Skotopoi Studios

2009-07-03T22:16:00.001-04:00

Nubian Queen Lo La's is 1) amazing 2) amazing and 3) has great gumbo. 1815 Rosewood Ave, Austin TX

2009-06-23T02:41:00.003-04:00

http://ping.fm/vNDC4

2009-06-23T02:41:00.001-04:00

http://ping.fm/QhSkB

2009-06-20T13:28:00.001-04:00

Trying out Ping.fm It lets you broadcast your blogs/pics/whatever to multiple social networking sites. W00t

So tired.

2008-07-23T02:11:00.002-04:00

I'm nearly done with another freelance thing for BazaarVoice, which really wiped me out after a half-day at Fat Quarter Shop. I'm enjoying having work after the long dry spell after moving to Austin, but oh Lordy, I'm beat.

Updates

2008-07-19T16:52:00.002-04:00

I finished the aforementioned samurai painting, although it went through some compositional changes. It's on my site at www.skotopoi.com, and you should go have a look.

Also, I put a couple of ink drawings on my flickr. The stream shows across the top of my site. I've still got another decent ink drawing to scan, and a painting or two I'd like to finish, but the sense of urgency has backed off again now that the art show is up.

I also read The Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing, which was definitely a girl-oriented novel but not in such a way that it stopped me from enjoying it immensely, and Snow Falling on Cedars.
I believe I need a new book now.

What's up...

2008-07-01T21:38:00.002-04:00

I'm entering hell week. I wish I had some new art to post, but the (not so glamorous) web design work I've been doing is contractually protected and my paintings not even half-finished, and I've done little with lasting artistic value in the past couple of weeks. That should be changing a lot this week, as I enter a painting frenzy and generally bust ass trying to fulfill some promises I've made as a freelancer and a friend.

Side note: I recently read The Reader, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, Crooked Little Vein and Snuff, all of which were highly entertaining and edifying to various degrees. If you're twisted, read the last two. If ecclectic, read the second one. If a fan of high lit, just the first ought to do it without bringing down your opinion of me too badly.

To do list:

Paint a samurai killing zombies with a guitar.
Paint Godzilla, the hydra, and a robot toppling the statue of liberty.
Paint an icon-ish tarot card of the magician, Gabriel, and the serpent superimposed on each other.
Work on two websites.
Do a bunch of ads for tanning salons.
Keep going to work.
Level my poor, neglected druid, Dirdge.

Are you an average reader?

2008-06-28T03:37:00.004-04:00

In response to Ann Pittman's stupid meme post.

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well, let's see.
1) Bold the books you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Star the books you're reading/have read some of.
5) Copy, paste, & repeat.

32. I'm toning down my previous message of disdain, because Mishi just schooled me on the reading numbers. Also, Ann's post was not stupid, as it was one of the very rare meme posts I've chosen to respond to.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen (seen the movie)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky *
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck *
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis. *
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (seen the movie)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley *
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck *
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (seen the movie)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac *
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding (seen the movie)
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (seen the movie)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (seen the movie)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (seen the movie)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (seen the movie and musical)

More Fliers

2008-05-26T20:26:00.003-04:00

Stuff for Tyler, really simple black and white fliers for a couple of his shows.

Currently Reading

2008-05-03T04:03:00.001-04:00

Uhm. Picked up comics today. New Ex Machina. Vaughan continues to be pretty spectacular. Everyone on earth should pick up everything Brian K. V. writes, although, I’ll admit, skipping some episodes of Lost is not necessarily a bad idea.

Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis. Haven’t read a page yet, but I’m phenominally excited. The last bit of Ultimate Human was good, the most recent bit of Black Summer ditto. The man writes some brilliant shit, but he’s definitely one of those spastics who’s on his own wavelength and writes at his own pace, damned if you can’t keep up, and damned if you want some more.

Also I’ve been following Northlanders by Brian Wood. It’s my favorite thing he’s done next to Channel Zero so far. DMZ is all good, but the politics and character elements don’t sit as well together as I think they might. CZ was raw youth energy, full of hellfire and brimstone, and brilliant artistic commentary on the state of media and clean culture. Northlanders is a mature character piece with a great viking revenge story to move things along. Everything in between is a collection of brilliant musings, but none of those have the same capacity to move as raw ideology and raw humanity.

