Sketchbook: Where he lives and what he brings

My 2 year old daughter is convinced Santa lives in our chimney… so suck it everyone else, I guess. WE GOT SANTA IN OUR CHIMNEY AND HE’S BRINGING ME BEER.

Sketch Cover Sale! Help my classroom out and get some artwork!

It’s that time again, readers… time for me to hawk my good to y’all. I love drawing on sketch covers and now you can love owning one of the sketch covers I loved all over with my pencils, pens, and markers! That sounds like a good sales pitch, right???

Anyway, I’m trying to scrape some money together for the Gem City Comic Con at the end of the month. My students and I are paneling at the show on Saturday and I’d like to have a little extra scratch for gas and other amenities. Last year I gave the kids a couple of bucks and let them go crazy at the long boxes, and that was super awesome.

…so here’s the deal, y’all – you can purchase any one of these predrawn sketch covers are $20 dollars apiece. That covers the actual cost of the comic (usually around $3-$5 dollars), my drawing fee (probably around $10 bucks, we’re not talking crazy rates here) and shipping to you.  I have a PayPal account and if you drop me a comment here with the book you’re interested in, we can work out the details.

SPECIAL SUPER ADDED BONUS TIME!!!

Around Christmas, I acquired a sizable stack of blank sketch covers for IDW’s GI Joe #1.

Same deal as above, $20 dollars and I’ll draw you something on there are send it your way… only you get to choose what I draw for you. Please keep in mind, it’ll be in the style in which I draw the journal comic, so plan your choices accordingly. I’ll draw your favorite COBRA guy… or hell, I’ll draw whatever you like on there. Want a GI Joe comic with my version of Serpentor? Great! Want a cover where I draw something about Romeo & Juliet? I can do that!

Doodle Day: The Bard Over the Garden Wall

Here’s a little doodle I did in preparation for second semester’s Shakespeare work in my classroom. I liked it enough to ink it and scan it… but not enough to color it. If you’d like to color this, you’re more than welcome.

On the other hand, here’s a doodle I did of the characters from the Cartoon Network mini-series Over the Garden Wall. I liked this one enough to get out the Prismacolor markers… but marker colored pieces always look weird when I scan ’em.

OTGW was fantastic, by the way.

Sketchbook: New Scooby Doo?

It’s dumb, and I can’t believe this joke hasn’t been made somewhere before… but since my kids are all about Scooby Doo, the character’s been on my mind lately.

Sketchbook: Tons o’ stuff

A random assemblage of sketchbook stuff including:

Barry Ween: Judd Winick’s boy genius creation has always been a favorite of mine. I understand the market forces which moved Winick toward writing superhero comics and working in the entertainment industry but geez Judd… MORE BARRY WEEN PLEASE:)

Doonesbury: I’ve been looking at a lot of the older Holt, Rinehart, and Winston collections of Garry Trudeau’s comic strip. Not much can beat Doonesbury in terms of newspaper comic strips during its’ run in the late ’70’s/early ’80’s.

Eggbert the Talking Christmas Egg: The New York Times can explain this oddity of my Hudson Valley childhood quite a bit better than I ever could.

Sketchbook: Romeo and Juliet

In drawing these comics about my teaching of Romeo and Juliet this year, I noticed I’ve been using the same designs of some of the characters. I didn’t set out to design these characters and I think it shows in those comics from earlier in the week. I decided to try and refine a bit more. Here you can see some quick sketches of (clockwise from top) Romeo, Lord Capulet, Tybalt and Juliet.

Romeo had kind of a Disney prince character thing going on, which is kind of interesting I guess.

Sketchbook: Student awesomeness

No comic today but here are a couple of things I’ve been sitting on for a few months.

 

A sketch page I stole from Sade, one of my students this year. I thought it was so good I couldn’t resist. It reminds me of the kind of thing I do in my sketchbook from time to time. Look at this, she’s so good!

sketchbook: world’s finest

Elliot asked me to draw him a Batman and a Superman and here it is.

Happy New Year! I still have two days of break left… I should probably start grading and preparing for the second semester, huh?

sketchbook: santa claus conquers the sketchbook

 

A few days ago I was watching Mystery Science Theater 3000‘s first Christmas episode, where Joel and the ‘bots watch Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. I doodled a little bit in my sketchbook while the flick was on and here are the results. I remember hearing rumors of an MST3K comic book years ago and I always wondered how that would have looked.

sketchbook: adventure time

 

 

For some reason, the Internet was down at our house all last night. I have the next two comics in this week’s series scanned but I can’t upload them until the WiFi problem gets fixed! As such, here’s a sketchbook page I happened to have saved on my school laptop.

A couple of drawings of characters from Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time with Finn and Jake. I mentioned awhile back I had become a fan of the show but after some Thanksgiving break viewing, I’m now upgrading myself to “big fan” status. There are tons of blogs better than this one to give you a rundown about why the show works so wonderfully well… but my own higher appreciation for the show came from the recent episode titled I Remember You which was one of the best takes on losing someone to Alzheimer’s disease I’ve ever seen.

One of the great things about that episode was that it wasn’t even ABOUT Alzheimer’s disease. The main story was just powerful enough to put you in mind of it. I Remember You wasn’t evocative of the show as a whole, but I’m always impressed when a TV program is good enough to deviate from its’ format and say something new about the characters and situations. Adventure Time is that kind of show.

I also love the designs on all the characters and how easy they are to replicate. Pendleton Ward’s style is deceptively simple… but it’s the kind of thing a kid can sit down and do themselves. That’s one of the great hallmarks of cartoon design, so much so that my son Elliot’s a fan of the characters even though he hasn’t seen one episode of the show! He’s just seen drawings. Look at this, we were out to dinner a few days ago and he drew his own Lumpy Space Princess!

(The one on the right is mine… the two on the left are his!)