Whatever should one do on the first snow day of the season? Why, DRAW of course!!
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Animals Art: Drawings Art: Inking Character Designs Illustrations Random Doodles Sketchbook
Category: Art: Drawings
Apparently Santa doesn’t have much love for discrimination.
A very Merry Christmas to ALL – no matter what your private health choices are!
Oswald Cobblepot, making crime look respectable since December of 1941. That’s right, the Penguin turns 80 years old this month.
Another page from my sketchbook that was colored in Photoshop. With a bit of DNA from the animated Batman show, thought I’d take a stab at my impression of the Penguin.
I had the pleasure this past August to illustrate a Thanksgiving article for this month’s issue of Clubhouse Magazine published by Focus on the Family. It tells the story of Sarah Hale, the woman responsible for convincing Abraham Lincoln to make Thanksgiving an official holiday.
Sarah was an accomplished writer of books and the author of Mary Had a Little Lamb, and she was also the editor of a very popular magazine based out of Philadelphia. Her persistent letters over the years to several U.S. presidents finally got results with Lincoln.
I wanted a bit of a hand drawn quality to this illustration, so the final line art was a black Prismacolor pencil drawing on bumpy watercolor paper. It was then colored in Photoshop.
Here is a detail of the newspaper with some headlines that may or may not be historically accurate. I’m particularly fond of the Thanksgiving day sale ad in the lower corner of the newspaper that is announcing the first official Thanksgiving holiday. Silly is what I do, even in the midst of a history lesson.
When researching the details for this illustration, I found this great image of an older Sarah Hale who was in her later years during the events of this article. So, I based my drawing of her on this.
While in the middle of working on this piece, I visited the Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia to find Mrs. Hale’s grave. The cemetery was LOADED with historical figures both factual and fictional. While it boasted Civil War generals, Titannic survivors, baseball players, and even a signer of the Declaration of Independence, this was also the cemetery where Adrian Balboa, the wife of Rocky Balboa, was buried in the Rocky movies.
May you and yours have a very blessed Thanksgiving, and remember to give thanks to God for all you have in this brief life He has granted.
I love the work of William Wray.
When I first met him a number of years ago, he went by Bill Wray, and was working on painting backgrounds for Nickelodeon’s show The Mighty B. His work was well-known in the animation industry having had a tremendous influence on the look of The Ren & Stimpy Show among other films and TV shows, and he contributed to comics over the years, including MAD Magazine.
Besides being a brilliant cartoonist, Bill started doing incredible fine art painting where his subject matter of choice is primarily urban landscapes, and he started going by his more formal name. He seems to get so much emotion with what seems like minimal paint strokes in his work, but as any artist knows, it takes YEARS to hone such skills to know how to lay the paint down, and how much to leave out. In short, whether cartooning or fine art painting, William Wray makes my jaw drop.
Back in 2018, I got my first in-house gig at Warner Bros. TV Animation as part of the story team for the Netflix show Green Eggs & Ham. (Hopefully our Season 2 gets released soon!) I really didn’t know who all I might have known was already at WB, so on my first day I went down to the commissary alone to look over day 1 paperwork while I ate. Who should I bump into but William, who promptly welcomed me to WB and joined me for lunch. Turned out that he was working downstairs from me as the Art Director for the Harley Quinn show.
As I learned over the year that I was at WB, William loved to sketch folks at lunch without them knowing it. It’s a great way to stay sharp by observing people and their behavior, and I do it from time to time, but William was a fiend for it. What a treat one day to find that I had become one of his subjects from across the dining area!
Earlier this year I heard that great illustrator Jason Seiler was going to be interviewing William as a part of Jason’s podcast series Face the Truth. Jason often invites fans to send in drawings of his interview subjects, so I thought it would be fun to contribute something to his talk with William.
Well, there you have it. Artists drawing artists. It’s what we do, and sometimes we fall prey to each other. One way or the other, it’s always an adventure.
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Walt Disney – “I only hope that we never lose sight of one thing — that it was all started by a…”
Today’s the day! After church, all you Disney fans in the San Francisco Bay Area should head on over to Mouse-Con in Concord. You can meet me, my pal and another former Disney artist Rick Law, the voice actors I mentioned in Thursday’s post, lots of other special guests, and lots of dealers with Disney merch!
Rick and I will actually be giving a talk together at 1pm on one of the stages telling stories of our times at the House of Mouse!
Details are at Mouse-Con’s website by clicking on this sentence!
Hard as they try, trolls are never very good chefs. They never use enough seasoning, their meat always tastes quite gamey, and they’ll eat anything that’s not related to them. It’s truly an ugly existence, even more so when you realize they actually have nothing of benefit to offer society.*
Although, they might offer a bit of a humorous escape for people if some producer gave them a cooking show.
*Of course, I’m talking about REAL trolls here. Not those fictional technicolor Smurf-like creatures who sing all the time.
Black cherry colored pencil in a sketchbook.
Here we are 24 days into Monster Month, and there hasn’t been one self-portrait in the batch. Seems reasonable that after drawing all these monsters, there should be at least one depiction of the artist as a creature that goes bump in the night. (In real life when I do that, it’s likely due to stubbing my toe in the dark on the way to the bathroom.)
So, why not trot out everyone’s favorite blood-sucking vampire from Transylvania as inspiration? I call him CHADULA. Mwuahahahahaha! (Cue the lightning strike!)
I’ve made appearances in past Monster Months. You might remember me as Frankenstein’s monster, a hairy beast, a zombie – even as the Wolfman a couple of times. If you are adventurous, you could click on the “self portrait” category on my blog and see if you can find my other beastly incarnations.