All right. I agreed to participate in the “Make Something Cool Everyday” concept a while ago. Well here’s the thing guys. I’ve been drawing SO MUCH everyday that I don’t have time to update this page haha. Not that I’ve gotten any hate mail over the lack of MSCE posts . I have a good handful of half started tshirt ideas (most of them are now failed daily submissions) that I’m keeping in reserve for potential derbies. It would be nice for once to not have to stay up until 2am on a Friday since I had something already in the works. Well, I figured I’ll post something up that may or may not end up as a shirt someday (I’m debating if I should color this without tshirt restrictions or not). This is the initial sketch I made over lunch . . . Not sure what’s got the little imp/demon’s attention on the lower rock. I’ll work that out as I go Though suggestions are welcome!

Now onto the inking stage. While I’m doing that I’ll be trying to decide what style of coloring I will do (style is ALWAYS the hardest choice for me so I tend to try a lot of them).

So I decided after a bit of doodling that it’ll be a happy imp and he’ll be fishing in the lava of hell. No real point to this piece. It’s more a test of art styles. Here’s another snapshot of the drawing. I picked cranberry so it helps with the “hellish” colors without being outright eeeeevil looking.

I kept working at it and figuring out colors and exactly what I wanted to do (without really knowing what I wanted to do) . Here’s another snapshot. I really look up to the artists that can draw a design without relying on outlines. Sometimes I enjoy emphasizing the outlines but sometimes if you pick just the right colors and style you can get away without them. The “lava fish” is the closest complete thing so far on this design. I also think I figured out a few new techniques I’ll use in the future . . .

It’s that time again where woot gathers up the shirts the blessed with an “Honorable Mention” and tosses them into a pile and watches them duke it out. Another way to think about it is a “Second Chance” for a select few. I have three in the running atm. The one that has a chance of some placement is “Is THIS what you were looking for”. My other two are “Panda has Nap” and “Rudolf”. Won’t you stop by and give them a hand

Do-Over Derby

Tigers and Dragons and Pigs, OH MY! This time we can use one or all the zodiac critters to make a design. I think there are already some excellent entries out there (and plenty to learn from). Here are my two designs. (I had two ready only because 1.) Burning Bright was almost done anyway and 2.) I stayed up late .

Zodiac Take Out

Dragon’s pretty hungry. Looking at his order he got:

Rat Fried Rice
Tiger Kung Meo
Bunny Dumplings
Shanghai Sheep
Peking Pig
Rooster Eggrolls
Mu Shu Monkey

Sadly, no matter how much he’ll eat he’ll still be hungry in 2 hours

Currently it’s not in the fog but stuff shifts around a lot at the beginning of a derby (and sometimes at the end!).

Zodiac Take Out

Burning Bright

An ode to William Blake and his poem “Tyger Tyger”. Did something artsy that coveres more of the shirt instead of being only front and center. Not doing too well, but that’s fine, it was an interesting style to try.

Burning Bright

ANOTHER UPDATE!: “Is THIS what you are Looking for” is currently snuggling in the fog with a few other entries for this week’d “Do-Over derby. Sadly “A Better Story” did not get an Honorable Mention nod. This means that once the conditions on the entry expire (I can’t submit it anywhere until 60 days has passed) I will post it someplace else (most likely goodjoe.com since the message seems to work with the website. I’ll keep y’all posted!

UPDATE: I need to learn to count . . . Looks like the Oz design was humming along well and was in the fog (no clue which of the spots though) and around lunchtime 2/1/10 it got rejected for seven colors *facepalm*. Normally I separate all my colors into individual colors layers. This time it slipped my mind. Eh well. Retooled the colors and added a background (with mixed results) and it’s up to be voted on again. Might be too late to catch up though, eh well. Also looks like “A better Story” is hanging out in the fog too. Only time will tell how this’ll go.

NOTE: I think I fixed the issue with my website sometimes not showing well or displaying a “Service Unavailable” error. Sorry about that.

