I'm Officially A Freelance Artist

While my day job of testing Xbox 360 games has not changed, I have managed to pick up a nice little moonlighting gig that should be a lot of fun. I've signed on with a company that makes those little pulltab games you find in bars and will be doing some illustrations for them. It's an awesome gig, as there is no major deadline for the artwork, and it's all cartoon stuff. I had given them two designs once before, which I'll try and dig up tonight, but they wound up not using them. That was over a year ago, so I figured I'd never hear from them again, but just last night I got an email asking if I could do five more, and then more would follow after that.

I'm pretty stoked, as this will be around the second paying art gig that I've had in my life. I'll post stuff as I work on it, so you can see the progress of each one. I think I start next Tuesday, so by Wednesday or so, I should have something to show for it.

Roughly 237,389 more jobs like this one, and I'll have enough to pay off the student loans I used to get my art degree!

P Shooter

What if the "P" stood for Prairie Dog?



I was drawin this here mangy varmint when I realized he needed a weapon of some kind. Course then I decided it'd be a real fine idea if I gave him a prairie Dog to shoot.

The sketch is of him reloading.

Reach for the sky.

Smoke Break

I felt the blog was lacking color recently, so I just went ahead and splashed a little color on this fine fellow instead. It isn't the colored piece I mentioned in my previous post, but at least it will spruce things up a bit while I work on finishing that piece up.



Comments and critiques are most certainly welcome. You could even mention the fact that the shadow from the banana is casting in the wrong direction.

You could most certainly mention that, couldn't you?

Wrasslin'!

I actually thought I'd have a pretty easy day today at work, since I was so jammed yesterday, but I wound up working even more hours. That being said, I managed to doodle out the little wrasslin' man you see below.




I've got a piece I'm currently working on inking and coloring that I'm going to try and have up tomorrow with any luck.

Until then... go put someone in a rear naked choke hold.

Sketch Dump!

Today was the day from hell, in terms of my job. I arrived at around 8:00 this morning, and didn't leave until 9:30. It was a day of stress, no lunch, and very few breaks. I hate these kinds of days, because they always translate into some bad drawings from me. I really don't like how the sketches below turned out, and looking at them now, how totally random they are. However I promised I'd post the good with the bad, so here is a batch of the bad.



In case you're wondering, the little devil dude in the center is how I viewed a co-worker today. The gorilla looking thing is a character from a game my company is involved with. The long necked man is my attempt at sketching a person with one last question as the person they are speaking with turns and walks away. The gentleman on the bottom right appears to be dancing. The man in the center bottom is most certainly dancing. Finally, the guy with the massive teeth is just someone I saw on Google and wanted to sketch.

I'll try to do better tomorrow.

Please don't hate me.

Bea the Bee

I did this one a while back. Don't be fooled by this one tiny little picture, if you click it, you'll get to read the entire story of Bea the Bee and the Bus.



Hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, let me know by leaving a comment. Of course, if I get no comments, I won't take it to heart, as I think around 3 people read this blog each day, and of those, 3 of them are my mom.

Rhinos In Love

I decided to try my hand at drawing some rhinos, after I got inspired by some of the character designs by Andrew Shek. They're okay, but they really just wound up looking like a cross between a hippo and a horse... with horns on their noses.



Maybe tomorrow I'll try drawing some chickens, because they'll probably turn out looking like beavers, and I've always wanted to draw a beaver.

Oh... and that one rhino up in the corner, swinging from the web, is actually Spider-Man. If you thought he was a rhino too, then I'm either really good at drawing rhinos, or really bad at drawing Spider-Man.

Sketch Dump!

I was in a dog sketching mood today, so I sketched one. Then I sketched 21 more and posted them here.



WOOF.

This Year's Christmas Card

This is a Christmas card I was going to send out a few years back, but never got around to finishing it. I splashed some color on it, but I still need to finish up the shading on the tree.



My wife and I rarely send out Christmas cards, but I think I'm actually going to finish it this year and send it around. If you've got an idea for a one line caption to put on the inside like, "Hope the Christmas season doesn't choke the life out of you" or something along those lines, post a comment and let me know.

Baby, Look At You Now!

I couldn't wait, and splashed a little color on the baby and dog when I should have been fast asleep.



I'll often do that, in that I will try to force myself to take my time on something so that I choose the right colors and make it look as nice as I know how, but wind up just rushing and splashing color on it like I don't have a care in the world.

Maybe I'll color it again tomorrow and see how the two compare.

Then again... maybe it's time to move on to something else besides limbless babies.

People might start talking!

Fun With Babies

The growl should have told him not to rattle it again...



And with some inks...



The "inking" was done in Photoshop, in case you wanted to know... but you probably didn't.

