The other day I saw a photo of someone’s altar to Anubis, which contained, among other things, a little toy Millennium Falcon. “I don’t know why,” they said. “Anubis just made it very clear that he wanted this on his altar.”
And this image instantly leapt to mind. Apparently a printout of it is now helping to decorate that altar, so, success!
Illustrator, 30min.
Earlier this year, A.C. Sobrero asked me to do a cover for the third book in their series, “The Luminous Fleet”. We ended up tossing a lot of email back and forth discussing the themes of the story, what kind of book covers we liked, and playing with ideas. Ultimately I wound up illustrating a scene where the commander of the invading Earth fleet talks to the Sorceror-General of the local furryish natives; I chose to do this in a style inspired by Japanese woodblock prints, since some part of the culture of the locals is inspired by Meiji-era Japan. Which was really not in the same stylistic place as a lot of the eighties SF covers we were initially looking at, but works for the story – culture clash is a major theme, and attempting to make the cover be from the non-human point of view felt like it tied into that.
Also it let me ask myself “how would Hokusai depict a floating hologram window” and any day where I get paid to ask questions like that is a pretty good day. :)
And for what it’s worth, Gary Ruddell’s cover for Bujold’s “Mirror Dance” was the particular inspiration for this overall composition; I had to pull back somewhat to get space to show something of the cultural differences with the outfits, and account for the extreme height differences (the lady was raised in low-gee, so is Very Tall), but this was the image that popped into my head as something to really push the “there is a conflict” theme when I was doing initial thumbnails.
And here is a screenshot of the Illustrator file with some of the reference material sprawled around the artboard. Not included: the books of Japanese prints I have on the shelves of my library that I flipped through and pondered.
Illustrator, 11.5 hours.
Earlier this year, I got commissioned to help with a redesign of the front page of Plush City, a Mastodon instance with a plush toy theme. Mawr was looking for a children’s book vibe; they sent me some excerpts from a few of their favorites, and I figured out ways to adapt my usual no-lines Illustrator process into something that felt a bit more like colored pencil and watercolor than impossibly perfect cyber-colors.
There is also a night-time version, that shows up depending on what time it is.
The orange/maroon elephant is a cameo of Mr. Elmer, who was my mother’s childhood toy. He sits atop my shelf now, keeping an eye on me for her.
Illustrator, 12h total, including the alternate version and a repeating background pattern and a couple other little bits that I didn’t show here.
This idea’s been kicking around for a while. When I was living in Boston I doodled a few things on some largish pieces of illustration board, and one of them was a pretty goth lady advertising “Spiderade”, a drink full of spiders. I was always intending to dig it out and finish it in a vaguely Mucha-influenced style.
This October, I remembered this idea and started on it from scratch. Finished it off today. It ended up being more of a 1950s magazine ad, with some process choices inspired by the look of hand-separated drybrush work. Maybe someday I’ll do another Spiderade ad in a deco style like I originally wanted to. Maybe not. Who knows?
Illustrator, five and a half hours, including the half an hour I spent tracing some wrought iron balcony elements from my photos of the French Quarter, and the half an hour I spent changing it all to not use overprinting because Illustrator no longer simulates them when rendering out a jpeg. Maybe someday I will trace a few more of those balcony elements and sell a package of them.
Prints/shirts/etc on Redbubble, if you want ’em. Illustrator source on Patreon.
One of the cats who lives under our house. Illustrator, 30min.
Mostly done because I saw a picture of a bear in this sort of style posted on the Illustrator subreddit that had everyone going “oh god this is SO LABOR INTENSE I’d do it in Photoshop” and I wanted to find out exactly how piss-easy it would be to do if you actually know anything abut Illustrator. My estimate for the image that inspired this was a couple hours of work at most, and after doing this I feel like it’d probably take me an hour to get an animal face to a similar level of finesse. Maybe a little less after really dialing in the scatter brushes to draw the fur.
AI2020 source: artie.ai
Last week, my SO and I were watching “What We Do In The Shadows”, and came to the episode where Colin Robinson, the Energy Vampire who feeds off of peoples’ boredom and stress, gets a promotion at work and becomes dangerously powerful.
This lead to the SO insisting that, no, really, that’s kind of them, and some discussion of the internal mythology that their several equine fursonas are all really just their changeling character playing different roles, so I decided to draw Schadi sitting on top of the serpent-dragon version of myself I’ve been drawing lately and having a nice glass of hearts. Which are pretty consensually given, I definitely get stuff out of this relationship. Like “help with bills” and “cuddles” and “writing scripts for our comics” and whatnot.
