Sketch Sketch Sketch

A friend pointed out that I've been neglecting this blog, and it's true.  For quite a while now, my online output has been limited to commission work and large scale projects.  But a finished piece represents only like 5% of the total work.

So!  I'm going to share the other 95% with you.  

I've spent the last year and a half shedding like crazy, filling sketchbooks with ideas, studies, doodles, and scribblings; look forward to seeing copious amounts of this stuff, plus smaller side projects and shelved/retired/forgotten bits as well.  

As always, thanks for following and enjoy:)

Especially with the Hats

Just some sketches from my favorite decade, fashion-wise.  Why can't we still dress this way, ladies?  No excuses!  

Brothers Unite, Streak Squid

So my most excellent brother has the sweetest job: he researches Vibrio Fischeri, a bacterium that colonizes the light organ of the hyper-cute Hawaiian Bobtail Squid.  His lab runs an impressive squid-breeding program that pumps out innumerable itty-bitty squidlets for research purposes.  I spent an afternoon helping him sample them out, and it's no easy task:

His lab also hosts a yearly Squid Pow-Wow where their colleagues come from afar to bask in the collective bioluminescence of their research.  And this year's pamphlet features the first collaboration between the Miyashiro brothers since like, forever.  Naturally, he turned a scientific gag into a comic strip and then commissioned me to dress it up as a painting. 

It's actually an evolutionary joke that rifts off the bacteria's life cycle: see, the adult squid pump out most of their bacteria every morning, then the bactera reproduce and colonize the light organs of brand new little squidlets.  And some day, the joke goes, the bacteria will be the host, expelling its colonies of squid every morning, the better to colonize little baby bacteria.  

If you're not laughing, yet, just relax and enjoy the painting.  It's very green, isn't it?

I really don't do much drawing with brushes on photoshop; the results always feel too mechanical.  Instead, I sample really, really huge brushes from dried swatches of india ink and then build up the penciled image with a succession of stamps.  It feels more like a monoprint than a painting, but those distinctions always felt a little foggy to me. 

One thing's clear, though: I love love love drawing squid!  How could I not?  They're so malleable.  My sketchbook is peppered with the little guys, along with an occasional chicken or chick, for variety's sake:

A Little Indulgence

So I am spending most of my time working in a project-specific sketchbook and I'm almost at the last page and good heavens it is the worst quality sketchbook I've ever bought.  I can't remember the brand, but it's been on my shelf less than a year, has prematurely yellowed pages, a black faux-canvas cover that melts off in the presence of liquid, and a weak spine that popped off for no reason last night.  Morever, this thing hates water and ink and washes and if i try to draw in it with anything but pencil, it bleeds well into next week. 

So!

These are some sanity-saving warm-up doodles from my good and trusty, archival and dapper watson-guptill books.  What a messy relief.  I love wash over pencil and pencil over wash and plan to include them in future projects, but they're currently relegated to the sidelines because oh man, I could just do them all day, every day. 

They Do Not Die So Things Become Difficult

I've been rereading the Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, my favorite fantasy series from those long-lost days as a fourth grade something.  The above illustration is the only one to make it past the thumbnail stage successfully.  It's from the first installment, The Book of Three, which is a super fast and intriguing and intense read that ends with not one, but two deus ex machinas and is ultimately way, way less satisfying than its successor, The Black Cauldron*.  But the composition was so strange, I was compelled to finish it.  I've started drawing in my sketchbooks a lot more, aiming to straighten out people and animals and armor and hair and clothes and horses way before the thumbnail stage.  It's quite fun, trying out little variations as you go along.

Gwydion didn't surprise me too much, he's frequently likened to a lone wolf, with shaggy hair and trail-beaten getup.  He quickly becomes mentor to the young protagonist, a source of authority and solidarity in his upturned world, which is why it's a tad disturbing when he's cut down so quickly by the Cauldron Born. 

The Cauldron Born are a Celtic take on zombies, corpses that are resurrected in the Black Cochran.  They're tireless, fearless and immortal warriors who move silently and never speak.  The text describes them in something of a uniform, with bronze waistbands and studs on their breastplates, but I ended up pushing them in a different direction, emphasizing the differences in their appearances  before death.  Zombies with braids! 

I've been drawing characters from the second book, but since other projects have to take precedence, they're in limbo right now.  I'm shooting for another illustration by next month, but I might end up posting sketchbooks instead.  Thanks for looking!




*A super-dark young adult read that I hardily recommend.  A heavy, heavy read, at least 50, maybe 60 lbs.  By all means, check it out.  But do us all a favor and don't watch the horrendously pathetic Disney movie of the same name.  Don't even think about it.  Stop it. 

We'll Allow You to Introduce Me

These Are Mostly On The Job

 

Whenever I'm on the verge of complaining about excessively black pants and coats and shirts and hats and hearts, I look up and the women are wearing all these psychedelic grampa shirts and the men are sporting highlighter shirts.  Spring, I tell you, they are unfurling their tail feathers.