The One Free Man...

Having finished Mass Effect, I finally sunk some time into The Orange Box the other night, and blew through Episode I and II in about 1 sitting. God damn do I love the Half-Life series. Portal and Team Fortress are pretty rad too, but the Half-Life games are the highlight of the package for me. I find that storyline more compelling than, say, Star Wars, and they're pinnacles of the medium to boot. Anyway, I wanted to draw some stuff from the series by hand, but it was too busy at work with finals and shit for me to feel comfortable with people potentially looking over my shoulder. I decided to just goof off in Illustrator piece by piece when I had time. Nothing amazing. The final version is my new avatar on bombunists.com, but I figured since I hadn't posted here in awhile (or even looked at it, sorry for the lack of comments on my part, bros) I'd post up another WIP. I don't know why I share these, they're just fun for me to look at sometimes and see how I went about making whatever P.O.S. I'm shilling.

This is a big image, so click to see the full version.



Do you like the way I skipped a huge chunk of steps where I kept tweaking, adding and removing details? Haven't you learned vast insight into my work process? YOU'RE WELCOME.

I bet I think this pictures about me

en espanol por favor

doodleydoo part 2... while at a meeting

I did this when I probably should have been paying closer attention to the work.. (I did take some notes though)

Mars pic

Here's my sorry contribution to that John Carter of mars book I mentioned to you a few weeks ago.

I draw stuff thumbtimes

Blogunists

We have this blog that we use at work to keep all of the students and staff up to date on important University happenings that we may receive a lot of questions about. Back in the day, I used to be one of the primary contributors, both in writing the posts and maintaining the site. As of this semester, I've pretty much taken a back seat to let someone else have a stab at it. For a couple of years we had this really generic template in place that I threw together in Photoshop. It was yellow and green Mason colors with photos of the campus, the Johnson Center...it was pretty fucking lame. Now that it's in new hands, we figured we'd redesign the look a bit to match the current "theme" we have going on at work. The theme is "The J-Team" and we deck out all of our shit with A-Team or military style decor. The current show runner assembled the one that's in place at the moment, but he asked me if I wanted to contribute anything. I had grand plans of a propaganda styled background, but I couldn't get it to work out in a way that I was happy with. I cobbled together the left over assets I'd made into this half assed monstrosity:



It's entirely too busy and confusing. Graphic design is not something I have any talent for, though it is something I'm constantly wanting to research and improve upon. Anyway, I was supposed to leave work 5 minutes ago, so I'm shutting the fuck up.

I guess if we ever get around to redesigning the Bombunists site, I've got a load of assets we can use in a pinch.

doodleydoo

Here's a tarzan looking dude I drew... (while driving in rush hour traffic on 395)



and this was some sort of concept I was working on of the "R&D lab at the Scudco factory" I think I was originally hoping if I came up with some really inventive, I would make a very well crafted version that I would submit it to Rob in the far flung hope of getting it printed in the pin up gallery of the new Scud book. after a few minutes, I gave up on it.

Stumptown

Margaret and I went to the Stumptown Comics Fest this past weekend. Above is simply an artist's rendition of an actual exchange of dialog at said fest.

Fuck you, Gunston!

The editor of Mason's newspaper, The Broadside, saw my facebook gallery and asked if I would do some cartoons for the paper. "Sure" I said. Why not, it's good for a resume (ha!) right? Well, they needed one by Monday, and since I'm leaving straight from work tonight to go to Myrtle Beach, that means I had about 2 hours to get the first one done. Fuck. I also took all of my art supplies out of my bag so I could use it to pack. All I had was a ballpoint pen and Photoshop. Fuck fuck. Anyway, I say all this not to excuse my shoddy work, just to...ok, yeah, excuse my shoddy work. It was a rush job! I didn't have my fancy ass brush pens, colored leads and Microns! The articles sharing page space were about our mascot, Gunston, possibly being replaced, and something about tasers on campus. I combined the two:



(click to biggerize)

Originally, I, of course, had Gunston getting tasered right in the cajones, which is why he's posed that way, but then I thought maybe I shouldn't get fired before I'm ever even really hired, so I flipped him around and stuck it in his ass instead (if I had a nickle...).

Whatever, I'm going to the beach.

learning illustrator

This was my first attempt at drawing a picture in Illustrator (and trying to learn how to actually use the program) I had to check out a few tutorials. This image was for a magician friend who was putting together a "magic barmitzvah" website. He requested that I redo the face to make the kid look younger. I haven't gotten around to that yet.

Face Off...

I know this doesn't really take much technical ability, but I haven't drawn in weeks and I felt shamed by the recent (to me anyway) activity here. There was a month or two there where I posted every few days or so, I don't want to fall back to my old routine of posting once a month. I really want to make it a point to study more graphic design theory, because let's face it, this cluster fuck of shapes and hues in the background is like a technicolor dagger to the eyes.




