Category: Drawing

Yesterday, I posted a drawing that’s part of the Cloudy Characters print set. Today, I wanted to show you the process. I’ve always admired the process posts on Dan Zettwoch‘s site (like this one), so here’s one of my own.
Nothing starts without an idea. The brief I had from David was simply that it had to be a ‘cloudy character,” nothing else. I didn’t want to do anything with clouds in the sky because I couldn’t think of an interesting way of depicting that. Instead I decided to think of ‘cloudy’ as ‘head in the clouds.’ The economy was tanking at the time (and still is) and it was pretty obvious that Wall Street has had their head in the clouds for way too long. My initial idea was to comment on the various bailouts by having Ransom Strange‚Ñ¢ magically inflate an empty suit:

That seemed over-complex graphically for the small image, and didn’t really make much sense. But I liked the idea the lost financial capital as magical (or fictional) and evaporating as if it was never there. My second sketch was much simpler. It’s just a Fat Cat deflating… blowing mystical capital all around around him:

I was happy enough with the above to work up final line-art (india ink over pencil):

Next was color. I scanned in the line art and printed out a few smaller copies. This way I could quickly play around with it using colored pencil:

I liked the last variation best, and worked up the background line art based on it:

The final step was compositing everything in Photoshop and coloring the art based on the color pencil guidelines above. Here’s the final art:

See (and purchase) the printed (letterpress!) version here… Hopefully someone will find this useful in some way.

I was invited by David Huyck to create an image for a collection of letterpress prints called Cloudy Characters. The print is part of a set that includes art by Meg Hunt, Bill Fick, John Martz, Amy Crehore, Steven Weissman, and David Huyck. The set can be purchased from David’s Cloudy Collections site. This is what I came up with:

Pssst…

As mentioned in the previous post, I’d done some illustrations for Robyn Chapman’s Hey 4-Eyes! zine. Well, here they are. It’s a brief history of eyeglasses from Emperor Nero’s Emerald to Otto Wichterle’s invention of the contact lens. The drawings are presented in reverse-chronological order. All the research was done by Robyn.

1961 AD. Otto Wichterle and his Merkur (a tinker-toy-like construction system) based apparatus used to develop the first contacts.

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Ink & colored pencil, 2 x 2 inches
This drawing has been staring at me for a couple of months. Somehow it ends up in front of me no matter where I’m sitting and what I’m doing. Clearly, I don’t have the right place for it. So, if someone out there wants to give it a new home, please leave a comment. First come, first serve.

This is the first time ever I got around to making an holiday card. It’s a little thing, 3.3″ x 5.2″, printed with the Gocco system. After sending them to friends and family I’ve got a bunch left over. If anyone is interested in getting one of these cards, just send your mailing address to me (tomk {at} robot26.com) and I’ll send one off. Offer valid until supplies last.

Click to Enlarge.

I was commissioned to do some cavemen drawings based on the caveman of my Uncivilized Books logo. The commission didn’t work out, so I was stuck with a bunch of sketches of cavemen. The only thing left to do was to ink them. All the originals are about 4×5 inches in size. If any caveman fans out there are interested, I’d be willing to part with one or all of them for a small fee (I’m cheap!). Email me tomk (at) robot26.com or post a comment below.

1. caveman walks I

2. caveman rockman

3. caveman walks II

4. caveman stonedman

5. caveman walks III

6. caveman walks IIII