It's a bird, It's a plane, It's a...Toadbat?!

This is the full image from the last post, with tonal values splashed on there. It's still a work in progress, but at the moment I'm working up a solid value relationship before I start to tackle color. This was a tip I learned from watching one of J.P. Targete's videos from The Gnomon Workshop (quite possibly one of the most helpful videos I've ever seen from them.)

The actual idea for this came about from listening to one of Bobby Chiu's video streams. Somebody suggested he draw "a toad crossed with a bat," and when he decided not to take it, I thought it'd be a waste to let a weird idea like that slip away. So that's how this came about!

It's a bird...it's a plane...

It's...well...what the heck is it? It's a peek at a little illustration I'm doing...a shiny ha'penny to the one who can guess what it might be.

Painting fun...

Here's some late night screw-arounds in the painting department...

Market Square

Here's a teaser for this coming Friday's NEW page of Border Crossings. For anyone that had been following, there was a two week break as I made the move from Atlanta BACK down to Central Florida. But now we're settled in and work has returned to a steady pace.

I'm really happy with how the inks on this page turned out, and you'll get to see not only a confident, inked page, BUT a new attempt at coloring, one that's taking a cue from the lessons learned from Mark Sweeney's blog about ink limits. His little corner of the web is more than helpful: It's a damn goldmine that's free to the public. Ya can't find this stuff in books!

Mark Sweeney's Blog: Link

Silhouette Doodlin'

Here's some creature doodles that were done as warm-ups recently. Sometimes it's fun to just take a big, fat brush and see where it takes you on the page...Especially when you know you aren't trying to achieve anything beyond letting your mind wander. Done in Alias Sketchbook.