BTW, I finally made some headway on my own bit, tentatively titled “Blank”, on Thursday. Maybe someday I’ll get to post some superposh art here. We’ll find out.

Tyler Jordan and the tugboats?

2008-04-25T04:29:00.004-04:00

Here's a new flier for Tyler Jordan.

Soilent Diamond!

2008-04-21T01:48:00.001-04:00

It is exactly what it sounds like!

New Site?

2008-04-18T03:30:00.002-04:00

So I'm mostly done with skotopoi.com. Right now it has all the same content as this blog, since I just imported my posts. And it doesn't display well on IE 6. But if you're using Firefox, Safari, or IE7, I hope you'll be in for a treat. Comments enabled and everything. Run your mouse around the screen for some random light patterns. Talk to you guys soon, but I won't be back to posting much drawing until I've a) finished the site template and b) finished a whole bunch of print ads for some tanning places and the ink jet cartridge refilling chain in Michigan.

Although it's not all stuff I'm superproud of, the portfolio on creativeeyeball.com is almost all mine.

India's acid victims demand justice

2008-04-09T04:23:00.002-04:00

Courtesy of BBC News.

Reading this article made me feels weird and little dirty, understanding the desire to have revenge on someone when you get jilted, or spurned, or passed over.

I always assumed that the desire for power over someone who's just fucked you over (making it blatantly clear that you're not in control) was a gender-neutral trait. After reading the article, I wonder if the tendency is slightly gender-biased, or if the cultural relic of chauvinism just lends itself to this kind of abuse. Either way, reading about the horrible shit men are doing in the throes of that very familiar desire is fucking disturbing.

I hope we all grow up soon.

He said what? - politics and religion.

2008-04-06T16:56:00.002-04:00

"The fact is that America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed, and I believe September 11, 2001, was a generational call to arms that we can no longer ignore."
-Reverend Rod Parsley in his book, Silent No More (2005)

I found it through Mother Jones, which I'll grant my conservative friends, has a definite left bent; but this is a direct quote, and a heinous one. This douche is endorsing McCain, and although the title of the MJ article is a bit misleading (McCain called Parsely a "spiritual guide" At a rally where Parsely was standing next to him, which isn't quite the same thing as being a devoted follower of the man's ideas), it's always worrying to see major candidates courting wackos and wacko demographics because apparently, they think that's the face of America and will win their elections.

I'm a little bitter. I liked old McCain as much as I've ever liked a Republican. Now Ren can't stop showing me horrible news articles about him, and it's really disappointing.

Art! Kind of.

2008-04-05T02:14:00.005-04:00

I said I'd post something today. I don't know whether I like the overall colors better than the straight inked version, but it was a fun little sketch, and I enjoyed playing fast and dirty with photoshop, even if I didn't do anything grand. Let me know what you think!

Just added a bit more texture. Maybe it's getting somewhere. I'll know when I'm done.

Still just writing...

2008-04-04T01:25:00.002-04:00

Sorry I haven't put up any new art lately. I will soon. I just started a loose, quick pencil to brush pen thing that I'll hopefully post tomorrow; but my hands were becoming unsteady rather too quickly to get it done in one go.

I worry that I'm not cut out for this at times; what does it say about an artist that he has to stop mid-drawing because of his unsteady hands?

I was just reading someone else's thoughts on being unable to commit. On being a pussy. And while it's something I worry about, I think I'm ok with never quite feeling that I'm on "the path". Being sure of who you are and where you're going is a precursor to personal rigidity and the kind of harsh, steely strength that turns pillars among men into, well, assholes.

(I've had a theory for a while now that the laws of the prophets can basically be summed up thus: don't be an asshole.)

The point is, I hate myself sometimes for doubting even my most cherished goals and wishes. Maybe I won't manage to realize any of the dreams I've had so far. My inability to commit fully to a goal may be the same bastard cynic part of me that fails to commit to another person.