I'm going to color this one at some point tomorrow, and I'll post the finished color version at that time.

Comments, as always, are quite welcome.

Sketch Dump

Here are some of the things I sketched today while taking breaks at work.



Click it to make it grow!!!

As you can see, some are okay, some are not quite okay. Nothing I'll probably hang on to, but the upside is that I've finally managed to draw a girl character that doesn't look like her face was melted by a candle. They still look a bit freakish, but they're getting better.

In case you didn't know, I've never been able to draw female characters worth a damn.

John Kricfalusi's Blog and the Inspiration it Provides

For those of you that don't know yet, John Kricfalusi has a new blog he's been posting to for a little while now. Most people know John as the creator of "Ren N' Stimpy," but some also know his work from Spumco, including "George Liquor" and "Ripping Friends."

As any animation fan who grew up in the 80s and 90s will tell you, RnS was a huge influence on me. That's not to say my drawings look like Ren N' Stimpy much, but just from the aspect of humor, and the overall feel of the cartoon. It's something I still draw from to this day in my comic strip.

John is a throwback for sure, in that he feels that cartoons today are crap (which they are) and that the life is gone from most, if not all of them (which it is.) He constantly preaches old school, and invites people to go back and watch cartoons from the 40s, which blow away modern animation in almost every sense of the word.

I had dreams of becoming an animator growing up, but frankly lacked the talent. I know just enough to make my drawings not look like they were drawn by a blind monkey with the shakes, but not enough to bring motion to my work. Yet when I watched cartoons like Ren N' Stimpy, I felt as though that was what I wanted to do for a living. Years later, I find myself testing videogames for a living, and though I enjoy my job very much, every break I find myself hunched over a piece of copy paper, doodling away.

So when I stumbled upon Mr. Kricfalusi's blog and read what he had to say, I yet again felt inspired to put up my own blog and begin sharing more of my artwork. People have seen my comic strip in the past, but now I'm going to start sharing my other work with you. Understand that this will run the line from the good, to the not so good, to the downright ugly. A professor in art school told me that the average person has 100,000 bad drawings in them, and the sooner you get those out of the way, the sooner you'll be drawing what you want to draw. I won't be holding back, so you'll be seeing some of the 100,000 for sure, but I also hope that from time to time you'll get to see one or two that fall out of that 100,000 range.

This blog would not have gone up, had it not been for Mr. Kricfalusi's blog getting me excited again, so I thank for him for that.

Now let's see where this ride takes me.

Just in case you weren't aware.

In case you didn't know, I draw a little comic strip called Dog Complex. I've been doing it for a few years now, and though it's on a short hiatus, it will be back up in running in April. Later I hope to post a few comics from it on this blog, and give my thoughts about it. I'll also tell you of my brush with syndication, and share my thoughts on the current state of the comic strip.

I'll get all that (and more) posted this weekend, or my name is Marth Stewart.

Your Pal,
Martha Stewart

Bunny Ranch

When I get a break from work, or need a break, I'll often sketch. The sketch you see below is a character redesign I'm working on for my "Happenstance" comic strip.



I had originally made the bunny short and fat, with no mid-section to speak of, but I just didn't like the design overall. You can see the original bullet-shaped body in the strip below.



My hope is that new body will afford me much more in terms of body language and emotion. The beaver character will be staying as is... for now.

Comments on either design would be much appreciated.

Getting the Ball Rolling

I thought I'd toss up a few of the pieces from my art room over at Dog Complex, as a way to get this blog rolling. In the days and months to come, I hope to add much more to the blog, in terms of sketches and comics, but this should help get things moving in that direction.



This image you see above was done for a t-shirt I was selling on my site. At the time, I still had the belief that I could sell merchandise on a webcomic site. This is something I later found to be totally wrong, as the number of people who actually buy merchandise hovers somewhere down around 1% of your readership, so for a site only pulling in a 1000 people a day, my orders equaled about 4 a year. I bought a few for myself and family, and had an order trickle in here or there, but that was pretty much it. I like the way the piece turned out, though I do feel that Sid looks a bit plastic. I also think I probably should have added strings to the guitar, even it were just 3 or 4, as it looks kind of strange.



Another from my "Dog Complex Springwear Collection," this was the shirt that actually got ordered a few times. I think it works well for Sid as a character, and really conveys his free spirit. What I don't like is that he has the same goofy smile on his face in each pose.



And the final shirt, which didn't sell either. This one would be a tough sell, even with a million readers a day, because wearing it would cause more than a few odd stares. If you're a guy and you have this shirt on, you most likely have pants on, implying that you are not a man. What guy wants to wear a shirt like that? If you are a woman and you have the shirt on, you're pretty much asking men to expose themselves to you.

I didn't think that one through very well.