Portrait demo

A friend of mine wanted wanted some tips on doing a self portrait, so I did a demo and broke it down for her -

0. Took her reference photo and broke it down into basic shapes of face and hair (red outline); also divided face in half vertically and at eyeline to get a sense of spacing for the facial features

1. Quick, dirty sketch of those same features. I straightened things out a bit since her head was at a slight tilt in the photo and I stylized the spacing just a smidge as well to make things look a little cuter (bringing everything down towards the bottom just a bit).

2. Lightly put in the shapes of her eyes, brows, nose, and mouth. Still keeping it sketchy because I want to make sure the spacing looks good before I refine everything.

3. Going back and forth between erasing and drawing new lines, I define the features and start to clean up the hair. The entire time, I pay close attention to the specifics of her features - what shape are her eyes and how they are affected by her smile pulling her cheeks up, her rounder nose with just a slight view of her nostrils, the dark spaces on the sides of her smile. There are some features I tone down to better suit my style and keep her looking cute, such as the wrinkles on the sides of her nose and mouth, the creases under her eyes, the size of her eyes and eyelashes (I made them significantly bigger), and the volume of her hair.

4. Finished cleanup and added all the finishing touches - highlights in the eyes to liven them up, freckles spreading out from the nose, flaring the eyelashes, chin dimple, and overhauling the hair to have fun masses and direction inside. I also added ears.

Laser girl

Legend of Zelda: Midnight Munchies

Just a little fanart I've wanted to do for a while. What if Link had more than just 4 bottles? What if he kept a reserve of fairies? What if he just started eating them all the time?

How would Navi feel?

Blonde Barbarian colored

Here's a cleaned up version of the Barbarian from the last post. The other characters are coming soon.

Assorted flavors

Just a bunch of random characters I've been messing around with. Maybe they'll turn into a story

Blonde Barbarian

Skippy Tumblr Projects

Along with the updated Twitter Header (as seen in the previous post), I was also commissioned to do a couple of gag posters for Skippy's Tumblr site. They wanted to coordinate their promotions alongside the Oscars by doing parodies of popular movies. Here are the ones that I got to do:

None of the writing was mine, just the images. And yeah, that last one is an animated GIF with some fancy flickering lights.

Skippy Twitter Header #2

This past week I got to make another header for Skippy's @TheFunNut account to promote their new Salted Caramel flavor. It just went live yesterday, here's a screenshot:

I'm really happy with how this one turned out, it was rough trying to get the caramel to look like actual caramel, especially in the stalactite drips. Having the cool, blue cave opening create rim lighting on the sides of the nut character really brings the piece together and I got to use some fun reference to give it the Indiana Jones tribute feel they wanted.

Here are some shots of the process:

The two main options I came up with for the composition

Started right in with the painting on top of the option the client liked best. They had an image file for the character and jar that they wanted me to use, so that made things easier. Mostly just tried to get the colors and values in place.

Client wanted more and more caramel stacks

Looked up tons of caramel reference and toned back the blue light in the background to make the foreground pop more. Honestly, most of the time was spent on all those freaking cubes.

A few more finishing touches with lighting and the sparkles of salt on the caramel

Another Skippy Ad project

In December I was commissioned to make the Twitter header for Skippy Peanut Butter's @TheFunNut account.

And here's the full image:

Norman

Warmup doodle from this morning. Haven't posted much because I've been mostly putting stuff on Tumblr, Twitter, Deviantart, Instagram, Facebook... pretty much everywhere else except here because I don't know if people care about blogs like this any more.