Happy Holidays

I wasn't able to mail out a card in time, so I hope this virtual digital kind will suffice. I was originally drawing an elf doing the robot. But it was very complicated. Because he was at a rave. So I opted to draw a quaint chrismassy city block instead. The other day I did the robot in the shower, for no reason. It just felt natural.

The holidays snuck up, didn't they? Not to mention 2010 is practically busting down our doors. I don't like it, mostly because 2010 takes a long time to say, unlike "09", there is no shortened version. We can't really say "0-10," can we? Wait til we get to... 2017. Why do we say the 'Two Thousand' part anyway? We all know what millennium we are in. Can't we just start counting upwards without it?
Well, there's my rant for the day.

Happy Holidays to everyone, and I hope two-thousand-and-ten only brings wonderful things to you!!

Have you heard?

Everyone's heard!!

So, this is one of a series of little birdies I've been making this summer for friends as birthday gifts. This one is property of the lovely Maurene. I wonder if she named him/her.
(Btw - the grey drop is his little poop.)
I'll post more when I get some photos.
I intended to make a whole bunch (along with other plushies, books, prints, etc) to have a presence at APE Con in San Fransisco this year, but alas, things didn't work out that way. Not enough time to prepare for it, since it's happening in less than a month! These things take time, you know! And I have tv to watch! Just kidding, I'd really like to try for next year though...
Mmm boppa mmm mau mau, mmm boppa mmm mau mau....

Update: Here is little Mandy's birthday bird (sorry it's not as a great a shot):

Illustration Friday - Wrapped

Couldn't think of anything else. :( Oh well, Mr. Mummy will have to do.
Have a great weekend!

Afternoon doodles

Who wants to work when there are kitties and silly characters to draw and paint?!

Illustration Friday - Impatience

We've all seen her. Or we're related to her. People impatient with her, and she's impatient with everyone.




My good buddy Ryan motivated me to do I.F. this week, tonight being our deadline (you better finish yours and post it or ELSE!!!) So I tried to keep minimal colors, and couldn't decide if I like her with or without shading, so posting both. I'd like to say these were done quick but they kinda weren't. The sketches were, but trying to keep few colors was a fun problem-solving process, as simple as they are. I end up doing too many variations for my own good.
Anyway, and now... back to work. Have a great week!

I love lines.

Lately, I'm doing a lot of this while I think.

Bring it on, Wednesday...

Sunday Sketch

Many Sundays ago, in a friend's backyard. The late afternoon lighting and shadows were much prettier than what I could get down quickly.

Black Butterfly Productions

Some months ago my sweet friend Shev asked me to help her make a logo and business cards for a business she's starting up. I love the name and jumped on the opportunity. These are the finalized logo concepts I presented her, after getting a good grasp of what she was after, and thumbnailing out initial ideas.


She really liked the bottom one, and from there I did various layout ideas for the business card.


And then ultimately, the finals!
[back]


[2 versions of the front, with different font choice for her to choose from when she's ready to print]



This project was a lot of fun for me and I like the way it turned out. Shev is a great friend and she was suuuper easy to work with and let me run loose. I don't think I've really shown the process of many of my projects before and thought I'd mix it up a bit.
Have a great weekend!

Colored Heads

Because it was fun! These are random doodles from meetings and such I decided to color before going to bed. Saw "Dead Alive" for the first time tonight with friends, and though it was hilarious, I needed to ensure my last thoughts before going to sleep are gore-less....but now I just reminded myself of the head in the blender part... dammit. This isn't working out so well.

Hug Me To Sleep

Epically long post.

