Ellie Lives!

I have a new webcomic! Check out Ellie on Planet X and tell me what you think!

Rocket Through The Wilderness!

Through the magic of Photoshop, here's the mission patch for Ellie's journey to Planet X. I was trying to emulate the mission patches created for all of the NASA missions. I want a real one now.

This!

Which is a remake of this:

Which is a remake of this crap:

Weather

A thousand and then some

Every so often I collect all of the artwork that I've done on my tablet and print it up in a book. That way I have a hard copy to put on my shelf next to my other sketchbooks. I'm just shy of hitting the 1,000 mark on total "pages" since I bought my tablet pc so I thought it was a good time to start putting it together. I actually have well more than the number stated, but that's the number of pages that have been saved to the folder on my hard drive called "Sketchbook". It's not counting all the other files I've done that have been worthy enough to have actual titles bestowed upon them. Not like files such as poor ol' Image926.tif. Oh, what fun that one was, but just not fun enough to get a fancy name. But fancy or not, they all go in and then I can back 'em up to make more room on my drive for the next thousand-and-then-some.

I'm curious what's going to happen when I reach 1,000. Will it restart at 001? Or will it add a one to the front? So many unanswered questions.

Below is the cover I did for the book. Since Ellie and her peeps feature largely in the pages it's only fitting they be on the cover.

UPDATE: Upon reaching 1,000 pages the file automatically gets named Image1000.tif. Another mystery solved!

Ellies

This should be wrapping paper.

Ellie Reads Comics

This is a poster I designed for KIDS READING COMICS, a gallery show at Green Brain Comics and inspired by the Kids Read Comics convention at the Henry Ford Centennial Library in Dearborn, Michigan. The exhibit will hang at Green Brain until Friday June 11th.

Something to post

It's Irwin and Ellie, fresh from my sketchbook.

Bri's Birthday Cavalcade!

Birthday Girl Brianne requested Ellie and her peeps to grace the top of her cake this year. Here they are in their current incarnation - until I get bored and change their looks again. I think we decided to call that Seussian-style instrument the Saxotrombaphone.

Stretch and Squash

Here are several recent sketches of Ellie from my sketchbook. She's evolved quite a bit from this post.

A l'il more Ellie

More "tests" as we like to call them.

Ellie again

Just some little Ellie tests. Not sayin' it's a preview or anything, but..., well..., just sayin'.

Baby did a bad, bad thing.

A quick sketch of Chris Isaak, though I don't think the likeness is that good. I had fun doing his jacket though. I need one like that.

And here's a drawing of Ellie from my sketchbook just 'cause I liked it.

Nope and Yup

More stuff not for the book

Just goofin' around.

Makin' the cut

I'm trying to come up with some original Ellie On Planet X for my upcoming book of art that I mentioned below. Here are a few I did that I'm not really sure about. Something I've been painfully aware of is that I have a portfolio full of characters for this story, but none of them seem to be doing anything. They just kind of stand around and pose. So I really need to drop them into an environment where they interact with one another or there's a story going on. The illustration below tries to do that but I'm not sure if the joke is clear. Regardless, I don't think either of these will make the cut. Gotta come up with something though. I'd like to have these printed before SPACE! (Small Press and Alternative Arts Expo in Columbus, OH) in April!

Ellie Squared

A self promotion postcard idea.

See? More Ellie.

Ellie Evolution

My one ever evolving project is Ellie on Planet X - kind of an internet comic/children's book thingy in the works. It's been an epic in the making, with its natal beginnings over ten years ago, still waiting to see the light of day. Ellie's character didn't even show up in the story until late in the brain storming process and has gone through many changes along the way. Partly because my style over the years has improved, but also because I can't make a decision on how I just want to do the art for the story. But the idea behind refining her character design has always been to simplify Ellie and come up with a formula to draw her the same every time.

Originally Ellie was going to be a little girl in a space suit, but for the practicality of the plot line it made more sense to make her a robot girl instead. The above drawing was the very first sketch I did of her. She already had antenna on her head to represent pony tails and a solar panel skirt. I went from drawing to 3D models, back to drawing, then to vector illustrations for simplicity (which only made it more complicated), then back to drawing, all the while trying to make her design more and more simple.










I found that having a permanent smile made it difficult to show different emotions on her face - having to cover it up with an arm or a shadow - so I dropped it. And I continued the simplification process by limiting the colors too.





I'll spend hours drawing Ellie over and over again just to work out problems I have with posing her or the kind of emotions I'm trying to portray.

And just when I thought I had it figured out I started at it again. I don't know if I like where it's going, but I thought I'd simplify her head some more and make it easier and quicker to draw. If ever the story makes it to the light of day I guess I'll have to choose.

Sketchy and sketches

I played it lazy last night and used my mighty tablet pc at Dr. Sketchy as opposed to real paper and pencils. Azucena teasingly calls it cheating. I've made it a point up until now to not use the tablet so that I would be forced into fixing on the fly whatever mistakes I make using traditional media. How else do we improve but by learning from our mistakes?

Our models for the night consisted of three hula hoopers, including Revolva (awesome name) who posed for us before. All proceeds went to Blight Busters which gives hula hoops to inner city kids for World Hoop Day. The fun part of drawing hula hoopers in action is that nobody can tell you that you got it wrong. The models were moving far too fast to get an accurate picture of what they were doing. In fact, all of my sketches are amalgams of the three hoopers, using an arm from this one, a leg from that one...etc. The session was more about capturing the feeling of movement than any kind of accuracy and it led to much more cartoony drawings than what I normally produce at Dr. Sketchy.

I'm also throwing in three sketches from lunch break earlier in the day. Kind of my warm-up for D.S.: a girl from a pop-up ad on my email, Ellie, and Azucena admiring a rock.

Coming up next: My Comic Con report! I got to meet Dr. Sketchy creator Molly Crabapple herself! Stay tuned!