50: Summer Collaborations

Color-wizard Extraordinaire Tardigrad and I spent quite a chunk of the summer doodling amongst ourselves, resulting in a few proper collaborations and loads of sketches.  My next post should be up-to-date school stuff.  I've just finished my first week of senior year, after all!

 We'll begin with her linework, which I transferred, inked, and colored with a mixed media medley.  I was finally able to get a pink 'underpainting' to work the way I wanted, so this was a joy to work on.

 This one was a commission and I created the lines for Tardigrad with carcoal pencil on tracing paper.  Our commissioner specified something similar to Kransekake in the background, and I have never enjoyed looking up reference quite so much.

 More lines I created for T!  These guys are based on the medieval "Cameleopard"- the early European perception of giraffes.

 Not a collab, just two of our characters scheming, with hers doing most of the scheming.

And finally, here's a quick link to a couple pieces she drew for me, completely out of the blue.  All of them are jaw-droppingly amazing, so you'd best be checking them out.

49: Digital Trio

Toward the earliest part of the summer I experienced a sort of digital awakening- suddenly everything made sense, and being able to paint over any and every stroke became such a corner-cutter and such a pleasure.  All three of these are commissions and gifts for various friends of mine, featuring their personal characters.

 A long-time commissioner let me go nuts with her pine marten character, to great success, I think.  This was an exercise in limiting my palette and pushing depth-of-field.

Friend and fellow fantabulous artist Remjie had me illustrate her daemon characters enjoying the cold.  I restricted my use of warm colors here- an exercise a long time coming, haha.

And lastly, moving away from the painterly style, here's a quick doodle for a very good friend and one of my biggest inspirations, Tardigrad.  Sphynxes and fruit, such a bright combination!

48: Noodling from the Summer

...Oops, I appear to have fallen off of the blog-o-sphere.  Apologies, followers!  I have a slew of posts queued for the next couple days; this one focuses on sketchbook fun.

Aardvarks are made of endlessly fun shapes to play with.

 Fiddling with gargoyles yet again- I quite like the face on the bottom-right, and I hope to do more with that character.

 Turtle hands.  Not much to say here!

Most of my summer seems to have been spent waiting for appointments, and these guys were a direct result of one of those waits.

More of my little alien guys who never seem to have a finished piece to their names...someday!

Silly dinosaur scribbles from the sketchbook- brush pens are excellent.

Three watercolors drawn from life at the Shoal Creek Living History Museum-  these were all created before Missouri was blessed with almost a month and a half of 100+ degree weather.  I can't wait to do more studies in this vein!