Trayceface

This started out as a little cartoony sketch of my lovely girlfriend Trayce. I haven't done much with color in a while and I learned about a couple new techniques in photoshop, so I was itching to to do something. I'm not crazy about how the cleaned up pencil lines came out. It was a small drawing and that's probably why the imperfections show up as they do, and a harder lead may have helped too. But maybe that's part of it's charm. I'm going to pick up some pens and try my hand at inking again, something else I haven't done in a long time. I also could have kept tweaking the color more and more, adding more variations, but I really feel like getting to drawing today. So this is how it is. I may revisit it later.

The Notes of Carter Rankine

I've been working on some characters from a story that my friend Chris Mich is writing. It's called The Notes of Carter Rankine: Pernico's Plan, and is about a time traveling, soldier-ish scientist. Chris and I went to college together at The University of the Arts, where he majored in film and myself in animation. The summer before freshman year we called each other to "meet" over the phone and spent 2 hours talking about Star Wars and Indiana Jones. I guess this summer marks our 19 year friendship. Over the years we've written some scripts together and I've always enjoyed drawing things that springboard from our brainstorming sessions. I hope to post more from his Carter Rankine story as time goes on. Click on his name above to see what the "Michman" is all about.

Conan of Late Nite

Some more caricatures, keeping in mind what I read over at Tom Richmond's tutorials. I remember when Conan first got his last show back when I was in college. He seems to be doing alright with his new gig. Man that hair! What a trademark!

Let sleeping cats lie

Practically whenever I sit at the computer, like I am now, our cat Jako jumps up on the shelf behind me and meows for me to pet him, like he just did. Here's a few sketches I did of him sleeping on the couch not meowing. I don't know where his other paw was (maybe between two pillows).

Scribble Guy

This started as a quick nonsense scribble. I then looked for a face in there and came up with this guy.

Oldies

I drew these guys while on the couch watching TV.  The guy with the Yarmulke was out of my head and the bald guy was from a 1 second glance of a guy on commercial.  It might have been that guy from America's Top Model.

McShane

Here's a caricature or actor Ian McShane from HBO's Deadwood.  It's not very exaggerated, I just started practicing after reading Tom Richmond's Tutorials  on his blog.  It's a great blog and is a great tutorial.

Here's a few more studies I did, more playing around with different styles more than trying to capture a likeness.

Old West Guy

I did this sketch in my sketchbook last month and have been wanting to expand on it...

So I did.  I referenced some pictures from the film 3:10 To Yuma (the recent version) for the gun and clothing. I read in an interview with artist Ben Balistreri on the Character Design Blog 

http://ben-balistreri-interview.blogspot.com/ 

how he finds visual research so important so as not to fall back on cliches or what we think things may be like.  I also find it inspires more ideas to come up.

JAKO

Here's a drawing I did of our cat Jako for my girlfriend Trayce.  It was 100% done on the Cintiq tablet.  I had a few photos of him, made a "model" construction of his head, finding the spacial relations of his features and then drew it in photoshop.  I played around with the opacity on different layers for the color.  I really enjoyed doing this.  Working in color flowed out of me much more using the Cintiq.  I also purchased a thinner stylus pen to work with.  The grip pen the tablet cam with I find too think and cumbersome, and it cramped up my hand.  I ended up buying the Wacom CLASSIC PEN.  much lighter and more like a real pen/pencil.

Elvis-like bounty hunter

This guys ended up looking like an Elvis-like bounty hunter type of guy.

Shoreline

Gonef Comic Cover

This was the cover to a comic that a writer friend and I started a while back.  The 1st drawing was on a tiny post it, I enlarged it from there.

I have model sheets for all these guys, maybe I'll post them soon.

Greeting Card

This is a generic greeting card I did for myself a while back.  I Remember I was on hiatus at the time so I was pretty relaxed.  I think the picture captures that pretty well.

Figure Drawings Sept 2008

Faces & Limbs

With sketches like this I usually don't have anything in mind.  I just start throwing down shapes and see how they turn into faces.  Coming from animation I also like to give the expression as much life as possible.  The older fellow at the bottom ended up looking like actor Thomas Mitchell to me (Uncle Billy from It's A Wonderful Life.)

The arm and leg sketches are just me playing with straits against curves and opposing curves.

Card Game Pencil Test

An old Pencil Test with some old characters.  Some stuff is really rough, I hope you can tell what's going on.  Enjoy!!!

A sketch of a character that myself and a friend were working on.

This is a character I'm working on for a project with a friend. It's about the 3rd drawing I've actually done of him.  The 1st two were on a napkin.  I might use him do do some animation tests if I ever have the time.

Because You're Stupid

I'm trying to find the best size (dpi &/or inches) to post my pictures at.  any suggestions would be greatly appreciated

Because You're Stupid

(More Cintique drawings)
Guess who?

Thie Cintique

These are some drawing I did testing out the Cintique tablet.  We have started to draw digitally at work.  Not sure what I think of it yet, but here are some samples....