So We Put a Filter on Our Internet...

And now I'm locked out of Tumblr and Deviant Art.
So until then I'm going to posting here I guess. Hi guys! It's been a while.

As you can see, I've been refining my skills in drawing long-haired emo men.

Hairstyles Faceshapess

Like wot it says on the box.

Outfits

The joys of dressing your characters. Well, maybe for some people it's a joy. For me it involves a lot of wading through clothing catalogues. Because: what is fashion sense?

But I am quite pleased with these sketches. 

Face Dressup

I'm not dead I promise! Just been really busy with work, freelance, and the yard, but now I've got a bit of spare time on account of autumn.
Been working on some concepts for the next software at work, aimed at 12–14 year olds.
Here's some possible faces for the protagonists + the blank template.

Bee Lady 2

Bee Lady 2 

EDIT: re-uploaded the image after making some contrast tweaks.

Wow, I’ve been working on this on and off for like… two years. Sad. Anyway, this is the second in what I guess is a series now.
Yeah I don’t really know why I didn’t post this when I finished it. I’m so bored by the commission work I’m doing right now that I found myself finishing this. All I did was touch up the glowy parts a bit, and that seemed to make a big difference.

So I guess this is my homage to every comic-book cover artists who ever turned the female body into a rubber, skeletonless, sex object. There’s all sorts of things wrong with perspective and light and anatomy here, but that’s kind of become a theme in the Bee Lady paintings. (lol there’s only two of them, what am I even saying.) But heck if I didn’t just want to paint a bee lady in stilettos. And that’s really what all this has been about.

I’ve got a third bee lady painting in the works, but I’d like to hear if any of you have suggestions for future images.

The first Bee Lady (aka Her Majesty’s Courier)

Claud

Sometimes I just need to draw sulky men in finery. And spats. How I need to draw spats.

This is Claud. He budded off of Gladys in a sort of weird asexual reproduction; he was only supposed to be a gender swap, but he grew into his own living, breathing character. Which is a little like hosting another personality inside your mind, it's exciting and unsettling at the same time.

Bare Bee Inspection

This isn't as brave as it looks actually. 

Can you see the drone?

Look for the curled up white grubs, those are the babies.

For today’s inspection I went veil and glove-less! It was pretty exciting. They stayed very calm for the most part, and I was not stung. (Dad was, but that was because one got stuck in his hair.) I had to smoke them again, though, when I got closer to the queen and the brood comb as they were getting feisty.

I saw a good number of drones this time, you can spot a few in the photos, they have large dragon-fly like eyes. You can also see some of the brood, curled up in their cells.

I’d say the hive is just under half full of comb now. No harvesting yet. I am a little concerned though, because they’re building brood comb on the larger bars, and honey storage on the thinner ones, but it’s supposed to be the other way around: brood on the thin bars, honey on the wide. But all the comb is straight, with little to no side attachments, so I’ll just let them do what they do.

 Afterwards, when dad pulled the stinger out, we looked at it under his hand-held microscope. Amazingly small! Surprisingly it didn’t look barbed at all. They must be micro-barbs because the stinger looked very smooth.

Maira and a Prototype Character

More sketches to let you know I haven't died (but this blog kinda did for a while).

Maira is an OC I made back in high school, and one of the few "femme fatal" characters I have.
The gal in the jodhpurs and goggles is a first pass at a character who will be the protagonist in a short comic which will happen in the undetermined future. (Read as: not soon, sorry) I’m not even sure if I want a female or a male protagonist. Claud is really the first male character I’ve explored in-depth, but I also think it’d be fun to do this short adventure comic with a female lead, a la Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.
HN, DECISIONS.

As some of you may have heard, I got bees!
I still have to upload the video I took on the day I installed the package of bees, but I have photos of my most recent inspection, courtesy of my dad’s blackberry.

Just to bring y'alls up to speed, this hive was completely devoid of comb 1.5 weeks ago. All this work was done in that time alone. My girls are so industrious!
You can see how overdressed I was. Very few bees were flying around at all. When I first installed them in the hive they were crawling all over everything, and a few were accidentally smashed between the top bars, but now they were fastidiously careful about where they’d fly, and where they’d walk. They never left the comb, and they wouldn’t fly into the open space in the top of the hive; arriving foragers still used the hole entrances on the sides. Dad, Rick, mom and Lauren were all able to get very close without a problem. Not sure how much of this gentleness is due to the natural disposition of the hive, the smoke, or the fact that I was just looking and not taking anything. We’ll see.

As for me, I've been really busy as well! I quit FedEx last week, got a full-time job doing in-house illustrations for a company that makes software helping kids to learn English, am still finishing up a few freelance projects, plus there's the yard with all the fruit trees/vines, and the garden to look over. May will be a crazy month!

Henry Hudson

The next set of illustrations I've been so busy with. Whew! It always feels great to hit a deadline!

Natural Cycles

The latest of my illustration work. I had a lot of fun with these! With the animals, because: animals, and with the non-living cycles (gas, rock, water) because I got to research some rad things.

It’s kinda funny, I’ve always wondered what it’d like to be a science textbook illustrator, and here I am, doing it! Wow. It’s such a weird thought!

Textbook Work

These were for a textbook aimed at second graders, so they wanted BRIGHT SATURATED COLORS. Which is not… my area. But thankfully that’s what Photoshop is for! This story is about the Mound-builder peoples of the Mississippi basin. (I had no idea these people even existed before starting this project. Oops.)

Since this was work for hire, and since I don’t like the full images anyway, here are my favorite parts. Pretty much everything but the people. Sorry, people :c

Note: Painting leaf litter is a PAIN. LITERALLY.

And yes, I did go to the Greg Newbold school of noodling, how did you know? (Hi Greg)

Short Comics

While I enjoyed the text book work… I’d so much rather be drawing comics! 8D
I got to do three short comics for the upcoming anthology “The Enchanted Toilet.” My friend Will Strong’s got two comics in there as well. Again, this was work for hire, so I don’t even own these characters anymore. Which is kinda a shame :’c
BUT I’M GETTING PUBLISHED OH MY GLOB

Plus! My editor was really great to work with! She really knew how to get my stories to come together, gave me great ideas, she was wonderful. She told me I could make potty jokes! How awesome is that?

You can tell I hit my stride with Miss Muffet. Took me long enough. Also all that lettering was hand done. STUPIDEST IDEA. Next project will be to make my own font. Hand lettering. Never again.

Southern Utah Trip

'Bout time I uploaded these! Went on a trip to southern Utah in May and it was just FANTASTIC. We had rain, sun, wind, snow, hail, cloud cover, you name it. EVERY atmospheric condition. These here are just a small sampling of the 400+ photos I took.

Enjoy!