barn owl love

I did this the other day but didn't have time to post. A happy little lovey-dovey barn owl - I just love their heart-shaped faces.

miss button

Miss Button. She's just your run-of-the-mill shorthair with the "tuxedo" markings. Found her on the streets of Milwaukee all skin and bones and adorable. Couldn't bring myself to take her to the Humane Society so I kept her...

weekend with my family!

Funny story. My family went up to my grandpa's old house this weekend and we all just sort of hung out and played with the dogs and did some tree-cutting. My brother's girlfriend wanted to go see the new deer hunting blind they built for my dad. So we took her new 2006 Ford Escape across the field and up to the woods to check it out. I got out and went to set my beer on top of the car - saying "Don't drive away with my beer!" Well I didn't realize her sun roof was open and just as the word "beer" came out of my mouth I let go and the can fell inside the vehicle upside down and into the cup holder - spraying beer everywhere... oops. I felt so bad but still laughed and so did they. So this is my quick little comic depicting the scene.

panda poster

Poster concept for a festival that does not exist... I repeat, does not exist. Just having some fun with shapes and color and text. It started out as an illustration of a raccoon, but I went to the zoo the other day and the red panda was out for once and he was soooooo cute so I changed it.

new sketchies!

Quick illustration created from sketch below...

Another productive day at Jackie & Brent's house! Thanks for keeping me motivated guys! And watermelon, coffee, and Jimmy John's always help - though not all at the same time, eww. Anyways These are some of the better sketches from the hours I spent there. Some macho sheep, a cute pupper, and Mr. Smilodon fatalis, looking very smug indeed.
It's amazing how much cleaning up has to be done on these sketches too - I have this habit of drawing on top of drawings - sometimes unconsciously... So I end up with page after page of overlapped drawings and scribbles...

poor lizard...

This was done one for Illustration Friday's word of the week - detach. Just a really quick illustration - about 30-40 min. Poor lizard and his detachable tail....

sedna sketch

rough sketch for an illustration I want to start soon - also could possibly be an entry for the new IF prompt - "detach." It's based off of one telling of an Inuit myth about Sedna who's kind of a goddess of sea animals. In this particular variation (apparently there are quite a few), Sedna marries a man who turns out to be a bird spirit - and not a very nice one at that. They move to a secluded island but her father comes to rescue her. As they are leaving the island in his kayak the angry bird spirit husband calls to all of his bird friends which circle around the canoe and their flapping and flying creates a terrible storm. In fear of drowning, Sedna's father throws her overboard. She surfaces and clings to the kayak with her hands but her father cuts off her fingers one by one. Each finger falls into the ocean and becomes the whales, seals, walruses, and fish.

bushed bearcat

The Crimson Binturong!! - the nocturnal crime-fighting viverrid keeping the forest canopies safe! That is, when he's not dozing at the local diner..

the S.S. HEARTBREAK

Here are two illustrations I did yesterday and today - the top one being my very first submission to Illustration Friday based off the word "sail." The bottom one was the first completed, but then I decided to go back in and make it somewhat more detailed, though I think I like the simple one better for some reason.

gigantic herbivor and other random sketches

I went to conceptart.org and saw that the creature of the week was something like "gigantic herbivore," so this was what I came up with. He's huge. He eats trees. That's right, trees, and uses his big 'ol beaky, boney jaws to break apart and crunch 'em up after severing the roots with his spade-like bottom jaw.

Other randomness...

I want to try and make some movable dinosaurs like the mammals I did for my senior thesis project. So these are some quick sketches to show how I get to the final product, though when I start cutting paper out it takes a long time to make the joints work together the way that I want them to.