Day-2 Art Challenge

Here is my set for day-2. Wizard cards from the first two Harry Potter video games.

5 Day Art Challenge

I've been posting on FB for the 5 Day Art challenge. The challenge is to post 3 pieces of art for 5 days and in turn challenge other artists to do the same.
Here is my set for day-1. McDivot art. McDivot in "The Shining", as a flight inventor and a Chibi style character.

Tony Benedict has been posting a series of storyboards on his blog. These are from an episode of "The Jetsons" that he wrote.

He is posting a page a day of this story. there is nothing more fascinating to me than the thought process of creating art and story.

My fellow artists and creative folk should check this out!

thelastcartoonery.com

AC/DC - Gopher Style

Another very fun event we had was a set of classic album cover parodies. This time I collaborated with David Stevenson. Rather he collaborated with me. He gets full credit for making my messy drawing stellar!

I came up with this record-themed set thinking it would be quick and simple. All we needed was a square format to swap out the art and have a templated desktop area with a spread of vinyl albums.

Naturally I was wrong about the amount of time it would take. We artists often tend to be perfectionists and detail oriented. It took nearly a week longer than expected. Plus we added a 7th image just for the Facebook fans. It was worth massaging the schedule.

The final set was so well received by the fans... and the Fairway team...  that I can see doing this again in the future.

I had a tough time with some of the sketches in this full set. Most of the final pieces look more like the actual musicians instead of the McDivot cartoon characters. We thought we'd make them more caricatured but gopherized as if they were lifted from their world.

This is a cleaned up version of a sketchbook drawing for the AC/DC album parody. I cleaned it up so David could make sense of my chicken scratch ...

Take a look at how David leveled this up. Amazing! It goes to 11. No wonder his nickname is Dr. Detail. He made it look fabulous. On top of that he's an AC/DC fan so he really wanted to do this one.

I'm so glad we did this album. It has a perfect pun!

I work with a dream team of artists so collaborations are always a joy. There are no egos to battle with. We work off of each other and learn from each other. We've all become good friends.

Big Bang Theory - Gopher Style

I mentioned in an earlier post about collaborations with McDivot art. Here's one example.

We had a background event featuring a set of TV show parodies. One of the 6 shows featured was "The Big Bang Theory". I love this show. This one parody received quite a few lovely responses on our Fairway Solitaire Facebook page. We have the BEST fans!

Here is a basic breakdown of the colab' process with one of our background artists and part of the McDivot brain-trust, Sandie Chun.

Once we tallied votes on shows we began concepts. We decided it would be funny to feature Burnie the worm as Sheldon and create a lady worm as his girlfriend Amy. McDivot and Sandy (Sandy the gopher not Sandie the artist) are playing Leonard and Penny.

Sandie did this color concept image based on a common scene in the show where the characters are gathered on their trademark sofa eating dinner.

In order to bring the characters into the common McDivot style I did a trace over on velum (yes, I still use paper and pencil).

The next step was to do the ink work. Okay... here I used Photoshop. Not real ink. I recently started using a great plug-in called Lazy Nezumi. It cleans the ends of tapered lines and smooths out any shakiness as I draw. I love it. In retrospect I couldn't recall if Sandie wanted to use these inks but it did clean things up a bit for her to take over. I didn't want to lord over either Sandie's or David's art so I let them have at it in their own preferred way and it worked out beautifully.

Then she did her final rendering. Sandie has a very keen eye for color, composition, mood and atmosphere. I've always been more of a cartoonist than painter so it was very interesting to me to see someone else's style incorporated with my sketches. This is her final painting that went into the game.

Since we have a trio of artists, Sandie Chun, David Stevenson and myself we now tag-team more frequently and the results are amazing. I will post one of David's tag-team pieces soon.

Saint Patrick's Day Dash design

Here's a design I really enjoyed doing. It wasn't a cartoon so it was out of my comfort zone. But I still enjoyed the process (and thanks to Mark and Kristi for letting me use their computer since I didn't have one at the time).

I had a freelance project to design the 13th annual Seattle Saint Patrick's Day Dash T-shirt and poster designs. It did pay a whole lot but it was an amazing experience being in a race (yes, I used to run... sorta) where most of the participants were wearing my design.

Front and back.
The back design was also used on posters.
The front design was also used in a 1/2-hour TV show about the race.

Side note; when I went to sign up for the race at a local Seattle restaurant I got to meet Sonny Sixkiller who was also promoting the race. He even bought me a beer. 
How cool is that!