Omnitarian

The secret goal of this design was to make something that trumped up my street art influences. Somehow, that took the form of a greek chimera with a hobo getup.

This design never got tons of attention, but it’s actually one of my favorites. It’s a complicated character to design and lay out, and a dumb premise to try to build an entire illustration around, but it all panned out into a nice aesthetic. The goat in particular is easy to love.

Trivia:

Nobody seems to have noticed this, but the bandage on his (their?) arm suggests heroin use, which was totally not my intention.

This was the second time I illustrated a chimera.

The working files contain a cool bit of typography that I guess I decided not to incorporate into the final design:

Omni design tropes employed:

Random bandages

Floaty wings

Multi-headed critters

Palette: one color on black

Here’s the second installment of my Throwback Thursday, when I talk through the process of a design from the archives. This week: It’s Chicken Dog! (2012)

The concept here was just to do something silly with the aesthetic of Japanese advertising mascots. I probably simultaneously came up with the idea of doing a dog/chicken hybrid, and that this “chicken dog” would be the mascot for a chicken-based hot dog.

I don’t know a lick of Japanese, but using Google I felt confident enough writing things out. It turns out that chicken (chikin) and dog (inu) make the perfect portmanteau in Japanese: chikinu. So the text below reads “chikinu-kun”... I think.

Not sure what to say about the layout: the background came together well, and this was strangely the first time I ever illustrated such ornate flowers. Originally I was going to shoot for something more maximalist, with more text all over the place, but ultimately went with a more pared down layout, either out of laziness, or just deciding the illustration was more iconic that way.

Trivia:

The barn features a chicken-dog shaped weathervane.

Unintentional: if you look at the little dogs’ eyes, they look like faces.

I haven’t quite decided how a chicken dog would give birth. ...eggs?

Omni design tropes employed:

Mix-and-match critters

Japanese pastiche

Pac-Man Eyes

Palette: 5 colors on dark red

I’ve been thinking about my back catalog of lost and forgotten designs recently. Those illustrations need love, so I figured I’d do something a l’il fun in the spirit of Throwback Thursdays, and talk in depth about an illustration from the archives.

I figure there’s no better place to start than a 2010 design of mine, Planet of the Hamster DJ.

There’s actually a nice backstory to this design: "Planet of the Hamster DJ” showed up as I was using The Video Game Name Generator. I thought it was pretty amusing, so I wound up making a design off it. Specifically, I wound up putting it in a $10k contest held by Threadless. It was actually one of my more ambitious and ornate designs I’ve ever entered over there. In total, I remember this design probably taking 30 or so hours of work.

My bad habit when it comes to designing is not investing enough time into the sketch. I tried to really buckle down when I layed out this one, and it was time well spent (you can catch a glimpse at the very earliest draft, above). The typography, in particular, was a pain to solidify but turned out nice in the end.

To this day I’m still strangely proud of the character design, which was a nice mix of simple geometry, amusing accessories (the combo of goatee, hipster glasses, necktie, and glow bracelets came together so naturally), and a dash of the unexpected (I made this at a time when I was practicing hands, so his hands are way more big and anatomical than they ‘ought’ to be. The floating ears are also something I’m surprised I haven’t tried more of).

Trivia:

Naturally, this design features two turntables and a microphone.

Also one of these things, which apparently are apparently just called disco balls.

 I don’t know why the planet is drippy.

Omni design tropes employed:

Animals in silly hats

Audio equipment

Thunderbolts 

Palette: 6 colors on dark green.

I beat Alpha Sapphire the other day (not the most exciting finish, though: Primal Kyogre makes mincemeat of the Elite 4).

I'm making a comic!

Well, it's not a super-huge comic. Just 8 pages or so, but it's still way more work than you'd expect aaaaaaaa

I sketch a lot. That big stack of books and loose paper up there basically represent basically everything I have drawn over the span of the past 3 years or so. Most of what I draw never leaves the sketchbook, which in essence means I have literal mounds of art that I have never shared with the world at large. And that seems like a pretty awful waste! So welcome to the first of what I hope will be many sketch-collection posts I'm calling Sketchbook Liberation.

We'll start with the sketchbook that, for reasons that will become quite obvious, I call the demon sketchbook. It all started with doodles of Krampus- always a good subject matter.