new sketch and possibly a new character?

I finally have a new and improved way to draw!  I got a cintiq of my very own.  I've had one at work for a while, but if I wanted to do any drawing at home, it either had to be awkwardly accomplished on my wacom tablet, or on a piece of paper.  And who wants to draw on paper?  All those trees screaming in pain as someone uses an exacto knife to cut each piece of paper off of it....or, at least, that's how I assume paper is made.  It can't be squished into pulp and then flattened.  Or, what would be a tedious process, trees were broke up into splinters and then glued together.  Or into long thin strips and woven together.

In any case - it's like my food - I don't care where it comes from, as long as it tastes good.  And doesn't give me ebola.  Sadly, even that statement isn't true.  I'm more interested in how my food is treated before it's slaughtered for me - and I can't eat at a fast food restaurant because of their evil ways.  It's my own fault for looking into it.

Anyway - This is the first sketch from my first attempt at working on my brand new cintiq.

This was all done in Adobe Photoshop.

Also - I got this sucker more than 2 weeks ago, but I have an older HP laptop and the technology of the cintiq aren't completely compatible, so I had to figure that out.  Turns out one has to open the back of the cintiq and unplug the cord for the DVI cable and replace it with a VGA cable.

A boy and his dog

I did this illustration for Dreamstime's latest contest:

Dreamstime is a microstock site - where they license photographs and illustrations.  And while i have every intention of winning this contest...it's usually the photographs that dominate.  There are a select group of artists that submit illustrations to the contest, but it's few and far between that any of us have won.

The payoff for just entering is still worth it - if this file is ever licensed (and my past entries have been a few times), they sell for more - on the low end the price can go from 36 cents to $1.26.  So it's a good incentive to participate.

The contest this month is "children with pets."  It's important to be one of the first entries (the contest started on friday) so you get more eyeballs on your piece.  I submitted it Friday night and as of Sunday, I'm still waiting to have the illustration approved...

This illustration was drawn in photoshop, but cleaned up and colored in adobe illustrator.  Microstocks like Shutterstock, Istockphoto, and Dreamstime sell more vector files than any other form of illustration.  So it pays to work in that media.

A boy and his puppy

This is another illustration that I did for Dreamstime.  I had an idea to draw a kid with big round eyes getting a puppy on Christmas so I drew this on my wacom tablet using Adobe Photoshop:

What's great about using Photoshop is that you can easily lighten and darken the lines and work on separate layers to quickly and easily draw and edit.  What isn't so great is using a wacom tablet to do it.  But it still gets the job done - because it's just a sketch that I transported to Adobe Illustrator (in stock image sites like Dreamstime, they always like photographs and vector drawings...vary rarely will a raster illustration do as well).

I might have made the eyes too big and round...but he looks happy (if slightly alien).  Anyhow - I wanted to do a very subtle background, so all of that color (not the ornaments) is a gradient mesh with a few lines for the fireplace.

Lil' Kid

Here are a couple of drawings I did in Adobe Illustrator: