Transformers

My friend Ulises Farinas has been doing some cool stuff for the Transformers comics lately and it got me in the mood to draw a robot in disguise... or at least on his way to being in disguise..

Another Crash

More art for your eyeballs

Loan Shark Hunting

Here is a new illustration for the Portland Mercury. I'm really happy with how this one turned out, and it started with an awesome concept from the AD.

I tried something a little new with this one, I inked it on watercolor paper. Usually I just ink on sketch or bristol paper. It's kinda hard to tell the difference when it's all finished, textured and colored.. but the ink on the paper looked really cool. So yeah, paper does make a difference.

Read the full article here.

New Art - sketchbook

A few recent things. The Lloyd City piece is from my sketchbook - a fun little illo with colors and grunge textures in Photoshop. The other thing is a Photoshop brush sketch.. not something I normally do in PS, but I like it.

New Shirt - Sludge

I made a new shirt and put it on mysoti.com for now. Eventually I'll be selling these shirts separate from mysoti I think, but this works until I get that going.

This was a fun design to make, I penciled, inked and finished it off all today. I used a Rosemary & Co. Series 33 size 0 brush for the linework. I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted it to look like in the end, but I did things a little differently with the brushwork. Instead of filling in all the 'black' areas, I outlined the penciled linework, then in Photoshop just filed the inside and subtracted the brushed lines. Working this way made the line weights extra important.

I wasn't sure about the face. Adding it made it look a bit cartoony and leaving it blank made it look more creepy.. but a little less interesting - so I went with the face.

While inking I was thinking a lot about 'process' and I came up with this: "Your process is the answer to the question 'how do I make this look the way I want it to?'" - That may not be the best or fullest explanation, but that's kinda how I think of it.

Free Font - Sewer Rat

I have created an original font and I'm proud to release it here. This is the first font I have designed so let me know if you have any problems with it. Please send me any feedback you may have.

This version only includes a basic set of all caps A-Z and 0-9. This font is fairly detailed in it's texture, but would work well for high resolution or large work.

I could see this typeface used for grunge, punk, rock, skateboard and other designs along that line. It would also work well as a Halloween font - as it is October...

It is a free font so you may use it in anything, even in designs you sell. You just cannot redistribute this font, or host it on a server.

The font is hosted on my website so click here to download it. Or right click and select 'save as'.

Space Sailing - Illustration Friday

An illustration for Illustration Friday. This is what I think a space sail would look like... something like that anyways. Like a big ball of solar panels for energy... might also have mass controls to vary the pull of gravity between planets. I dunno.. makes sense in my head.

Sour - Illustration Friday

So I used a little different of a process this week, parts of it I liked and others I didn't. I can see that in the end result. I started off with a pencil sketch. I kind of had a loose idea of how I wanted it to look anyways and I pretty much captured that. I think it would've lost a lot more life had I NOT done a pencil sketch. I scanned the sketch and outlined my shapes in illustrator. I think that's where I went wrong. The illustrator shapes are just a little too rigid. Next time I'll remember that and probably hand draw each shape over a lightbox. I took the pieces into photoshop, messed with layer options and threw in some grunge effects. Then cropped it all down. So I liked some of the process, but I should've done it a little more hand drawn and a little less computer aided. But it's done, thats whats important - and I learned from it.