shadow's cloak, night's embrace
Ivy vines obscuring face
Peering eyes through iron gates
Where least suspected
Creeper waits

21 Days of Halloween Day 5- Zombies!

21 Days of Halloween Day 4- Death Takes a Call

21 Days of Halloween Day 3- Gargoyles

21 Days of Halloween Day 2- Jack of the Lantern

Click here to watch it fullsize.

21 Days of Halloween Day 1- The Terrible Grin

Little Brother is done!

One last normal post before I begin my Halloween posting tomorrow. When last we left the awesome puppet that Jarrod Boutcher was making based on my sketches, the poor little guy was naked. Actually, Little Brother doesn't mind being naked, but at his family's insistence he usually wears a bit more than that. He has several favorite shirts, all Spider-Man, and generally prefers to go pantsless, with only his diaper down below.

I thought Jarrod would simply be able to go down to the store and pick up a boys Spider-Man t-shirt, cut a whole in the back for my arm and slip it on the puppet. Turns out due to the unique proportions of the puppet, he had to make it from scratch. Not only did he sew the shirt, but he also screened the webs and Spider design on. What a ton of work making a puppet is- not for me, but certainly for someone as thoroughly dedicated as Jarrod.

Below you can see the finished product, Little Brother, standing looking cute and seemingly innocent, next to my original sketch which suggests his other nature.

And here he is, again compared to my original sketch, showing his short temper. Sometimes he forgets that he's not the boss.

To check him out in action, click this link to see the video that Jarrod posted of him. I can't wait for him to show up on my doorstep! In the meantime, don't forget that tomorrow starts the 21 days of Halloween on this blog, 21 spooky sketches, one for each weekday of October. Come back every day, tell your friends, and leave comments! See you then!

Little Brother Puppet Pt II

I'm so flippin' excited. Jarrod has made amazing progress with the puppet he and I are collaborating on. Below you can see the head, with the skin tightly sewn on. Notice how the cheeks which were previously foam forms, are now just soft curves under the skin. The silver wires that you see are the eyebrow mechanism. Little Brother has a hair trigger temper- tell him ,"no" and he is not happy.


Here you can see all of the pieces more or less assembled. Love that he gave him doll joints for the arms and legs. This is really going to look and move like a real kid (or at least a professional puppet) and not something from your local toy store's shelf).

I don't even have words for the final picture. Awesome isn't nearly adequate.

I think I mentioned that Little Brother is obsessed with Spider Man. So I've asked Jarrod to put him in a kids Spider Man shirt, and a big puffy diaper (Little Brother doesn't like wearing pants). I can't wait to see the next update! Be sure to check out Jarrod's blog and website, not only for a few other pictures of this puppet, but also for a ton of the most amazing character puppets you'll ever see.

Halloween is coming...

This year there are 21 weekdays in October, and for each and every one of those I'm going to post a Halloween piece of some sort. The delightfully dark doodling starts October 3.

Down in Fraggle Rock Pt 5

Boy it's been a long time since I've worked on this one. I wanted a project to keep me motivated to practice my digital painting, so I figured a big free form group shot of a bunch of Fraggles would be good. I'm just kind of making each one up as I go along, not worrying about the overall layout or anything, but of course trying to get some good personality in there. The reason I've neglected is so long was that my Wacom was really acting up. My stylus finally died, and after getting a new one I find that that seems to have solved most of the problems I was having. So enough talking, check out the progress below.

This is where I left off.



So I blocked in a new Fraggle. I really wanted to make this guy unique. So often the background characters were meant to just blend in, and not really have unique features. I wanted to make this guy old, with grayer colors overall, a beard, and a hat. I kinda sketched him looking into his hands. I think eventually I'm going to put a doozer into his hand, but didn't have time to do it tonight.

You can see below, just barely blocking in the actual face, I've already lost a slight tilt to his head that was in the original sketch. I didn't notice this loss till after, and as I still like the end result, I didn't bother to fix it. Still, often there is something subtle about the sketch that is lost if you're not careful.

The beginning of facial details. Some bags under his eyes and liver spots or freckels on his nose.

Fur on the body and the arms are defined now. Love making these little guys look soft and squishy.

Here's his beard. I've really gotten a bit more extreme (realistic?) with the lighting on this guy, which means I might go back and adjust it on the others.

And finally, his hat. I seem to remember that the fraggles wore some sort of hat like this, though it looked like it was carved out of a gourd or something. But I felt the overall shape looked a little too Smurfish (especially with that Papa Smurf-ish beard), so I wanted mine to be a bit more angular. And I tried to make it look like a patchwork.

That's all for today. I hope to work on this a lot more frequently.