I took some time to add a few more pieces of artwork from the backlog to the Illustration page! Check out my drawings of Splinter, Godzilla, Rattrap, Doctor Doom, Optimus Prime, and… Jack Skellingtor?

The Optimus Prime one, based on his appearance in Transformers War of Cybertron: Siege, became one of the best pieces I had ever done and got some attention on Reddit and other places I posted it. Now it’s finally up here. This is the kind of thing I was hoping people would commission me to make more of but I sort of moved onto other directions as I am often prone to do. Now I feel like I would rather make silly drawings than cool drawings, but I can always be convinced to change my mind.

Of course, you can continue to see my latest art on my DeviantArt and NewGrounds pages, as well as sketches, works in progress, and other stuff on my Tumblr.

I’ll be busy working on something else as I gear up for Toronto TFcon in December. I don’t know how much more art and other updates I’ll be able to do until after that, so I wanted to take care of this stuff first. See you on the other side. Or anytime I’m on Twitch.

Sayonara.

Once again, it’s been too long since I did this. Adding new artwork to the Illustration page should be a simple process, but it gets tedious and takes longer than I think it will, so I only do it once in awhile. So I’ve got plenty of stuff to put up here, and I’ll get to the rest of the backlog eventually, but for now, let’s take care of these six.

I have added artwork of Miles Morales, Harley Quinn, He-Man, Hordak, Bumblebee, and Devilman. This artwork is all from the bygone era of 2019 from the brief period of time when I was taking suggestions for artwork from anyone who subscribed to me on Twitch. It was a fun time when I experimented on a lot of different styles and techniques, but eventually had to stop doing that when I found I was spending more time than I should have on those drawings. Fun while it lasted though!

I’ll try to do more some time soon, but hey, we’ll see. In the meantime, you can catch most of my art and other updates on DeviantArt, NewGrounds, Instagram, and Tumblr.

Sayonara.

Once again, we have reached July without a TFcon. Hopefully the rescheduled December date will stick, but until then, let’s get together online one more time for another Virtual Convention panel!

“Beyond Transformers” is a panel about the other branches on the Transformers family tree. From the formative toy lines like Microman and Diaclone to some of the wild and weird robots from Takara that arrived after Transformers became a thing, there are a lot of cool toy robots which many fans might not be aware of, but are related to Transformers in one way or another. There are a lot of weird characters and surprises too. For this revised and extended edition, I’ll be combining the panel I preformed at TFcon 2019 with the panel I did in 2017 to create the ultimate in depth look at Takara’s extended robot universe!

The panel happens on my Twitch channel on July 11th! As was the case with my previous virtual panels, everyone is welcome, even if you’ve never been to a Transformers or anime convention before. You do not need to have a Twitch account to watch, but you will need an account to participate in the chat room. I won’t be interacting with the chat much during the presentation itself, and all notifications and redemptions will be turned off during that stretch of time. But we’ll have some time to chill from 5:30pm EST before I start the panel at 6, and then we’ll do some Q&As (and maybe an unboxing too).

Later that night, join my Discord server for a surprise. Did you know that this weekend is Ultraman day?

My previous virtual panels were a big success and a lot of fun, and even though they are obviously not a substitute for the real convention experience, they did at least help to scratch that itch of not being at TFcon. I hope you can be there, and please help to spread the word by posting about it on your own blogs and social media platforms. I am all about creating those “You had to be there” moments, and so there will not be any recordings or VOD. Don’t miss it live!

You can also check out the Facebook event page if you are into Facebook and use it to share that this is a thing that’s happening! Hope to see you there!

Sayonara.

Page One of the Frankensketchbook. Started drawing on June 17th 2020.

One year ago, I was feeling like I wasn’t satisfied with the kinds of artwork I was doing, and wanted to just break out of the rut by drawing a bunch of weird stuff all together for no reason. At the time I had been looking at a lot of images of various Japanese toys that I found online and was really struck by the unbridled creativity and wild designs found in the myriad of wonderful vinyl monsters, robots, mutants, and other characters I saw. Inspired, I wanted to inject some of that into my own work, and not just digitally. It had been awhile since I had kept up with regularly drawing in a sketchbook, probably because I didn’t have one that didn’t have most of the pages already drawn in. There was one sketchbook that was pretty much ruined when many of the pages got water damaged before I ever got to draw in it, but I resurrected it from the dead by transplanting the remaining unused pages from other sketchbooks into it, creating a powerful new sketchbook that would serve my purpose. Frankensketchbook was alive!

