art makes me smile

We’ve been keeping up with sending out a holiday e-card on toonzone.net for the last few years. Here’s the one we sent out just prior to the Christmas holiday. The concept was a group effort. I did the sketching, inks and colors. It was a lot of fun to hammer out, particularly the expressions. Inks and final colors below:

Alright! Acidic Tees launched!

I did a series of t-shirts for them. So, be sure to check those out here and like their Facebook page so you can keep up with their latest news. Feedback is always welcome.

Most of the art I do is happy and cute and peppy. So, let’s switch things up a bit. Here’s an inked Zombie and a writhing person growing out of a skull that has sharp knives pointing away from it. Presumably, so that the skull will not accidentally cut itself. No one wants that.

While I was on vacation, I didn’t have a lot of internet. So, I spent some of that time doing some poses, costumes to add to the toonzone mascot’s model and idea sheet. I just inked the new poses and did the flats. I also split the costumes off into a new page. Here goes.

Recently, George “The Urban Jibaro” Torres allowed me the opportunity to redesign the logo for his online magazine, Sofrito For Your Soul. The magazine promotes the evolution of Latino culture in the United States and shares the spirit of that heritage through art, music, dance and other forms of communication. It was an honor to work on a project with someone who’s clearly quite passionate about what they’re doing.

As with all my personal sketches, I usually return to them down the road to ink them. While I was working on this one, I started thinking back on the Power Pack comic Marvel put out in the 80′s. That was a great series. Engaging, mature stories featuring a team of unsupervised super hero children and fantastic art by June Brigman. It is completely and totally worth your time.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Inked sketch of a kid as a superhero.

One of my buddies from the Bronx, Junior McClean, has two locations where you may check out and purchase his designs on t-shirts, iPhone, iPad cases, greeting cards and more. His designs are pretty slick. So, be sure to check out his Zazzle and RedBubble stores.

I had mentioned that I wanted to sketch something on twitter, but was blanking on what to draw. @ToonFaithful requested a sketch of Gumball, of  The Amazing World of Gumball. I’ve never seen it before. So, I had to heavily refer to online footage. Hopefully, I did it some justice.

I might put up requests on Sundays for sketch ideas.

Here’s the last image inked yesterday. I don’t remember the origin of this robot. Whenever I draw robots it’s because I’m in a weird place. I like to try different things when creating a new robot. In this one, I decided he should have an elongated head and should move about on wheels. I had a lot of fun inking this one. Particularly because the sketch was done with such a muddy pink pen that I was making most of the details up as I inked anyway. I’d like to do more sketches with this guy at some point.

This one has a story behind it. Brian and I were in a Petco one Saturday and I passed by the hamster tanks. There was this one, adorable, show off of a hamster pressed against the glass. I became enamored with him because he looked like he was having a blast. So, I took a few pictures of him and of the other hamster in the tank.

When I got back home, the pictures of the happy little hamster kept sending me into giggle fits. By chance, the other hamster was being a recluse and hiding in his igloo. That’s when I decided that the happy hamster should be called Warbles and the other should be his evil cousin, Marbles. Marbles can’t comprehend how his cousin could be so happy-go-lucky and is very jealous of him for it. So, his mission becomes attempting to teach Warbles a less and cause a great deal of mischief.

I actually edited those two pictures into a very brief intro comic to bring into work and make someone in particular laugh. I still kind of crack up at the quickly drawn eyebrows, monocle and a curly mustache right on top on the hamster and how lame it is.

I took the idea further and sketched Warbles and Marbles out. Marbles decided to change his facial hair between the two. He combs his hair in a different direction now too.