Buu from Dragon Ball Z!

Character commission.

A recent t-shirt commission, another humpback whale. I've not been too well this week but knew I had to get a couple of shirts done and was dreading it... Actually turned out to be a really soothing experience!

New PC!

I was still running Windows XP on a 9 year old machine. I was kinda determined to get to the 10 year anniversary, but... It was getting to be an annoyance. And with my Macbook's wifi not working and track pad playing up, I accepted the offer from a friend to get a new machine.

So here's the first scribble on the new machine - Beerus! - and here's to the next 9 years of digital scribbles.

I started this back in 2013... And just left it unfinished. There's lots of issues with it. There's lots I would do differently today, but I decided it was important that I finish it.

Until very recently, I wouldn't finish much personal work. It would get to a stage where I thought "I can do better if I redo the entire thing" and would push it aside. It's a stupid attitude, because you end up with very little polished work to show. Much of the professional work I do I can't share and more importantly, I don't get much opportunity to work on stuff like this professionally, so I have no evidence I can do it. So here's a digital painting of a dragon. It's a bit dark, I know. It's suffering from typical me dullness syndrome. There's some stuff about it I really like though, like the hand and the light coming through the wing.

I ended up changing the colours on this afterall! It did feel a little dull before... I was sort of going for an earthy look, but it was too earthy. I have a habit of making quite mucky looking artwork, I dunno if that's a fear of using brighter colours or just that I have a personal preference for duller tones.

Either way, I think this creamy background is off-white enough to be gentle on my muddy-loving eyes, but bright enough to not overwhelm the illustration now. And I've been staring at it for a few days and I still like this pallet. So I consider this fini! A4 prints are available from my Etsy, as well as handmade stickers, or there's vinyl machine cut ones available from Redbubble!

I tend to avoid doing digital lineart. I have a reasonably shaky hand and the stylus picks up and magnifies every shudder. But I've decided to stop being a wuss and actually try to make something. A lot of the time, I find myself going "oh I can't do that, so I won't even try" and I need to stop it. 

This turned out better than I thought. I think the lines are too thick, but it's a start!

This is a small section of a large scribble I drew back in December that I was just going to do my usual digital painting under/over. But I may try doing something completely different with it now and taking on the challenge of line-arting the entire thing digitally. Or maybe just outlining the characters and having a painterly background and scenic elements. Either way,  better than expected, and the lesson here is stop avoiding things because you think you can't do them before you even try, because it's stupid.

Couple more pen sketch commissions! Drawn with that micron pen.

Not certain how I feel about the colours of this yet, but I'm really happy with how the actual illustration came out. I've been wanting to try a linocut-like drawing of a dinosaur for a while, so here's a cute little microraptor. He's up on Redbubble, on tshirts and the like with a blank background, but I'm still thinking about how this works as an stand alone image.

Couple of inch sketch commissions from the past few days!

 New giganotosaurs bleach shirt, on it's way to a new home as I type!

Information about bleach shirts click here and see what's for sale over on Etsy!