This last weekend, I attended Crypticon in Seattle. I did some caricatures and some sketches. One of the sketches I did was of "The Creature form the Black Lagoon", which I was able to have signed by Ricou Browning, the man behind the Creature's mask! He is the only one of the original Universal Monsters that I ever managed to meet, and it was a great honor because, at one time in my life, they were a principle obsession--I used to play "Monsters" with my friends (I was always the Wolfman, btw) and we collected the old Aurora model kits and stayed up late on Saturday night sleep-overs to watch them stalking about graveyards on the Late Late Late Show! We even built "Spook-houses" in my friend Brad's garage. I even had the "Creature from the Black Lagoon" model!


All in all, it was fun and interesting as cons always are to me, but I only just broke even. I did however score a totally cool Plush TARDIS for my ever-expanding Dr. Who collection. When all is said and done--I am still a huge geek!

Anyway, I'll post a few more sketches later.

The Meme of Me

I thought I'd make one of those meme posters as a self promotional piece. It is sort of cute, so I'm sharing it here.

^0^

Draw A Dinosaur Day! 2012

Apparently, today is "Draw A Dinosaur Day"! This is my DaDD2012 submission. He's a dino explorer off to explore Pangaea. I sketched it during lunch today, so it's a bit rough because I started running out of time. The whole thing was drawn with a 0.7 Staedtler Sketch Pen.

Red Means "STOP"!

A few of my CLAW friends met at the comic book store today to sketch, ostensibly on pages for our group's still theoretical anthology comic. It was a bit difficult to stay on task...what with a Magic: The Gathering pre-release tourney going on at all the other tables. So after I puttered on a couple of sketches for pages, I finally broke down and indulged my demented brain by drawing up a sketch of a pun that had been plaguing me for the last few days.

I was listening to my art director at work talking about the rotation of videos and stuff he has to watch with his son and the word "Hellmo" popped into my head with the image above and wouldn't go away. Now, hopefully, it has been purged!

Dragons? NAW! Year of the Flying Monkeys!!

2010 was "The Year of the Robot" and 2011 was "The Year of the Pipe" and I unilaterally decided to make 2012 "The Year of the Flying Monkeys". To that end, this was a piece of art I created to put on the website and the programs for C.L.A.W.'s "Great Yearly Ceremony", which is our annual get-together to celebrate the previous year and usher in the new one. If we continue the pattern of using CLAW's Sacred Truths as inspirations for each year, 2013 will have to be "The Year of the Zombie". That should be an interesting program...

Anyway, this art was a relatively quick piece inspired by the poster for "The Rocketeer". I liked the deco design, and the reason I thought of using that is because I had decided my flying monkey would have a retro-style rocket pack instead of the traditional wings. That kind of art deco layout then seemed the obvious look.

Paper Clowning

Finally, here is the last piece I did for Christmas presents this year, but I think definitely not the last paper sculpture I'm going to do! I am really beginning to enjoy this medium in a way I never did before and have definite ideas about more things I want to do!

In the meantime, the Joker up here was done for my youngest nephew, Brandon! He LOVES the Joker and was also wanting to see zombies and monsters in my sketchbook! I think my baby sister is going to have her work cut out with this kiddo!

Dat'sa Gooda Paper!

Today's paper sculpture is the piece I did for my nephew, Justin! He's a big fan of all things Mario Bros. I had to research this because the last time I played Mario was on the first version of Nintendo...and he was just a blocky little chunk of pixels! Since then he's come a long way--and there are many versions of him floating in the ether.

I considered giving him the raccoon tail and ears, but it was pointed out to me that was from before Yoshi's time and Justin really likes Yoshi and so I wanted him to be in there too.

My one addition was to give him the shoe laces (because they always look cool in paper sculpture, and the little torn area on the knee. Just gives him more personality...so he's not too clean. This piece was also built for an 8x10 frame, so it's all pretty tight. But it came out pretty well, and Justin didn't find fault with my interpretation of his hero!