Where to begin! MrTiki was a massive project and a labor of love. It was a virtual world, based on a magical island where almost every decision you made on the site affected your alignment to good or evil - the inhabitants and animals (called "Spirits") of the land vs the villainous, rich Mr. Woo (and his team) who "discovers" the island and plans to take it over and turn it into a tourist trap. I was invited to come on board as the third partner in Dec of 2006, to be the Co-Creator/Art Director/Artist. We all loved this brand we created, and I absolutely loved being the artist to bring it to life. I worked on it up until the summer of 2008, so you can imagine the amount of work that was produced. It's daunting to even think about it, looking back. To start there were only three of us: myself, "Volte6," who was master programmer and infrastructure, and "mrdweedles," game programmer and marketing person. Then Wee joined us, a very talented game developer. Kinh came on board as our amazing writer (who ended up writing altogether about 300 pages worth of damn gripping story). Much later, "TikiMaestro" joined us as our audio engineer and created beautiful theme songs for the world and sound effects for the games, and his wife "WeeOne," later joined as an artist to assist me with overflow. Aside from getting the actual site design/layout/infrastructure developed, we updated weekly with a continuing story line for our readers that included news images, usually involved site events happening on the island, we had a crazy amount of games (including multiplayer), shops which contained insane amounts of virtual goodes in the economy, a working economy system (currency was called "Tiki Tokens"), maps of the world, quests for users to complete, a system to own a "Spirit" feed it/play with it/care for it, a battle system to fight your Spirit against others, we had downloads for users, ... phew, this was an undertaking... a tiki mail system, a forum for users, collectible coconuts, high scores systems with trophies, etc etc ETC.... It was so cool, the site even changed from day to night depending on the time.
We had a steady and growing userbase - I'm not sure on the numbers but I believe we reached upwards of 10,000 users (I could be way off here), without much marketing at all. We also had a wonderful beginning of a fanbase with lovely fansites such as: http://mrtiki.wordpress.com
It was a HUGE accomplishment.. is, rather, and I'm proud of all of us for what we did. Unfortunately some months ago, there was a mishap with our servers and the site experienced a heartbreaking meltdown. I hope one day it all can be recovered and mrtiki can live on in all it's awesome tikiness. In the meantime I believe some of our games can be found on newgrounds.com
Here is a selection of art I produced. I hope you enjoy and thanks for reading and looking.
Click images for larger view.
Site design for homepage in the day and in the night:

Logo sketches to final (bottom right)

Tiki Island Map

Tiki Village Map

Wootropolis map & a couple shop interiors

Misc art: Konoso gravesite, Anantiki holiday scene, Cave of Impending Doom sketch, Tiki Temple interior

Foggy Coast sketches:

Some character dev:

Some Spirit art:

Some game art:

Some virtual goods:

Battle system and Spirit care system interfaces:

 A selection of weekly news images that accompanied the weekly story:

 Misc art: Calendar for users to download:

Concept backgrounds:





I will try to post animations another time. :)

Ruggedness

This is some old stuff I rediscovered and scanned. It's always fun finding old drawings you've forgotten about. Made me realize how much I miss getting messy with charcoals.

And a silly doodle.

Actually, while I'm at it, I did these sketches last year while visiting my father in Phoenix. We like to go on bike rides, sometimes with his posse of biker friends, sometimes it's just us two. One morning we woke up before the sun and got ready to ride wherever the wind takes us, just head north and keep going. Being the father that he is, he made me wear several layers of sweaters/jackets (including leathers), long underwear under jeans, boots, beanie, scarf, gloves, goggles, the works. I was grouchy because of it. But I was so grateful after about an hour of riding that I was wrapped up so well. It had to have been 45 degrees when we started out, and on the bike ascending in altitude I swear it could've been 30 degrees. But it was one of the best rides I've ever been on. I absorbed the changing scenery from flat desert to red rocky sharp rocky mountains to pine-layered hills to ghost-towns to working aged farms and hidden cabins. Anyway, these are a couple of the images I got down on paper when we got back to the house, bull-legged and wind-chapped.

Something Different

This is an image I had trapped in my head for awhile.

Sidenote thought for the weekend: Do butterflies poop?