Gift Art

Hi Folks!

See I'm not a filthy stinkin' liar!

I'm actually posting again and I DO plan to keep with it.

So... THERE!
(*And thanks for the comments too.)

Not much this time around.  Just a quick piece of gift art I did up for a Birthday card for my good buddy Alan.



Ya know it's not as great a present as an i-Phone or a tricycle with a sidecar, but hey when ya got no job...  gotta use other means to quench the insatiable thirst of the mighty Birthday Gift Gods.

I quite obviously need some new markers as these ones were crappin' out on me during the creation which made the results range from unexpectedly cool... to horrifying.

Luckily Alan Cummings isn't SO great a friend that I cared quite enough to completely re-do the piece.

And Hey! If you or anyone you know would like a piece of gift art (or decorations for the craphouse walls)  I'm more than happy to take commissions, so go ahead and shoot me an e-mail and I'll whip up something nice and fancy for you or your (not-so) loved-ones. 

So enjoy, and I'll be back with more random-ness real soon.

-Clarke

Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back!

No it's not Mr. Kotter, just lil ol' me.

But it's been a long hiatus.  Much too long for my liking and I know I've promised before, but... I'm a filthy liar, what can I say.

But this time I fully intend to get back to blogging and actually have a bit more free time then previously to do so.  And I hope you realize that just because I haven't been posting doesn't mean I'm not drawing dear fiends...  Ohhhh noooo.

Well enough blabber for now, here's some new-ish stuff to wet your voracious appetites for the moment while I scan and compile some new stuff for all three of you to enjoy.  (Thanks Mom, Dad & Fido!)

Here's my humble rendition of Chuck Jones' "Sniffle's" character. A bit of gift art I did for a very special someone who's favorite cartoon character is none other than Chuck Jones' Sniffles.  I like the way it turned out and share a great admiration for the character myself despite it not being some of what I consider to be Jones' best work. He was still trying to copy Disney too much at that point and hadn't found his voice yet.  But enough animation history...

*Click any of these small wimpy images for bigger bolder full-bodied flavor any man, woman or child can appreciate.



And next up we have a batch of Post-it drawings I got in the habit of doing every day using 3 recurring themes. One of which was Elephants, which are always fun to draw. So much floppiness, girth and overlapping action opportunities.  If anyone overhears this conversation we're having...  Yikes!  Anyways... I have taken to doing lots more of these guys and even came up with a concept and character design I think is really fun.  For the time being I dub these Eli-Phants!


And you didn't think you'd be getting away visiting my blog and checking out new artwork without a healthy portion of Random-Ass drawings now did ya?


Anyone else find that Post-its are basically the most perfect yet worst thing to draw on.  I mean there's something special about the
quality of the paper and for me at least, being confined to such a small canvas
usually results in good things.  But then what to do with all the little
buggers and how to store or present them?  Any ideas folks?  I just hope
one day soon that the fine folks at 3M decide to realease the same formula paper
in a handy-dandy 8.5"X11" format without the "Sticky".



More of the Random-Ass Variety with a fun little colored character concept I'm toying with thrown in for good measure along with a preliminary Character design (green guy) for a d-list celebrity friends super-secret project.  He didn't totally love it...  what noive!  And who DOESN'T love undead cupcakes... REEEALLY?




Okay folks this is just a mere taste of the smorgasboard that I hope to unleash upon you poor unfortunate souls in the days, weeks, months, years, and eons to come.

And FYI a big part of the reason I have more time and energy to blog is directly related to the employment to unemployment ratio in my life.  So if you're a fellow artist out here in Sunny LA, please feel free to shoot any paying job leads my way.  I'd love and appreciate hearing from ya.  Just don't tell my mother... she still thinks I'm a lawyer.

More Recent Marker stuff

Okay, at least now we're getting to some more recent stuff (for better or worse).

These are mostly studies I was doing while looking at golden books and trying to play around with marker and coloring techiniques using a very limited palette. I definitely think I learned a few things that I can now apply to my own work while doing these. They were also pretty fun and felt worthwhile at least which was a nice change. I plan to do more of this sort of thing and keep exploring on what seems to be a smaller simpler scale which seems to help when trying to break bad design habits and form newer better ones.







This last one is actually a somewhat old initial character design I came up with that I was pretty happy with and want to explore much more. A pretty rare thing these days.



And here's a few pages of of more recent randomness. mostly floating heads which I draw way too often. I was doing good for a while and was drawing full bodied characters. But when that becomes a bit of a struggle to do well, I all too often find myself slipping back into the trap of just drawing all kinds of random decapitations. I have to start making an extra effort to break that habit for good. But sometimes I guess it's hard to want to go further and invest time into a body design when I'm not really pleased with the head in the first place. I mean when's the last time you looked at a character and thought about how brilliantly the body was designed, but it had a real boring head? if the head and face aren't working a bodies definitely not gonna save it.





Well that's all I have scanned for the moment... But I do still have a stack of older and newer ballpoint pen sketches and doodles that I plan to scan and post soon too. Hopefully by the time I get those up I'll have another fresh batch of stuff that's shareworthy and I can be back to more regular updates.