Sun, a Day in Space: First Post of 2019!

by on January 6, 2019 at 11:57 pm
Posted In: Art, Blog, Sketches

In keeping with the theme of Time taking no breaks in 2019, here’s the 2nd page of my current sketchbook. I wanted to start this year’s posts last week but between car troubles and insomnia wearing me out, I just couldn’t make it happen.

In the future, long from now
The World, Orbyss, crumbles to pieces
Land, Sea, and Sky become one.

That’s it!

Just as the 2019 year rolls in blunt and bothersome, so does this page outta my sketchbook. Also, really late. Back in October I came up with something I call Interstellar Mage Punk. You’ll hear more about that later but for now, this is me pondering the world in that part of The Timeline.

* * *

Edit (01/07/2019): Ultima Thule

I wanted to include this in the original post but time was short and I really wanted to make my original deadline. On January 1, 2019, the space probe New Horizons successfully completed a flyby of planetary object Ultima Thule; now officially, the furthest object in our solar system visited by human spacecraft.

A Boomerang (or wiggle stereograph, as the Wiki calls it) of (486958) 2014 MU69, or Ultima Thule for those of you that don’t do number names. 2 frames=a 38 minute flyby shot.

“Awesome, a pair of rocks,” you think to yourself, probably.

It’s an ancient pair of rocks found in the Kuiper Belt, one of the outermost parts of our solar system. This is the belt where, just past Neptune, Pluto and two other extant planets, Haumea and Makemake, are located.

Ultima Thule (the names of the big rock/little rock respectively), is a contact binary object; not unlike Pluto and its largest moon Charon. They’ve been in orbit of each other for so long and so closely that they eventually became the single object pictured above.

It’s a formation that probably took many thousands of years to happen. You can go ahead and forget everything you knew about long distance relationships. While 2019 may have gotten off to a rough start, we can take some solace in the fact that it also began with humanity taking a small flyby peek at a love story possibly as ancient as our home in the vastness of space.

You can click here to read NASA’s article about the recent New Horizons flyby.

You can click here to see New Horizons’ Twitter and follow for updates on its journey through our cosmic neighborhood.

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It’s a Sun, Last Post of the Year Day: Mage Punk! Young and Old!

by on December 30, 2018 at 12:57 pm
Posted In: Art, Blog

Alrighty, everyone! The end of 2018 is upon us and with it comes the time to prepare for the next year soon to come. 2018 has without a doubt been a trying year like the ones before it. It’s been a long year, leaving little room for thinking the next will be any better.

The blind hope that time will eventually yield a better future only leads to despair when the world starts falling to pieces. Unfortunately, the world looks pretty broken already and we can’t trudge along hoping things’ll just magically get better. Pretending that the days ahead wear a different mask from the days behind us, is probably the epitome of failing to learn from history.

Fortunately, most stories that I’ve seen have been of various successes others have had in their 2018. They’ve been about carrying the momentum of those successes into the 2019 year. There are many acknowledgements of the coming difficulties ahead. An awareness that things won’t just suddenly ease up just because the clock strikes 00:00:00 01/01/2019.

There’s no breaks between 00:00:00 and 00:00:01 and 00:00:02 and that’s simply the crux of time’s unrelenting flow. The important thing is finding your way of flowing with it. I’m gonna do my best.

I didn’t intend to be so wordy on the matter but I was writing last week’s Christmas post and got a little carried away. So without further adieu, capping off our year is:

Mage Punk; Young and Old

Look at them! Jake is always tiny no matter his age!
Keeping to Young Jake’s general silhouette, I wanted to get a feel for the difference in Jake’s height and level of detail when he grows up. He doesn’t grow very far vertically.

That about wraps things up!

How nice is it that I got to end the year with a nice little Sunday post? What better way to leave a year behind than with a display of youth and age, side by side. I’m sure some of you are using today to try to relax before the new year starts rolling in. I mentioned earlier that time doesn’t take breaks between the seconds. The clock strikes 12:00:00 12:00:01 12:00:02 no need for commas. How appropriate that the year starts on a Twos Day. Even more appropriate that Day 2 of the year 2019 is a Wednesday.

I said time was unrelenting.

Me and my big mouth.

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Thor’s Day. A Little Effort, Please??

by on December 28, 2018 at 4:27 pm
Posted In: Art, Blog, Comics, Throwback Thursday

I didn’t actually prepare anything new for today because I thought it’d be nice to skip out on the last Thursday of the year. In case you have trouble reading the year on my crappy signature down there, this is from 2017. I took an hour or two out of some day to crank these out.