I'm proud to live in this middle ground. This is freedom from all security and stricture taken to a ridiculous extreme.

Don't mean to let these posts take on such solemn tones. I'll put up a fun deep sea diver tomorrow...

Omg pronounced "ahm-guh" - Want to be alarmed by the state of the nation?

2008-03-15T15:27:00.004-04:00

Granted, it was bound to be a polarizing show; but still, I am all for freedom of speech. I just disagree with the content"? Really?

Read http://www.metroland.net/back_issues/vol31_no11/art_murmur.html.

Sugar Skull submitted!

2008-03-14T15:12:00.001-04:00

Final version. Sorry for doing like 6 posts about this bastard, but this is the one that counts... Go to threadless and hook me up with some nice votes, or nice comments, at least.

Thanks!

Rock Flier

2008-03-11T18:41:00.002-04:00

On a side note, a silly drawing I did for a friend who plays music here in Austin made it onto his show flier. My friend Alicia's using it as her profile pic for now, so have a look.

Sugar Skull mark whatever and other projects

2008-03-11T18:38:00.002-04:00

Finished another round of revisions. The revisions were really light this time, so I'm not going to bother reposting anything here but the link to threadless. I'm feeling fairly good about it.

And I think I've figured out what my next personal, blog driven project will be - a customized igoogle theme.

And my website is almost done transitioning to a new server so i can start work on that can of worms.

Back to writing...

2008-03-03T15:57:00.002-05:00

Really content-light blog today. This weekend was Staple Independent Media Expo (read comic convention), and, although I shot myself in the foot by being hung over and irritable Saturday, I did manage to meet a few really cool creators.

Notably Paul Maybury, who lives in Austin and whose book, Aqua Leung, comes out on April 9th (I think). It's pretty. Also Nikki Cook, who has a book coming out sometime with Brian Wood called Dog's Day End.

All this by way of saying, it's embarrassing bitching about losing eight pages of work to people who turn out to make beautiful art like a kids eating candy. I'm sure it's hard work for them too, but wow. So I'm trying to get back to writing this afternoon, and it reminds me how much I miss being in school and having some guidance. I need to find a writing group and join some live drawing classes.

Self-Portrait

2008-02-29T15:26:00.005-05:00

Did this yesterday, afternoon/evening. I was a little frustrated with some of the drawbacks of speed painting. For instance, I painted a lot of really thick wet into wet, so it's going to take forever to dry and any mistakes I made (there are plenty) are going to be immortalized in big, raised brush strokes. Probably could've avoided it if I were a better painter, but still, overall, I'm happy with it. I'm hoping to get it over to Austin Figurative Gallery in time for inclusion in their self portrait show. The show automatically admits anyone who brings a painting, so I don't get any special bragging rights there; but it'll be a good way to meet some local artists.

Samurai vs. Zombie

2008-02-28T13:22:00.002-05:00

Here's what I'm working on right now. It won't be too fancy, it's on a pretty crappy particle board surface and not primed very well, but it's good practice. I'm going to put up the occasional WIP.

New Sugar Skull...

2008-02-23T16:07:00.002-05:00

Help me polish up my design!

I'd like this to be my first real Threadless submission, but I want to give it a serious workout on the critiques page. So head over to the critique and let me know what you think!

Here's the exact same image you'll find there...

Creativity?

2008-02-23T13:50:00.002-05:00

I've been feeling all rutty lately, so I'm blogging about somebody else's blog today. I found it through lifehacker.com. It's a blog of tips about ways to improve your creativity, and, once again, I've found that my roommates Ren and Alicia are already practicing this. Alicia especially lives by the tips about optimism and trying to relate in your environment to your chosen field. So kudos to you guys!

The original article is here.

P.S. I finished the second draft Sugar Skull, but I need to resize it and put it on a Threadless template before it goes live. You can see it here soon!

