Lotzi: GHOSTS!!!

I did this for Illustration Friday. There's a show on tv where a couple of fraidy guys walk into 'haunted' houses and then proceed to scare themselves silly.  I don't watch the show because it's ridiculous.  And if there really was a ghost (or in this case three) you'd high tail it out of there.

Hurry up and get out of there!

I did the illustration in Photoshop.  It was based on this quick sketch:

Lotzi is faded...

I drew this for Illustration Friday - this week the theme is 'faded'.  I was toying with the idea of a ghost...and then possibly dreams...but then my wife said that faded would be someone who drank too much...

That made more sense, so I went with it.  This is a character we're developing named Lotzi.  Let's say he's getting faded on too much rootbeer...

 He's a lightweight like me.  Two beers (rootbeer, remember?) and it's time to make best friends with the sidewalk in an alley somewhere.

One thing they've been doing in animation these days is steering the artists to use a cintiq to draw.  The best part is how easy it is to edit your drawings...one downside (and this is why I've been doing more drawings this way than by passing them through Illustrator like I usually do) is that drawing on the screen doesn't have the same feel as drawing on a piece of paper.  It's just a matter of getting used to (as sometimes there's a little bit of a delay...), so I just continue to work at it.

IF: Kernel three times

This week's Illustration Friday topic was Kernel.

It was a hard topic and it took me this long to finally decide that I wanted to attempt it.  And even though it's Thursday afternoon, and the week is almost at a close, I finally got my concept figured out and decided to post these drawings:

This is what gave me the most trouble - kernel conjures just one thing in my head...and that's a popcorn kernel.  It seemed like such a mundane thing to draw, so I held off.  But then I thought of a little word play and continued on with the next two drawings.

and that one led to this one:

Pixel Art Pets

I've switched gears a little bit in they style of stock illustrations I'm doing.  I've always enjoyed pixel art (or at least had an appreciation for it) since the time of the original Nintendo video games.  You have a very limited palette in which to convey your illustration.

I started with a page of fruit:

and then I moved on to pets.  First i drew a puppy:

And then drew this picture of a kitten based on Raimi, our little runt of a cat:

Microstock report for April 2012

This is our microstock report for April of 2012.  It was a bit of a downturn in all the stock sites, so towards the end I did one quick illustration...and I'll try to come up with some more this month to see if we can't turn those numbers around a bit.

Shutterstock still leads all the stock sites in how many sales we get each month - which translates into the highest earnings.

Istockphoto is really taking a turn for the terrible - as I can't remember the last time we made that little since we started.

 Dreamstime is slowly creeping up on Istock and could end up being our #2 lifetime earner soon enough.  It's still not too high, but it consistently makes between $20 and $40 a month.  And because of the image contest they do every month, I always want to create something for it, so we've ended up with a lot of exclusive files that sell at a higher price point on this site.

 This was the one new file I did for the stock sites...I'll try to do more spot illustration type drawings and we'll see if they sell or not.  It's feeling a little too much like clip art...

Adelia: Space

Illustration friday had the subject of "Space" this week...so I thought I'd revisit an old character to participate.

I did a quick rough in Adobe Photoshop:

and then decided to do the entire cleanup and color in photoshop as well (instead of importing it into Illustrator like I usually do).  And this is the final:

I always liked to use specific colors with Adelia (this character).  She's a little blue penguin and she loves the color purple...so it would make sense for her to hop around this low gravity moon.