Such a comfortable goddamn hoodie, too.

I could have sworn I blogged about this before, but  I didn’t. Fail me.

So, who remembers cthulhu cupcakes? Well, they now exist in both Tshirt AND hoodie form, immortalized in all their non-euclidean glory.

As part of my internship, the lovely people of Prism Sportswear gave me the opportunity to design and print my own Tshirt. I agonized over what to do for a while, not wanting to do art of anything that might give me copyright issues and so on. Eventually, I settled on The Cupcake.

I drew up the art in illustrator. Then I did the color separations, printed the films, and even burned the screens myself! (With the help of Mr. Printer Expert, Hank.) I did most of the actual printing, too, and holy crap, they look amazing. I made some regular tshirts, a ringer tshirt, and this hoodie, which because of the color contrast, is my favorite.

I’m kind of still working out where to go from here. I loved the process, I LOVE seeing the finished product- seriously, I can’t get over how great they look. But I’m at a loss as far as selling shirts, which is what I ultimately want to do. I definitely want to hit up some conventions or something, maybe not with this design (or maybe with!) but beyond that.. it’s just new territory. But it’s exciting!

Closeup so y'all can see how clean the print is. Hank = Amazing.

The Guilt Monster hit me yesterday, and would not be satisfied until I cleaned all the things, baked some (more) donut muffins, and made some art. So, I made some art.

As I do pretty much any time I “need” to make art but don’t have any ideas (and don’t want to do World of Warcraft Fanart..) I dug around the internets for some kind of reference image. Truth be told, I was looking for some interestingly hot woman to draw, but even after I passed up the image that inspired this illustration, I just sort of.. kept giggling about that old lady and her glasses.

So, here we are. First time I’ve really done an illustration like this I think. I spent so long totally avoiding/hating line (influence of my chiaroscuro obsessed high school art teacher, I tell ya) and yet.. I really like this a lot. I’ll definitely do more of these (eventually.)

Anyway, thanks to Thomas Hawk on Flickr for taking such a neat photo and offering it under creative commons! (PS: I just read about his $2 portraits project under that photo, and it is really cool. Check it out!)

Ahh, less than a week into playing World of Warcraft again and I’m already doing fanart. I can’t help myself!

This is one of my many alts, my draenei shaman Mounanchou. She’s only level 52, and yet somehow manages to look TOTALLY AWESOME. First colored fantasy art I’ve done in .. a really long time, failed paintings from that painting class aside.

That boy looks like a neckless turtle-child.

I haven’t been posting a lot of art, but believe me, I’ve been making it!

First of all, there’s the dailybean, which I tweet every day. Well, I draw one FOR every day.. I haven’t been spectacular about doing it daily, per se. Anyway, if you don’t have a twitter, you can always check the above link every few days for beany silliness.

I’ve also been interning at Prism Sportswear, which has been basically the best thing ever. I love it. I get to make a ton of art for real clients. This stuff ends up on Tshirts that people BUY. And WEAR!

The drawing on the left is one of the more exciting illustrations I’ve done at Prism. Technically the shirt was one color, and I’m not even 100% sure that this got used, but I really enjoyed drawing it. I love drawing kids.

Tee hee, butt!

I still really really wanted to do a painting by Peter Paul Rubens, but none of my books had a good image with a naked lady. So I did some naked guys, instead. This is a very tiny excerpt from the very enormous The Fall of the Damned, which must - wow - be really intense in person. (The figures I did are from the left/middle.)

This time, it’s all watercolor. I’m much less comfortable doing stuff like this with watercolor than I am with watercolor pencil, I think in part because I’m just more comfortable with drawing. But I didn’t even do a sketch for these, I went straight to paint. (Well, I made light outlines with paint.)

Anyway, I’m super happy with most of this. Working on it, I realized one huge strength of the moleskine watercolor paper- it’s super easy to pick watercolor pigment back up off of it and bring back highlights. Really useful for getting muscle detail in the back.

I kinda want to refine this into an illustration suitable for a t-shirt.

Finally remembered I was posting these prints on my blog. Here’s another one of the robot prints, a little less overloaded than a few of the others.

The halftone pattern was achieved by doing this weird trick with xeroxes. You rub gum arabic into a xerox, then get it wet and the ink only sticks where the toner is and you can print with it. I had a hell of a time making it work at first, turns out I wasn’t using enough easy-wipe with my ink. It’s still finicky and not really my favorite thing to do, but I think the results are really interesting. If I recall correctly, I made up these shapes from a different image I’d wanted to use, but had ripped to shreds in the process.

More work in the moleskine! I really want to work on my anatomy / observational skills this summer, and one way I want to practice that (and get a better handle on color) is by copying some master paintings. Mostly nudes, cuz.. well I like nudes.

This is based off of Bather Arranging her Hair by Renoir. He’s not actually one of my favorite painters - or so I thought - but I was really captivated by his use of color in this painting. It describes the light on the skin so beautifully, so warm and soft. I’m going to have to give his work a closer look now.

This one is all watercolor pencil. Overall I’m pleased, especially with the top left corner and the lower portion. The hair and head is.. off and clumsy, I need to work on mixing darks. So difficult.

NOT SCHOOL ART. Yessss. This is the first in what I hope will be a series of small watercolor pieces/studies, all done in my moleskine watercolor book. Those who know me are aware that I’m not the biggest fan of moleskines. I tend to think they’re overpriced, overexposed, and way too small for my purposes. (I sketch big! What can I say?) But I had been intrigued by the watercolor varieties, since I do love working in watercolor and watercolor pencil. Well, at the end of the semester everyone in my illustration class was given a shiny new moleskine, and that gave me a chance to try out this watercolor sketchbook stuff!’

This piece is a self-portrait I did in a few hours. I went back and forth between liking and hating it so many times during the course of making it, I don’t even know. It’s definitely muddy and overworked in some places, but I am really pleased overall with the light, particularly on the left.

We were assigned to make 6 small spot illustrations for an article about Twitter and Milwaukee. Specifically we were pretty much illustrating some tweets about Milwaukee.

Since I like drawing people above all else, I drew some people. 6 people (well, 5 and a statue) that you’re likely to find around Milwaukee. Ink and watercolor.

Hey, finally got around to posting another print from class.

This is probably one of my favorites. About half my prints have these little robot guys in them. The first one came from a picture of the Tin Man. I wanted to use it, but not just straight up cut out the Tin Man and stick it on my piece. So, I cut out his torso, but gave him skinny legs and a big ol’ square head. And it turned into a silly robot and I drew them approximately 800 more times.

This print started out as one of my favorites, and then I killed it. You can’t see any of what was there originally- I obliterated it with other colors and textures. I was totally lost, and then I realized- there’s white ink! And I can use it!

So I did, and it went back to being one of my favorites. I love how you can see the texture behind the white. And the simplicity kinda reminds me of petroglyphs.