Sugar Skull T shirt

2008-02-14T14:30:00.002-05:00

So, I played with the Brown Sugar Skull some more, and put a critique up on Threadless just for fun. Here's the updated image...And here's the link to the Threadless critique. http://www.threadless.com/critique/15080/Bown_Sugar_Skull

Sugar Skull

2008-02-09T23:32:00.000-05:00

A sketch I did, probably to be embroidered or screen printed on a t shirt, but really just for s#!^$ and giggles, based on Mexican sugar skull designs. With a little bit of patterning from western embroidered cowboy shirts mixed in for good measure.

Western Space Samurai Revenge (and nude)

2008-02-09T17:50:00.000-05:00

Here's yet another sketch of my scifi revenge story protagonist. I don't have a name for her yet.
And I'm also posting a quick pen study of a nude from an photographic reference book.

My Guitar Hero axe

2008-02-09T17:48:00.001-05:00

Custom paint job on my Wii guitar. You have no idea how helpful this is when rocking out.

Table-top Sketch

2008-01-23T14:45:00.000-05:00

My roomies had the bright idea of covering the dining room table with brown paper so guests could draw on it. We were just sitting around playing Magic and doodling a couple of nights ago, and this was what I got out of it...

A few more sketches

2008-01-23T14:39:00.001-05:00

The pen sketch is Oliver, Ren and Alicia's cat, sleeping. The other two are both from bar-drawing, on two separate occasions.

Doodles

2008-01-23T14:36:00.001-05:00

I've had several really long phone calls at work this week, so I've been doodling while I've been taking to you guys. A lot. Here are a couple.

Embroidery?

2008-01-23T14:30:00.000-05:00

Alicia got an embroidery machine for Harts 'N Crafts, so I've been doing some simple-ish patterns to try it out on, on the back of a work shirt or on a messenger bag or something. I actually got to try out the heart and crossbones already, but only on a necktie, so it was really too small for the amount of detail and doesn't read very well at all...

Character design

2008-01-23T14:21:00.001-05:00

This is a 2nd round draft for a character for an inkjet cartridge refilling chain...

New website graphic

2007-12-16T17:46:00.001-05:00

Here's a little something I've been playing with.
It's not nearly finished, but I've been working on the beginnings of the art for my next website iteration; and I've been playing with some techniques from a Photoshop seminar I went to with Ren.

So everything here is 100% digital, all custom brushes and layer styles.

Vector Abstract

2007-10-25T20:50:00.001-04:00

I just finished a long musing on what music might look like if visualizers interpreted songs intelligently and used something like style-sheets to present them. This was purely a free-time project, playing with Illustrator and Photoshop and finally pegging in a musically inclined, slightly trippy friend to give the piece a clearer focus. Thanks to Mark Erickson for the modeling!

And great thanks to Paul Burgess for having a killer website of texture photos (the background image) for free!
Urban Dirty

Kali finished?

2007-10-13T22:07:00.001-04:00

I think I'm finished with Kali, at least for now. Which is good, 'cuz I need to start penciling "Drama Queen" fast if I want to meet my self-imposed deadline. I do wish I had a better background, but that can wait a while...

character sketches for "Drama Queen"

2007-10-10T01:34:00.000-04:00

I'm trying to hold myself to a rigid schedule of an eight-page story per month. Here are the sketches for a few characters for my first attempt...

Kali pin-up

2007-09-30T22:47:00.001-04:00

This is a work in progress of a pin-up that's gotten dangerously scandalous. I just felt like coloring something on the computer.

Self-portrait

2007-09-30T22:46:00.001-04:00

I was just trying for a very simple style after reading the graphic novel, Blankets.

Samurai Western Sci-Fi

2007-09-30T22:37:00.000-04:00

I'm really only batting around character and scene ideas right now, but I want to do a samurai revenge story in a space-western setting sometime.

I've been playing with ideas for the female lead, whose family was murdered by a corporate aristocracy. She's alien, but humanoid, with her father's guns and precious few shells left for them. The guns are antiques, but she's sworn to take revenge on the man who ordered her father's death with those weapons and no other.

