Underwear Dance Party

Nipples are a weird thing to draw, you don't want to put too much thought into them but you can't really just throw them on. This was a lot of fun. mostly just throwing all the random things in the background. Also if someone wants to name all 4 albums featured in the piece I'll throw some sort of prize for your way.

Last year I really wanted to do a post a day but that ended up being entirely unrealistic with moving across the country and everything else, so I've decided to try this a little differently this year. I feel like setting the bar at at least once a week is much more realistic.

Wizard People

I went to see Deathly Hallows Part 1 opening weekend and it was really great and made me want to do some Harry Potter art. I in no way feel ashamed to occasionally indulge my geekier tendencies. Can't wait until July for part 2.
When I was drawing the original for this one of my staff saw me working and assumed I was working on a self portrait, I'm not entirely sure how to take that since I'm pretty sure i'd make a lousy Ginny Weasley.

This even has two figures who are, in fact, actually touching; progress, progress

He seems like a respectable chap.

Back from my brief vacation to Baltimore, had a chance to get some work done while I was there and then finished this one up over the last few days.

Time to make a change

It's been kind of a wild year what with grad school and moving back and forth between continents a couple of times and now doing the whole job hunt thing (p.s. if any knows of somewhere looking for a jr designer, assistant creative director, or that sort of thing please get in touch where isn't so much an issue as I'm looking to move somewhere else anyways).

So I was kind of awful at posting on a regular basis in 2009 so my biggest resolution for the year is to drastically change that. Since the goal is to make illustration my actual job it's time to start treating it as such so my goal for this year is a new post every day monday through friday. Just at least something; a quick sketch, progress shot, preferably something more substantial.

Right so lets kick this thing off, lately I've been at quite a loss for ideas lately and I realized that I've never done the illustrate classics type of assignments so it's as good a place to start as any. I've been working on this first one (Alice in Wonderland) for a week or so, restarting several times.



Some sketches trying to get the look of characters right.




Okay so I got the drawing and then decided to go straight to the coloring without inking, most because I was feeling lazy.



Ultimately I decided that was a mistake because when it came to actually doing the line work on my tablet things just looked wrong.



And I scrapped it and spent a good deal of time today inking this and plan to move onto coloring it next.


Bonus: here's another fashion-y girl drawing I realized after scanning it and looking at it again that the legs are wrong, but the parts look pretty okay on their own.

What a beautiful face I have found in this place.

Okay so I've been trying to wrap up the work for my course for the past few weeks and while working on that realized that I needed one more painting for the exhibition because:
1. Some of the earlier ones weren't as strong
and
2. May as well because I had the time.
Anyways here the final piece of work going towards my masters degree. This is one of the loosely based on a song type illustrations, more specifically for Neutral Milk Hotel's "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea", except less plane and sea and more spaceship and cosmos. I've been obsessed with the song forever, way to many memories and such come along with it, and I'm kind of surprised I hadn't thought of using it sooner. Also was one of the biggest contributors to my picking up the ukulele (long story).
So I'll be constructing/installing the exhibition for the next week or so and then it runs from the 18th-28th (full details below). So if you happen to be in Brighton or somewhere in the UK and want a holiday, or more impressively somewhere else in the world and want an even bigger holiday you should show up.

Rounded a corner and rounded corners.

Okay so I'm settled back in the UK for a while as I finish up my MA and after a couple of moves I'm finally stationary enough that I've been able to get back to work. So here's a new painting that I've done over the last few days.
I'm still having some trouble getting the colors to reproduce digitally so I may need to play around with it a bit more.

It's no secret to people who know me that I'm a fan of rounded corners, I was sitting at my desk last night and had this moment of I wonder what my stuff would look like with rounded corners thus this happened:

I think that I might actually prefer it with the rounded corners and may try adding it to some other things that I've done.

New Minicomic

Here's a minicomic I did a week or so ago for an mass drawing exchange and I thought that I post it here to share as well. It ends up being 8 pages and was accordion bound so it could be easily folded out. Looking at it now I think I really like the idea but would like it to be longer and not quite as rushed so I'm hoping to have time to redo/improve it sometime.

The Inhumans In Love

So I had a few down days earlier this week while I was waiting for a end of term review and decided to do something for fun. I've had this idea lately of not especially heroic super hero moments. So in this case kind of a timid love things going on with Black Bolt and Medusa. For those who are not especially familiar with the characters the important bit to know is that Black Bolt doesn't speak because his voice makes everything explode and tends to level cities and such. I think I kind of love second tier superheroes like a whole bunch, maybe I can do some Alpha Flight stuff at some point what with my childhood love of that premier Canadian super group.

Anyways I leave for my visit back to the states of Thursday so posting may be sporadic for a bit again.

Graphic Novel First Look

Okay so I've been promising a peek at the graphic novel I'm working on for a while so now that it's more or less in it's final stages (hopefully) I've decided to throw a few spreads up here. Trying to pick out stuff that doesn't ruin the story but is still interesting. Also leaving out all the text blocks and text for now even though it's basically taken care of, basically if there's a large white space imagine that there's text there. Expect a few more of these type's of post in the near-ish future as I continue to feel like sharing. Note these won't necessarily be posted in any particular order until I do a big here a final pdf type post sometime in the future.

Valkyrie

Hey there, well I finished the painting for my book last night and all that's left is to figure out a cover, scan everything and the graphic design and type forever. I'm hoping to get all the pages scanned at some point this week so I may throw a few preview pages up here at some point.