I drew on the first page during a live stream on my Twitch channel on June 17th, the night of my birthday. And it was a wild night! I was drawing in front of one of the bigger audiences I ever had, comprised of a fun convergence of people I knew from different places. I went into it without any plan other than to just draw whatever strange characters sprang to mind as I drew them. There were no thumbnails or anything else of the sort, just drawing aliens and kaiju and whatever other weirdos as they came to me.

Villains

One Million Ninjas

Monster Princess

I’ve drawn more pages since then, getting back to it every once in awhile when I’m tired of drawing digitally. To add some focus to each page, I’ll make everything on it fit a loose theme like villains, ninjas, monsters, and so on. Instead of doing a full month of Inktober last year, I did one page in my sketchbook featuring different characters representing the 31 official prompts. Sometimes I will base the page on whatever theme is going on in the art community that month, like March of the Robots and Mer-May.

Inktober 2020

March of the Robots

Mer-May

WiP KaiJune

So now it’s been a whole year since I started the Frankensketchbook. On my birthday this year, I was at it again, working on the next page, and it was another fun stream with a lot of people. I was a little disappointed in myself when I realized that this was only the 8th page in the book after the year of working in it. But when I figure there are like a million things on each page, I guess it’s ok that I haven’t drawn a million pages yet. I do want to take my time and make finished drawings about stuff that I enjoy.

While all the pages have been these big complete compositions full of characters, I can’t treat it too preciously. The pages are getting beat up along the way, with curling corners and wear & tear around the edges. I probably shouldn’t have been drawing all the way to the very edge of the paper. Still, I want to fill the Frankensketchbook with more weird and wacky stuff. It’s been a fun creative outlet and people seem to like to watch the traditional art process. Maybe someday I’ll do something with the artwork and use it in a larger project.

You can watch when I work in the Frankensketchbook, as well as other art other stuff, on my Twitch channel, and keep up when I post drawings and other things like this on my Tumblr.

Sayonara.

Last month I tried to undertake an art challenge of my own creation: Super Deformuary! I would draw Super Deformed big headed chibi characters every day in February while streaming on Twitch. Each character would be chosen at random based on suggestions taken by my watchers. This is one of my most favorite ways to draw famous characters. It’s a style that people recognize and it’s fun to try to find the balance between drawing the character as they are known while adding that rolly-polly simplified aesthetic. So I thought to myself “I’ll try it for a whole month! What could possibly go wrong?”

Well, the idea was sound! Or so I thought. I did get some great suggestions from a couple people, but I had to add a few myself in case I didn’t get enough ideas for characters that I was interested in drawing. Things went pretty well for the first few days, but I soon found myself spending too much time on a single illustration and sometimes bleeding well into the next day. And then my arm got sore, just in general from leaning on it, not only from drawing but I’m sure drawing didn’t help. So the initial challenge went out the window, and was in jeopardy of being cancelled altogether.

But I couldn’t let that happen! I started to feel better so I changed focus and endeavored to complete 14 drawings instead of the 28 that I was originally shooting for. And in the end, I did! When the month ended, I combined them all into one picture, right here.

You can also see all of the individual Super Deformurary entries on my Tumblr page from when I posted them after completing each one. I will get around to posting some of them on DeviantArt too, with a bit of extra commentary in some cases, and then eventually the ones I like best will be posted here in the Illustration page.

To summarize my Super Deformuary experience, I am not happy about how I could only draw 14 pieces instead of 28, especially considering October in 2019 when I did both Inktober and Skeletober in the same month and did a combined 64 pieces of art. But circumstances are what they are and I learned to live with it. The artwork itself I thought was mostly ok, but I struggled with making some things more detailed than they should have been and some characters don’t really look as accurate as I hoped, so mixed feelings overall. Also I have to admit that I did get tired of drawing in the same style the whole time. But I did find the random selection of characters a lot of fun and pleasing to work on. I got to draw a wide variety of characters from lots of different sources, with a good mix of males, females, humans, creatures, and robots,  and that is what the experiment was all about.

I wish it had gained more traction as it went along. I was hoping more people would notice what I was doing and start following it to see who I was drawing next. I’m a bit underwhelmed at the response, but I knew that was a likely possibility going into it. So it is what it is, and while I obviously hoped for a better outcome overall, I’m still glad I went though with it. Hey, I accomplished half of a thing! In these times, even only half is still pretty good!

And here’s the chaotic aftermath. In order to randomly select the characters that I would draw, I wrote the names down on strips of paper, folded them up, and put them in a plastic jar that once held jelly beans, then I’d pull one out each time I was about to draw one. A very high tech solution.

For some reason I kept them all this entire time after pulling them out. I don’t know why and I don’t know what to do with them now. Throwing them all away seems so undignified.

Anyway, no more art challenges for awhile, and I’ll be scaling back on art in general outside of my day job to let myself heal up a bit.

Sayonara.