Because of the limited ammunition, she's attached blades to the grips of both guns, so she can use them as short swords. She wears a mask, and has a couple of neon "banners" hanging from her back, which on the backwater planets form a warning sign. The banners contain coded information that a) she's hunting someone and b) she's carrying deadly weapons. They're mandatory for people living in the semi-lawless future who intend to commit acts of violence in a populated area.

That does it for the back story.
Here's round 1:

and here's round 2:

Some photos from China

2007-09-21T14:42:00.000-04:00

These are some photoshopped versions of my vacation photos from this summer. I just played with making some panoramas and combining AEB photos.

A merged version of a couple of photos, trying to combine the vivid color of the lamps (normally blown out) with some of the detail of the walkways and buildings.

The stone forest, in one of the more dramatic canyon-esque areas.

The terracotta soldiers, a bitch to merge, so there are still some glitches...

The forbidden city.

Here are some grown men flying amazing kites. Two of the kites are easily visible above the trees, but there are another three tiny specks floating way up in the clouds. Because the background and figures were pretty complicated, I didn't bother cleaning up the photomerge here.

The stone forest. Not the most dramatic part of it, but a pretty hot landscape anyway.

2007-03-06T15:14:00.000-05:00

Here are a couple of goofy sketches I did, practicing emulating a super skinny, 50s-60s cocktail party thing. A couple of my sketches came out more cartoonish than I would've like, but it was an interesting draw...

2007-03-06T15:11:00.000-05:00

This is a loose sketch I did with the intent of polishing it and submitting it for a local clothing company. But they weren't very receptive to my first round of illo ideas, so I switched gears and I've just been working on logos for them. I intend to finish it up a bit and submit it to threadless, but I kind of like the unfinished look. It was a fun, quick sketch, and I still have a couple of other urban concepts I worked up that I quite liked; so the jeans company work wasn't a total bust.

Lecture sketches

2007-03-06T15:02:00.000-05:00

Here are some sketches I did while "listening" to a lecture by classical realist painter, Anthony Ryder. He came up the the college I graduated from and did a workshop in addition to having a gallery showing. I didn't get to go to the workshop, and, honestly, classical realism isn't normally my thing; but his figure and portrait work was really amazing. And he seemed like a very nice, genuine guy even if he artistic mission wasn't anything crazy or novel. Plus, it gave me an excuse to sit still and draw with a pen for an hour. The unbearded-one is a professor at Hillsdale College, simply a spectator, like me.

Cavoni's menu

2007-02-14T16:17:00.000-05:00

Finally, a new menu for a local pizza and grinders place. Again, I'm pushing my recent project to include more of my own drawing, even if (in this case) it's only as a backdrop...

Rumble Rock!

2007-02-14T16:16:00.000-05:00

This is for a combo hardcore show and live wrestling event for a local all-ages club. I actually got to do significant original artwork for this one, so I was hella excited...

Malibu tan

2007-02-14T16:12:00.000-05:00

Here's a direct mail piece I finished recently, one of those "everybody wins" scratch offs for the local tanning franchise. Ian Bernard, who hooks me up with a lot of my work, definitely gets some credit for suggestions on color and general eye-popping direct-mail gaudiness. In a good way, but it's not how I'd do it on my own...

Birthdays!

2007-01-09T02:37:00.000-05:00

Not mine, my mom's. I did a sketch for her and inked it. It's not at all photographically perfect, but it was fun and quicker than I expected.

X-Men redesigns now. I'm on a nerd roll...

2007-01-01T03:38:00.000-05:00

So, I'm thinking about doing some x-men redesigns as custom action figures. Here are a couple of my sketches.

I wanted to play up Magneto's intensity as a holocaust survivor, disregard for the mores and culture of homosapien civilization, and messianic charisma. I figure, in direct opposition to the comic book portrayal of every superpowered character EVER, Magneto would few things like physical fitness as weak, vain references to human limitations. Who needs pathetic muscle when you can reshape the world around you with your mysterious magnet-powers? He used to look even more like a Christ reference with a barbed-wire halo, but I thought it was overkill. It may come back, though.

