Disney-themed Threadless Designs

As an artist, I sometimes wander pretty far afield from the fantasy subject matter I'm most know for drawing and painting. Here's an example: two designs I created for a Disney-themed t-shirt competition at Threadless.com. The designs are up for voting through March 25th and I've provided links below so if you like them, please take a moment to vote for them. I'd sincerely appreciate it.

Regarding the designs: I've always liked the early, B&W Mickey Mouse design best so I re-created an iconic Mickey pose in Adobe illustrator and since he's Disney's star character, I placed him among the stars as a constellation. It's a subtle image in terms of color scheme but I think it would make an attractive shirt.

The other image is bold and that's because it's Donald Duck and he's angry. Most of my favorite Donald moments have come when he loses his temper in cartoons and comics so when I chose to create a painting of him for a friend years ago, I made him angry. This design is based on that painting, although it's been re-worked and placed on a black background to give it added "pop" (the original painting was on a deep red background).

I hope you like these departures from the usual creatures and characters that populate this blog.

http://www.threadless.com/mickey/angry-donald/

http://www.threadless.com/mickey/mickey-constellation/

Character portraits

Here are 2 character portraits I created for Dungeon #210. The second one depicts a half-orc (hence the enlarged canines). I tried to push the lighting in these 2 pieces more than I usually do and I was pleased with the results.

Stonehenge

Pen and ink was my "first love" as an artist and I return to it when I can. I like using it various ways, from bold brushwork to simple contour drawings or a combination of techniques. However, I've always admired artists who use the medium to do value drawings. I've dabbled in that in the past but I decided to try seeing what I could do with it if I applied myself to the task more often. To get started, I drew the picture of Stonehenge above. It's about 9" wide and the drawing was executed in india ink and crowquill pen on bristol. It wasn't the best bristol and was a little more absorbent than I'd prefer but it worked. The lines bled ever-so-slightly on the soft surface.

As I was working on the drawing, I also improvised a little study of standing stones to help me out. On both drawings, I limited myself to using a crowquill pen but in the future, I may try using tech pens and some brush in combination with the dip pen.

I don't consider this effort wholly successful but I'm happy with the results and I learned some things along the way. Hopefully, I can apply them to the next drawing and make it better.

Mordakhesh Triumphant

This is a painting I did last summer for Dragon magazine #416. As you can probably guess, Mordakhesh is the rakshasa character standing over the slain dragon. In D&D, the hands of rakshasa characters are reversed on the arms, which is tricky to draw. It's very counter-intuitive to draw something backwards like that. It just feels wrong!

I had a lot of overlapping and darker elements to deal with in this picture so I chose to paint it in gray before applying color, which was built up slowly, in "glazes" on digital layers. I was very pleased with the results so I hope you enjoy them.

More Sketches

Here are a few sketchbook drawings created while I was just doodling for fun. The little ghost girls and the "steampunk kids" were sketched a year or so ago. The other sketches are recent.

Gnomes and Faces

I've been doodling gnomes and fun faces in my sketchbook lately. Enjoy!

Initiative

I've been very busy personally and professionally for the past few months but unfortunately, as is often the case in this business, I can't show you anything I've been working on yet. Instead, here's a D&D illustration I did a few years ago. I was very pleased with the poses and line of action in this one.

I hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday season!