In the meantime here's something that I did last week that I just got around to editing for the web. I needed a break from the book so I took a day off to just work on something else and had this sketched out from a little bit ago. Something funny happened to the background color when it was scanned that I can't seem to fix so just imagine it more magenta-y. So now that my life isn't as consumed with my absurd book-page-finishing schedule hopefully the updates can be a bit more frequent, as I'm sure I'll need a fair amount of breaks from the editing and layout processes.

Oh and also t minus 26 days until my US visit/vacation/temporary reprieve.

Houndstooth is really hard.

Here is as promised one of those sporadic postings that I had promised a bit ago so that you know that I haven't fallen down a well or something. This was done for an exhibition which ultimately fell through, but at least I managed to get a piece I liked out of it.

There hasn't been much time for anything else new as of late as I am in the midst of my book and it's absurd self imposed deadline. Basically right now it amounts to 2 finished fully painted pages a day for the next what feel like forever so that I can have most of the artwork done before my visit back to the US. Maybe I'm post a few teasers here and there as I start to scan some of it. I feel like I should have some sort of sign off phrase for these post.

I don't even like Captain America...

So I managed to finish that paper surprisingly early and have a couple of down days since it doesn't make sense to work on my thesis work until I have the meeting with my adviser on Thursday, anyways long story short here's something new that was just for fun and has no real relation to anything else I'm doing.

I've never really been one to draw superheroes (with the exception of those occasional project rooftop submissions last summer) but I seem to have be reading a bunch of superhero books lately and was introduced to a couple of really great new animated show that are gorgeous (spectacular spider from the equally spectacular Sean Galloway and batman the brave and the bold, go watch them now they're really pretty and fun). I'm not sure why I choose Captain America, especially since he's always been one of my least favorites, usually him and superman pretty much top my list. I have to admit that I didn't really know any Captain America villains so I just used the wonderful all purpose henchmen of HYDRA. Oh and since there were way to many dudes I also put in Madame Hyrda, who I only know about because she's in a episode of X-men Evolution which I really like, shut up it's awesome. As always feedback is awesome.

In which Tyler makes excuses and pretends to be a comic artist.

Howdy everyone, so I'm gearing up for end of term slash mid point of my course over here and as such have spent the past few weeks doing completely unfun things printing out everything bit of research and sketch that I've done in the last six months, cobbling together a reasonable in progress portfolio and now writing an obnoxiously long paper, which I am mid way through now and not sure when it'll be done (well before Wednesday I suppose since that's when I have to turn it in).

Anyways those are my super lame excuses for nothing new recently, however I do have this comic I did a little bit ago. I was asked by a friend of mine at SVA to submit a one pager for a comic collection he's working on. No info on the title or when it'll actually see the light of day right now but I'll keep you updated. This was a bit of an odd experience for me since I don't really have any experience in doing comics (I tend to be more on the reading way too many of them side) but it was fun nonetheless. So here it is, hopefully legit new stuff soon.

Littliest Bird finish

Here's the finish to this one in all it's washed out blogger glory, but that seems to be a problem for everyone so I'm not going to worry about it. If anyone has any thoughts they are as always appreciated. I think I may take a bit of a break from these for right now and focus on creating an overarching narrative of some sort rather than these one shots, so expect sporadic posting for a bit again.

The Littlest Birds (Sing the Prettiest Songs)

Okay so after a few weeks of distraction with class and some other opportunities I'm finally back on track with my actual project. Here's what I'm working on right now based on the Be Good Tanya's song The Littlest Birds (Sing the Prettiest Songs). Hoping to get it banged out in the next few days.

Maple Leaves finish... finally

Okay so here's the finish that I promised over a week ago, apparently I did manage to get distracted. And by distracted I mean started the painting over because I didn't like the colors followed by a quick-ish freelance piece for the Texas Observer (I'll post it sometime after the issue comes out). Maybe I need to jinx myself more often, I could get used to a little more of this sort of distraction, the paying freelance kind not so much the having to restart midway through bit. Anyways what you think people of the internet? Thanks and hopefully more soon.

She said it was all make-belief, but I thought you said maple leaves...

Here's the latest, it's based on the Jen Lekman song "Maple Leaves", hoping to have the final done in the next few days unless I get distracted.

They are zombies!... Finish

Here's the latest. There are bits of this I'm really excited about, I like the really minimal line work and am trying to figure out the balance between this and the really pattern-y stuff like the last painting. I've also recently discovered mixing a bit of concentrated watercolor in with the gouache which really makes the colors pop, though you can't really tell in the scan on this one the pink is a bit brighter than it appears on screen (and even worse once publish to the web, anybody have any suggestion on how keep images from being washed out when put up here?). General thoughts/feedback/etc? Thanks everyone and expect more soon.

EDIT: Thanks to Mark and Justin for their help with the color problems, still needs a little tweaking but a vast improvement.

They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back From The Dead!! Ahhhh!

Here's the latest sketch this one's for "They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back From The Dead!! Ahhhh!" by Sufjan Stevens, this may have just been an excuse to draw zombies. You know the drill final to come if it doesn't suck.

You and I finish

Here's the final for that sketch I put up a few days ago, still trying to get a hang of this painting business but I think there's some improvement here. Mostly just trying to get this whole using a brush for line work thing. I'm still at the point where I like the sketches more than the finals but I'm going to get the hang of this if it kills me. As always feedback is really appreciated and more to come soon.