I'm also redesigning Beast, first of all focusing on a hodgepodge of beastly animal types to make him something indefinable but definitely animal rather than simply making him a blue furry werewolf/gorilla hybrid. (Grant Morrison already moved him in this direction, and I stole pretty shamelessly from his and Frank Quitely's design.) Secondly, I figured that as a biologist/chemist rather than a techie, it'd be fun to show him using his scientific knowledge to compensate for his lack of certain human characteristics like nimble fingers; so he became a sort of self-created Frankenstein's monster. I'm coloring this one too, but it's not done.

Well, that's it for now. Questions and comments welcome.

Final Fantasy fan art? That can't be right...

2006-12-01T11:47:00.000-05:00

OK, it kind of is. I was just messing around some more with the dry pastels, but I feel like I'm stuck in a cartoony rut, and I need to work on that. But here's the sketch anyway.

Happy Thanksgiving all!

2006-11-27T12:32:00.000-05:00

Yeah, there's no new artwork. For those of you who actually check this blog, I just wanted to say Thanksgiving was fun, and I made it to Phoenix to see my folks and my brother and sister; but I still miss Austin and I wish I could've hung out with my friends there. Oh, well. Current estimates indicate I can manage a visit early-ish next summer.

Hope everyone's turkey-day, or tofurkey-day, or just heinous injustice against indigenous
people's day went really well! Unless you were celebrating the latter by means of reenactment, in which case I hope you die of herpes.

2006-11-18T14:17:00.000-05:00

Here's the last one... Actually the first one I did...

Sketches

2006-11-18T14:13:00.000-05:00

I've put this stuff up on my website too. It's just a few sketches I did in Walmart and at the local college's snack bar while I was waiting for Kendra to finish a paper. I've been trying to work in the traditional comic book mold of blueline rough to pencil finishes to inks. But these are just tiny sketches, nothing too ambitious.

Website and comics

2006-11-12T14:40:00.000-05:00

I've had a decently productive week. The website redesign is up, but I'm still working out a few window size and gallery issues. The content should all be good, though. Also, I got another page of The Optimist finished, and page 3 is inked, but I'm still working on it. So, without further ado...

My website's up!

2006-11-02T12:43:00.000-05:00

I just got my first website up and running. It's based on a slightly old design, and needs more color; so I'll be designing a new one right away; but for now, I'm pretty excited.

Action figure silliness

2006-10-30T21:56:00.000-05:00

OK, I guess I have too much time on my hands. Here's a customized figure of X-Force / X-Statix's character the Orphan that I made out of a Star Wars figure, some marine epoxy putty, and acrylic paint.

Portrait over lunch

2006-10-29T20:41:00.000-05:00

This one's not very polished, and some of the proportion is off too, because I did it on a placemat with a ballpoint pen and highlighters. That's Kendra, my fiance.

Menu work

2006-10-26T15:51:00.000-04:00

One more boring commercial piece for now. Although, this one was a lot more fun and I got to try to bring a little more design into it. It's the front and back cover for a drinks and desserts menu for a local Italian place.

The Optimist

2006-10-26T15:48:00.000-04:00

This is the first "colored," inked page of my first comics project, a little 11-page story about a cowboy-type who's so wrapped up in his personal, very upbeat, philosophy that he ignores the fact that his actions screw over everyone around him. Page 2 is inked, but not colored, and I have pencils for another couple of pages, but I'll post as I finish things.

Tanning card

2006-10-26T15:46:00.000-04:00

Here are a couple of commercially oriented things I've been doing lately. Not my favorite, most original stuff, but at least I get a little work now and then. This one's just a rewards punch card for the local tanning salon. The design hasn't been approved yet, but as soon as it is, I'll buy the rights to the photo in the background and re-post.

My Studio

2006-10-26T12:25:00.000-04:00

My graphic design business stuff is largely dull, but here's a sample of what I've been up to in the last couple of weeks. First of all, my proposed business card, which needs an web site built to match it still. I made up the word Skotopoi from a few Greek roots, so it can mean "dark little things," but it also has its roots in the modern word for black and white, low-light vision. I found it appropriate since I want to do comics, most likely low-budget black and white ones for a while, and it keeps the theme of the dark little things involved, since I like to work a little cynical of center.