Pig

Wow two post in one night; now that's something. Now to get back to the illustrations. This is actually done awhile ago for a personal children's book I was working on for fun. This is one of the illustrations from it that I loved since it turned out really well. I thought I'd post it so people can finally see it since I tell people about it but yet it's not on my blog or my site (yet). Now here it is.

Monkey King - Finished

So this is it, the final version of the Monkey King. I'm still wondering if I should important into Photoshop to play with the textures more, but I'm happy how it turned out. Hopefully I can finally get more done now that I'm back to doing digital illustrations again though working with just pen and ink again in my little sketchbook has a been a joy. I didn't know how much I've missed doing that. There's something fun about manipulating the pen to do as you want it to to create just the different line qualities and what not. It sounds like I'm drooling over a line, but I'm not ... it's more like I'm rediscovering something old again.

Back to drawing ...

I figure I should update more, but it's been hard to do finish stuff lately. The first two drawings are sketches from a creative response journal I'm giving to a friend. I'm not sure who else is going to end up joining in with what else but the end product should be interesting. I'm really not sure how much more I should draw in it just to leave things open for anyone else in the future. I really like how the two pieces turned out and I'm going to miss having them in my own personal sketchbook collection.



This last piece is the working colour rough for the Monkey King I, technically started, last month. It's been odd working on this piece 'cause I've been on and off with it. It's gone through some colour changes since nothing has felt right about it. Taking a whole month off of doing any finished work has definitly messed with my way of working, but it's coming back bit by bit.

A new year, a new sketchbook and a new beginning

So it's another year which never feels any different to me. I technically started this sketchbook a week ago, but it is something nice to carry into the new year with me. I originally wanted to just do inks without any pencil roughs, but I am not ready for that, especially for complicated things. I had fun doing this small piece and it's great to go back to pen and ink stuff again with hatching.

Monkey King

Here's a rough in progress of an illustration for the Monkey King (aka The Journey to the West). It's the part in the story where the Monkey King flies to the outer reaches of what he believes is in the universe when it's only the the hand of Buddha. I mostly wanted to test out a way to draw hands and I figure this would be a nice way of going at it since I've been meaning to do a decent illustration for the Monkey King in ages. I'll hopefully get around to doing one with the four main characters: the monk, the Monkey King, Pigsy and Sandy (the cannibal monk) who has this cool necklace of skulls and is sometimes depicted as a kappa (Japanese water demon). I'll hopefully finish this by week's end since I have Sunday off this week before the nice stretch to Christmas of work.

Christmas Design

So here's the Mucha inspired design I was talking about. It's still in the works and it's sort of gotten through that stage in all my work where the finished work just looks horrible and I shouldn't continue. I've still got a lot to do, but it's been fun designing a piece like this.

Christmas Cards

So here are the final design for the Christmas cards; there's 4 designs instead of 5 though I'm still going to work in the last Mucha-inspired design for myself since I'm really not sure how it'll turn out. They'll be printed in Bristol paper which is a fairly thick card stock at roughly 5.5" x 4.25" and they come with a cream envelope. 3 dollars a card of any design, $2.50 per a card for any order over 10 cards. Now to go back to some sketchy and maybe some more X-mas stuff.