The white globs everywhere are my avant garde, symbolic representation of semen. Artsy!

(click to get rid of the jaggies)

Agamemnon

Some stupid comics I made

(He's Magneto, Get it?)

Pottery...

I think this is going to take awhile. I want to make sure I do a half way decent job, so, I'm trying to take the time to draw some characters, then refine them and play around until I get something I like. Mo' experimentin':





I was kinda happy with the colored version of Voldemort, from a stylistic point of view, until Kevin told me he looks too much like a zombie and needs to look more like a snake. A snake? I didn't know about that shit. Kevin needs to look more like a mindless kiss ass and less like a fucker. I'm in an awkward position, because I don't want to just do caricatures of the movie actors, but I don't read the books, so I don't know what's an essential detail to include, or what's allowed and what's not allowed when trying to do my own thing. Of course, I still haven't figured out WHAT I'm drawing or who's going in it, so maybe I should work on a composition first. I dunno, like I said, this is going to take awhile.


And I drew Ron as a fatass.


And yeah, that was supposed to be Ron.

Dumbledorks...

So, Suzy has this desktop wallpaper on her work computer of a Prince image I drew about a bazillion years ago that I fucking HATE. The likeness is bad, the coloring is bad, the drawing is bad. It's bad. I keep asking her to change it, but she says she won't until I draw her something else to replace it. I didn't know what else to do, as I don't really want to draw Prince again, so, I figured with Pottermania sweeping the world, and Suzy being a fan of the material, perhaps I'd try giving some of those characters a shot. Below is my very rough, preliminary explorations of some of those muggle fuckers.








The scan quality is shit, as I had to adjust the hell out of my levels in Photoshop to get my super light red pencils to even show up. My goal is to eventually have at least Harry, Snape, Dumbledore and Voldemort in the image, but if I'm feeling ambitious, maybe I'll try to work an owl, or Ron and Hermoine, or Spock or Gimli or one of the other characters I presume are in the books (that I don't read) in there somewhere. But yeah, I think I'm going to try and document my progress here in the blog.

My progress which will probably stop here, because really, how often do I ever finish anything?

Avatard...

Sorry to double post in one day. Made this tonight in Illustrator using a mouse. It's pretty goddamned hard to "freehand" in that program without a tablet, so excuse the hands and the overly circular head. Also excuse the fact that my pants are down and my junk is on glorious display. I cropped it out, but it's there. Oh, it's there.



(EDIT: Well fuck me, I just realized I uploaded a messed up version where the "paint drips" of the graffiti style bomb logo totally don't match the rest of the image. Damn. I'll swap it out, but I won't have the chance to do so until I go back into work on Monday and have access to the computer I used to do this.)

Unintelligent design...

I was playing around with logos and shit today, not for any real reason other than my own amusement. I don't know that I'll ever apply any of this to anything, but seeing as how we're going to redesign the forums when phpbb3 comes out, I felt the urge to mess with design elements. I wish I was better at graphic design...almost as much as I wish I was better at not being ridiculously attractive.

(Click for full size versions)







The only thing I really created from scratch was the actual bomb, the fonts are from 1001freefonts.com...ok, yeah, basically I'm saying I didn't do any work on this.

Check Out The Beard

Check out my whiskers too (I kid). I made a mix tape, CD, play-list for Margaret the other day, and this is the album art that accompanied it. I think I came out looking a bit like Guy Smiley with a gimp arm, but maybe that's just how I'm looking these days.

Pirates of the AIRribbean! Har.

Another in the kind of air pirates theme we seem to have going now, for some reason. Not that I'm complaining. I was aiming for Ass Pirates, but I'm willing to compromise and get half of what I want.




I don't even know what I'm talking about most days any more.

This one's so wide, I had to shrink the preview image down a lot to get it to fit. As always, click for the bigger version.

Pilot Inspection

So I blatantly bit Todd's idea and drew me a dirigible pilot. What's that you say? You want me to take my absence of originality a step further and also post the rough sketch for this? Ok, whatever you say...

There, I even scanned the sketch book binding so you can get a sense of the image's scale. Why did I do that? It's because I'm a super generous bad-ass. Man if everyone else could be as generous and bad-ass as me the world would be like totally super generous and bad-assed.

Airship mechanic?

I feel like those arms are the mayors of Wonkytown, the face is at least a 6 pack away from attractiveness, and the wrench is all out of perspective, but I'm not positive about any of that. I did use reference for this, so it should have been cake to fix those issues, but the photograph was dimly lit and hard to make out detail in. Ah well, you win some, I'm handsome.



Original sketch.



Off topic, but while I haven't exactly been setting the group blog a blaze, I AM happy to see that looking back I've been a lot more consistent about trying to contribute the last couple of months. I'm going to go ahead and give myself a tiny bit of credit for actually somewhat sticking to at least ONE project for once.