The theme this week was “Heart”, be it the emotional concept, physical squishy thing, the band, or anything in between. I immediately thought of the OZ drawing I came up with. Most likely because I was already working on an OZ concept just not exactly this theme. (Had to do with tinman’s oil addition). So I had the character style already figured out, I just needed to get the rest put together. I worked on it for a few hours then put it away and tried a few other things that weren’t sucssessful. Eventually late in the night I came back to this and finished it up. I really wasn’t expecting much from it. It’s in the fog as I type this but things can change quickly. After I posted this I noticed the complete lack of a background. Even small bushes or SOMETHING. At least I have the road. But it does bug me and a few people brought it up. If it unfogs I’ll understand. Oh, I named the title wrong when I posted to woot, oops. Things like this is why I shouldn’t name stuff right in the comp.

Is THIS what you were looking for?

My Second entry is “A Better Story”. The reason I did two this week was because I thought the OZ one wouldn’t get much attention. It has and now oddly enough I have TWO in the fog. Feels weird and I almost want one to drop out. Last thing we need is a lot of the top notch artists spamming each week (though it takes a lot of work per image. I luckily don’t have much else to do at the moment). I had the rough design of this done already and was waiting for my chance to polish it up.

Here’s the story straight from the woot post.

“A different telling of an old story. This one begins where Red Riding hood meets the wolf when he was just a pup. Through an act of kindness the wolf begins to understand what friendship and love is and grows a heart. They become inseparable. Gramma even sews a doggie bed for Wolf and keeps it by the fireplace to keep him warm when they visit.

In fact the story goes that one time he protected her from an ax wielding madman that runs around the forest.”

A Better Story

And FINALLY my last image today is to tell people who read my blog (hi mom, hi dad) that I have a shirt currently printing at TILTEED. Adder from woot.com fame is a curator here. We got together and pulled my old Joust design from the depths of my hard drive. It was once a woot.com design (that didn’t print) and now for THREE DAYS ONLY (well two days now since I was late putting this up) it can be yours!!

Joust

UPDATE: I got an honorable mention. So look for this shirt at the next “do over derby”. What’s even cooler is that Taco Cat will be there too!

UPDATE: I ended up getting 12th place here. Which is fine. I really enjoyed some of the entries that ended up in the fog. The oddball I was rooting for was TACO CAT. Something about him is just awesome. Reminds me of a few characters I do from time to time (Rudolph). Maybe they should meet up sometime for lunch, hehe.

Another week, another theme . .another sleepless Thursday night.

“Panda Had Nap”

An alternative title if we didn’t have the restriction could be “Never pass out around your friends, you’ll end up regretting it”

I wanted to make a panda design since they are so lovable. However I didn’t want to make them extremely cutsie. I opted for a middle ground between cartoony and real. The initial outline for the fuzzballs went very quickly (less than an hour). The tweaking of the colors and textures and deciding on exactly HOW I was going to fill them in took up the other 5.5 hrs.

Where’s my coffee?

Panda Had Nap

UPDATE: I WON, I WON! Third Place Link for the shirt is on the right. Kind of bittersweet though, there were a lot of good entries I was looking forward to picking up :/

Wow, what an awesome theme. Almost too broad. I love drawing monsters so this should be easy . . . right?  Well after drawing a few snarling creatures from hell I put those ideas aside and thought I should embrace the spirit of the theme and focus on the act of dreaming. I came up with the design below called “The Guardian”. Talk about nightmare . . I worked on this drawing for 8hrs total Thursday night so I could submit it at noon on Friday.

The Guardian

Some people have asked why the girl isn’t holding the teddy bear tight. And that’s a great observation. Well, here’s my thoughts behind that.
The bear being at the base of the bed serves two purposes 1.) shows that she is protected regardless where the bear is (like a parent doesn’t have to be right next to their child be be very protective) and 2.) This helps the composition better. Initially I did have the child and bear together (like most people would expect) however it weighed the design too much to the center and left the right side a bit empty. You had the girl, the bear AND the bear’s spirit all coming from one point on the shirt, that’s just too much IMO. so I decided to spread out the story a little and have the nightmare on the left, the child in the center and bear on the right.

Enjoy! Because this derby is such a good theme it’s going to be VERY difficult to ride this out until the end and place. SO much good stuff out there right now.