Stayed up to watch BRUUUUCE on Late Night, and one of my favorite artists, Wayne White, is on Last Call tonight! I drew something silly with geometric shape tools in illustrator to keep me busy while I waited. HERE IT IS:

I love looking at buildings and modern homes. Mostly just for their shape, but I can appreciate some nice decor here and there. I would have liked to have been an architect, and I may have pursued that if any of the handful of people I know who went to school for architecture had jobs. ANYWAY, thanks for reading my blog!

I've been trying to teach myself some programming, so since I haven't drawn in a couple of days, I took an hour to make something. Here is a teenage bear playing video games.

I need to finish my community garden picture. I am doing way to much at once!
3/9 - Every time I scroll back to look at older posts, I hated the colors of this bear so today I made him black and got rid of the trees. Who plays video games outside anyway??

Drew a KC hat a while back. I've got it tiled on my desktop.
All I can think about is baseball.

Also! A while ago I drew some baseball cards. I was going to make a series called National Treasures, (National league players in front of landmarks from their teams city/state). I wanted to do one for each team with backs and everything, then get some printed, but I got bored with the idea before I finished. This one is of Albert in front of the arch.

Outdated now. Albert is in the land of the DH, so we'll still get to see him here in KC. 

Drew these monsters in bed last night. They turned out okay for the amount of time they took.

I keep saying next time I make something I'm going to try to shade it, or give it a shiny look. Here's the thing, I'm so used to my little characters being so simple I kind of don't like any undefined shadow. On top of that, I have a hard time figuring some of the more advanced (to me) Illustrator and Photoshop stuff out, not only because my brain is aging, but because my computer slows to crawl when I even try to rasterize an image. Maybe I'll give it another shot with these guys and re-post. 

UPDATE:

Hanging out with some friends at Mud Pie. Put some gradient mesh on these guys. I'll get better at it if I keep playing with it, but I'm not crazy about the look.

 

Just started working on the garden for my community garden poster. Not much to post because I just have bushes and sidewalks now... but here are some more people & creatures. I don't know what direction I am going with the style yet, so it will be time consuming as I try multiple things.

These characters are in between crispy clean and hand drawn. There is a lot of geometric shapes so far in the garden so it looks a little too clean to mesh well with the characters. Hopefully the busier I make the surroundings the more natural it will look.

Hello! I made a new banner for this here blog. Way better than some tilted 3D letters I think. I was gonna have the letters of my name chasing after me down that path, but the composition looked SO BAD, so I just left the path and put a kite string in my hand... and I really like it. There are a lot of happy accidents in illustration I've found.

Anyway, it bothers me to leave a post without a picture so here is something I played with a while ago.

I really like this old school Jayhawk. I wanted one on my desktop, but I couldn't find one bigger than a one inch gif on the internet, so I traced it and built one. I made few different desktops. With this one I was just playing with some of the colors.

I've been a Knick fan since I was a little kid. Amare Stoudemire just came back to the team, so since I had a lot of fun doing the baseball pic below, that I thought I'd do a basketball one. So here is cartoon Amare.

I did some shading and reflective type stuff on the court, but lost the effect when I applied the grain texture, but I like the way it turned out anyway.

Excited for baseball season?! I am. Kansas City is home of the 2012 All-Star game, so hopefully a couple of Royals get voted on to the AL-team. Our Golden Glove winning left-fielder Alex Gordon made a run at it last year. This morning I drew a cartoon Alex fielding a ball at Kauffman Stadium. Just realized I forgot the beard he has been sporting. Details! Oh well. Here it is:

I've been playing with filters, and man are Illustrator filters bad. This grain one is one of two I found and liked. I think they are the same as the filters in the version of Photoshop I have, but next time I make something, I plan on playing with some of the effects in Photoshop and seeing what happens.

I am working on a couple of different projects just to have something to show people. One of them is a poster called "Community Garden". The idea is there will be a large community garden, with several different types of people gardening and interacting with one another. Obviously it's geared toward kids, and hopefully it will be a really fun image with a lot of stuff going on to find. I started just with people, and I'll build the garden around them. Below I have a boy potting flowers, an eskimo toddler running from another child, a sumo wrestler helping to keep the garden clean, and a surprised woman.

So far I have about 16 characters made. I drew them in my note book, scanned them, then built them in Illustrator. Altogether each character is fairly time consuming, and I'm sure there is a better way to do this than I am aware of, but it is fun to see my drawings turn crispy clean once I'm done, and so far I've been really happy with how they've turned out. Any and all advice or comments welcome, even if these posts are old news by the time you find them!

Here are about half of the frames from a little strip I made to get reacquainted with Illustrator. I have CS3, but haven't had much time to use it lately. In this little story, the redbird asks the owl to watch something for her. The owl then looks down to find one of his favorite things... Cake! After flying down to check it out, several forest critters give him a hard time about sharing the cake, which isn't his to share. Eventually, under pressure from a couple larger animals, owl gives in to temptation and chows down.

I have developed a sort of "minimalist" style with illustrator, mostly because I am catering to the extent of what I know how to do within the program. I'd love to learn how to add shadow and texture to my images, so I'll probably be fooling around with that stuff, or trying to find other programs that make that easier. Any suggestions?! Hopefully I'll get a few people looking at this site after a while.

New Blog!

I just started this blog after looking at a couple of great artist pages. I recently left a nursing program at a Kansas City college to explore other career paths I feel more passionate about, including illustration and computer design. I am looking to learn a lot over the next year and a half by talking to colleges, professionals, and working with different programs.
I'll be posting some work to keep track of my progress. Any critique and or advice would be greatly appreciated! Thank you for checking out this page!