This about sums up my feelings regarding the fine art. Nevermind that these Throwback posts coincide with the Thursdays that I don’t get paid on. A little resentful, sure, and my feelings haven’t actually changed all that much since I drew it, sure, but…

…I’ve got nothing. But I do want to explore this again at a later time though. So there’s that at least!

Edit: For all my efforts, I just realized that I put this Thursday post up on a Friday. So that’s been my week.

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Last Wed Nes of the Year: Best Boy’s Day to Shine

by on December 25, 2018 at 12:22 pm
Posted In: Art, Blog

Happy Holidays, everyone! December has been a real emotional roller coaster but we did it. We’ve made it to Christmas! Oh, what fun! To that end, I’ve decided that since this week’s Wed Nes is literally right there next to Christmas on the calendar, it wouldn’t hurt to post it up a day early.

I present to you, my drawing for Inktober’s Jolt Prompt;

Olin “Slick” Calhoun!

Not in his usual outfit, I wanted Slick to have a less intense presence or mood from Jake in the previous drawing. Despite appearances, they’re both a couple of goofballs.

The initial draft; a treasure of it’s own!

I originally planned on coloring Slick traditionally like I wanted for Jake but I think I’ll be doing that digitally here as well.
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Sun, Day of Dylan’s Daydream Doodle

by on December 23, 2018 at 9:40 am
Posted In: Art, Blog, Sketches

For today’s post, I present a little flow of consciousness drawing that I did. It’s the first page of the brand new sketchbook that I’d bought. A little icebreaker, if you will. The whole point of a sketchbook is to scratch away at those ideas itching around inside your head. Consider a sketchbook your starting point for bringing those ideas to fruition and draw away. It may even make it easier to pick and choose which ideas and trains of thought to pursue in earnest.

  

Basically, I wanna do this page again from scratch, BUT COOLER.
Partway through drawing this, it started to look like it would make a decent comic page so I tried adding some kinda narrative element between Jake and Dylan. I may come back to this in some form in the future.

It’s much bigger than the smaller 5×8 Moleskine sketchbook I’ve gotten used to drawing in since I finished college and those 8.5×11/9×12 blackbooks stopped being a basic life requirement. Jake and Dylan are my way of exploring that age old hero/rival dynamic. This was a fun exercise in exploring their relationship.

 

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Fanart Friday: Bowsette~

by on December 21, 2018 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Art, Blog, Fan Art Friday, Sketches

Back during that Bowsette craze I tried my hand at my own design for her. I wanted to give the King turned Queen of Koopas a look that was tough and monstrous, but also voluptuous like the many shapely Bowsettes that other artists were drawing at the time.

This was probably one of those early ballpoint drawings that started my descent from pencils.
Her design was a lot of fun to play with. Everyone was so excited all it once to draw this Koopa Princess Queen.
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Wed NES: Mage Punk Ablaze

by on December 19, 2018 at 12:17 pm
Posted In: Art, Blog, In Progress

Back in the month of Halloween I attempted to participate in the age old tradition of Inktober. Of course, I failed miserably; but did I manage to eek out one or two worthwhile illustrations from the whole experience like the Inktober before.

I did three ink drawings and a number of ballpoint pen sketches until around the middle of the month rolled around. The themes I did in ink were Poisonus, Tranquil, Scorched, and Jolt. I’ll post Scorched and Jolt here on these last two Wed Nes days of good ol’ 2018. The last one I’ll put up sometime in January.

Today we have a look at a Fiery Mage Punk Jake for Scorched.

    

I drew this one and a leftover scrap with the intent of coming back to it to color it with inkwash. As fate would have it, I made many mistakes while working on him and used my Xacto knife to erase them all. I’ll color it in digitally and add it to the gallery later.
He's the shortest character and I drew him too big! I wanted more flame billowing up from his head. Boo!
I learned a lot while working on this. Very happy with how it turned out in the end.
I guess I also kinda sorta wanted the phrase "daddy" to come to mind.
I really wanted Jake to look like he was strong enough to punch through concrete.
Those flames! That X shaped scar is so cool! And his expression? Is it confusing enough?
I also really wanted Jake to look like he could melt through iron.

The preliminary sketch and some progress shots

I posted most, if not all of these, up on my Instagram stories as I was working on it.

My preliminary sketch. The goal here was “small but strong like fiery boulder”.
This was where I attempted to invoke forces of questionable origins in an attempt to make Jake as lit as possible.

All in All, Not Bad for one of the more unforgiving art mediums.

As for those ballpoint pen drawings, none of them actually count to me because pen and ink is a point of personal pride with me (as my top favorite medium).

Next week we’ll have a look at our best boy Olin, for Jolt, to cap out the year.

 

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