I'm an ass.

The Saddest Horned Lizard

Behold! Yet another drawing featuring a static life-less pose! My leisure drawing has freaking fallen off the chart lately. I damn well better remedy that if I have any illusions of doing any comic work in the next couple months. The past two weekends I found excuses not to check out the drop-in life drawing sessions around here, and instead justified hanging out at 7-11. Shameful.

Forf o' Jooleye!

I know I bitch about this all the time, but goddamn do I wish I could draw girls. I bought this book on 50's pinup art the other day, as well as the 50 Years of Playboy Cartoons collection (it weighs as much as Hugh Hefner) and I think it would be awesome to be a cheesecake pinup artist. I've been working on it a lot lately and it's not coming any easier to me. I need to learn to do loose, fluid curves and delicate faces. Learning some stock poses would also be nice. These are pretty "meh", but I like showing my garbage so Kevin doesn't kill himself. ;)



That left arm looks broken. I don't know why I didn't catch that before I inked it.



I know those color schemes are wack. I used an online color scheme generator to save time (I didn't get started on these until almost 5am).

Have a good 4th of July. Don't blow your dicks off with firecrackers.

Me Am "Mab Mab!"

Inspired by Kevin's recent avatar, I doodled this during a meeting at work today and afterwards cleaned it up a little in Photoshop:




Poor planning lead to me running out of space at the bottom of the page, so I twisted his left foot into an unnatural position to try and get it to fit. It ended up looking retarded (or, in Bizarro speak, AWESOME), so I did that lazy "fade out" shit.

Also, those aren't lens flares, technically. I made them myself, which means they're not tacky, but rather, FUCKING INCREDIBLE.

EDIT: Does his right arm, particularly, the forearm, look completely fucked? My eye keeps being drawn to it, which can't be a good thing.

Red White and Douche...

Muscle studies, courtesy of the supa awesomez Arnold Schwarzenegger Muscle Gallery.




Aaaaaand, the black and white line art, because I think I fucked him (yeah I did!) by getting carried away with my artsy fartsy attempt at a coloring scheme.



Man, why didn't I color the background green so I could title this RGB?! Why must my genius wit manifest itself after the point of usefulness?!

Why the hell am I even posting this crap?

Squat Magistrate's justice is both swift and purple.

Shit Goes Down

Gillian's son had not only swallowed her earrings,
but also her desire to ever wear them again.

Exploration Ball

Huey's uncle drove a ball like this back in 'Nam.
He also apparently,"Saw some shit go down."

Self Portrait

This drawing is all twisted and wonkey,
like my ego.

P.S. I'm growing the beard out again.

6.1

Not feeling it AT ALL tonight, but I wanted to just throw some lines down and keep my hand loose so...blah.

With a click of the mouse...

He had become the devil he once advocated.

5.26

I haven't had enough time to myself lately to get on the computer at home and play with PS/tablet, so, back to basics! Ballpoint, non-repro pencil, Pitt pens (fuck Micron) etc. I was able to talk my job into getting me a scanner as a "work expense" so now I can scan the stuff I draw while I'm here. From this week:

9-12

So if you've seen me in person in the past 10 months, chances are I had a 3.5" x 5.5" Moleskin notebook on me and you didn't even know it. Usually these puppies only see action when I'm riding the bus, and even then it's only when I don't suspect the person next to me will glance at it. Anywho, I was looking through my stack of these notebooks and ran across a page I thought I would post.In case you couldn't tell that bottom has a puppy chasing a rabbit, the middle has a bunch of potatos [sic] "getting the fuck out of there," and the top has some crappy guys holding some stuff.

5.17

Huzzah!



Reference is for suckas! Look, I even threw a CHAIR in that biotch!

....I think I need a new "background" shtick.

....Is her head too big?

EDIT: I thought it might be fun to sort of compare notes, so I threw together this little thing that documents how I've been approaching sketching in Photoshop. If any of you sees something I could do to improve, can make suggestions/recommendations, or want to critique some crucial error I'm making in my process, I'd love to hear it. Fuck, if you want to make your own to share, EVEN BETTER!

My Process!

{blah blah blah, filler text because that link is really hard to notice when it's at the bottom of the post}

5.12

Still rockin' the laydays...



...Also, still drawing them. BOOYAH! Blindsided by hilarity!

5.11

"Boogey boogey boogey!"



Working the Midnight to 8am shifts at work, so I haven't had much time to spend with Photoshop the last couple of days. I'm tired as hell, but I at least wanted to play around for an hour for routines sake.

Must learn to render!

Sorry I'm monopolizing the blog, Ryan.


...Sorry you're not, Kevin.

Pig Beast

You must fear Pig Beast.
For he will not fear you.