Illustrator, about an hour? Maybe two? I didn’t formally track this one and it’s part of the “horny doodles 2021” file so squinting at Time Sink’s tracking data is a matter of guessing when I was working on this and when I was drawing whatever weird stuff my loins wanted me to.
Illustrator source on Patreon, no prints today because I’m tired.
“hey peggy would you be interested in drawing a scene from my RPG campaign where one of my characters is fighting a big nasty monster straight off an old pulp magazine while another one is winding up some serious Time Magic”
“sounds good”
Really this one didn’t change much from the initial sketch, aside from some experimentation at the very end with the palette for Howell (the four-armed wolf lady in the front). Originally she was bright red, which popped a lot more, but made her look a bit too much like a fox rather than a wolf in the commissioner’s eyes.
We tried a few palette variants before settling on the more representational grey.
It was fun to do something limited color like this, I’ve been kinda missing it with all the painterly stuff I’ve been doing lately. I should do it more.
A couple of days ago, someone posted a little drawing of a yellow submarine to the Illustrator subreddit. It was cute and round and a perfectly decent little icon-scale submarine, but it wasn’t what I expected when I clicked on it. What I was expecting was the vehicle design from the Beatles animated movie. The one that I was obsessed with when I was a kid and could draw from memory. The one that’s from a movie I usually cite as one of the reasons that made me want to become an animator.
So I decided to draw it.
Two days later, it’s done.
Here’s a few closeups off the Beatles and couple of Blue Meanies:
Illustrator, 4.5h.
Prints/shirts/etc on Redbubble.
High res and AI source on Patreon.
in ad 2001
meme was beginning
“cats” set us up the laughs
you have become old; treasure your time.
Earlier this month, there was a post on Hacker News where someone showed off their attempts to start writing some game engines in a language named “Zig”. My joke that they should consider using these engines to write an actual game – say, a port of “Zero Wing” – fell completely flat.
This past week I found myself looking at an animation of crude redraws of the characters from the intro to the 1991 Genesis port of that largely-forgettable 1989 arcade game singing their poorly-translated dialogue to the tune of Queen’s 1975 song “Bohemian Rhapsody”.
And I felt old. I felt indescribably old. Nobody got my joke because there are tons of people who are fully functional young adults who have no idea what this is because they were five when it was the talk of the Internet.
So I decided to draw Stella dressed up as “CATS”. Or, rather, dressed up as the horrible realization that if you recognize who she’s dressed as, you are also probably getting old.
Anyway. Illustrator source is on Patreon; prints/shirts/clocks are on Redbubble.
that moment when the drugs kick in and you realize that there is absolutely nothing in the universe except you and your infinite reflections
So one of the things I do to put off getting work done is to go to the Illustrator subreddit and answer people’s “how do I do this” questions. Yesterday there was someone asking how to do this:
to which I replied
(You could also go old-school on this and find a photocopier; moving stuff around on the glass as the scan head is moving creates similar effects. Do a dozen or so tries until you find one you like, then scan it, and autotrace/work over it in AI.)
And today someone asked how to do this:
…where I suggested
Draw one vertical line of arches. Make it into a pattern brush. Draw a circle using this brush. Duplicate the circle and rotate it a little and change its color; play with opacity masks.
Making the varying blur/sharp parts is something I’d have to think about for a while in front of Illustrator, offhand I’d probably do it by drawing three arches with a green stroke at 0%, 100%, and 0% opacity, blending them, then duplicating the blends to make the line of arches to use in the pattern brush. Might have to expand the blends before making them into a brush.
I’d verified that the warp effect worked by doing it to a copy of the picture I drew yesterday, which is where the “play with the distortion effect settings” part came from – I liked how a low fidelity made a total mess of things.
So after spending about fifteen minutes fooling around with those circular patterns this morning to see if my idea worked…
…I realized that I could very quickly use this as a tool to make something akin to Escher’s “Circle Limit” images with a lot less work than he had to put into those. So I fooled around a while and this was the result.
Here’s the outline view, with the distortion mesh on and off – stuff you put inside a distortion mesh goes to a weird netherland, and vanishes from the main canvas unless you say “swap the dmesh for the stuff inside it so I can edit that”.
The two dragons at the corners are repeated by use of the Transform effect; getting the right settings was made a ton easier by using Astute’s “Stylism” tool, which provides nice interactive on-canvas controls for this effect and several others instead of Adobe’s modal dialogue boxes full of numeric fields.
If you wanna see the source, it’s up on Patreon. If you want a print of this, it’s on Redbubble.