Winter is coming...

As much as I hate to admit it, winter is not only coming, but actually here.  :S  I used to love this time of the year, with all of it's snow and gift giving and outpouring of general love and awesomeness, something happened at some point in my life that has turned me against it. 

I'm not even sure why, but now I have such a hard time with the winter months.  My body doesn't seem to like it anymore either.  My hands get very dry and achey, I'm always tired and I pretty much as frozen solid the entire time.

But I keep trying to remember that this is a good time of the year and that I have lots and lots of stuff to be thankful for.  I'm trying to stay inspired and it seems so far that lots of color and painting anything I can get my hands on helps.  ;)  Here's a page from my art journal and a little daily post it doodle to try to stay creative so far. 

And a little digital something since it's been a month that I've shared anything digitally related. :O  Hope you enjoy! :D

Busy Busy BUSY :S

Sorry I've been MIA for the past few weeks.  Work and life in general
     has just been crazy lately.  And it doesn't look like that will be about
     to change anytime soon, especially since we made the kickstarter
     goal for the third, Jack the Kitten is Very Sleepy book.  So much
     to do!  Anyhoo, I thought I'd stop in here for a bit and share some
     older things with you guys, since I haven't created anything much
     in weeks.

New project - Sherlock Holmes Playing Cards!

I have some awesome news to share with you guys today! I mentioned a few times I've been working on some projects over the past couple of months. One of them is about to be launched this week and I couldn't be more excited to finally share it with you! It's a Kickstarter project that the lovely Tabitha Grace Smith - Author (who you may remember as the author of the Jack the Kitten is Very Brave children's books I illustrated) has set up to produce a deck of playing cards with some Sherlock Holmes designs on them. However, this set is not your average Sherlock Holmes characters. They're based off the idea that Sherlock is an otter and Watson is a hedgehog! It's a new cute twist on an awesome, classic story that I hope you all will enjoy. If you want to get involved, feel free to follow the links below for more information.

To make it even more awesome, everyone who signs up at Thunderclap will get a free Sherlock logo car decal with their Kickstarter pledge!
https://www.thunderclap.it/en/projects/11778-sherlock-holmes-playing-cards

And everyone who signs up here on Facebook will get one of my drawings as a sticker with their Kickstarter pledge!
https://www.facebook.com/events/302969296528350/?ref_dashboard_filter=upcoming&source=1

So be sure to check it out because the game is on!

More vectors

 This piece started out as something completely different and somehow morphed into this.  I even started creating an extremely stupid, very silly story to go with it as I kept going with it.  Apologies if none of it makes any sense.  I really enjoyed working on this though, the picture part at least.  ;)  It's rare I ever pull together an entire piece like this, with a background and everything.

Another practice piece in this simple style.  Care for a cup of tea? :)  Be careful, the cups are ticklish.  ;D

Card designs, etc.

A simple design with some cake variations and practice with a new style of lettering.  Possible a birthday card design? 

 

 Just a silly design I was playing around with for a birthday card idea.

 

A monster birthday card idea?

 Some practice with a new style of lettering I've been trying out.  This one sort of became more of a logo type of thing then just plain text practice. 

I really really loved this piece I created a little while back.
So I recycled and redid some bits of it and created this, which I like even better!  LoL!  I really like creating in this style, if you can't tell.  It's absolutely delish.  ;D

Activity Sheets / layouts

I took a little time this weekend to try to get back into my creative groove and ended up creating a couple of 11 x 17 activity layout pages.  Some of the items I had already created and some were new.  I really enjoyed putting them together (although they're not quite complete).  It was fun trying to think of how to put the pages together and to find something fun to put on them, although I feel like I was being too repetitive on some things.  Still, I really liked how they turned out.  I wouldn't mind making an entire book of pages like this.  :)

Happy Early Halloween!

October and Halloween are my favorite times of the year, but I haven't really got to enjoy it so far this year. :/ And I've had pretty much no time to draw anything for days or weeks now, but somehow I managed to create these little creatures during one small snippet of an afternoon. Thought I would share them with you guys. :) Happy Halloween to those who celebrate it and happy fall to those who don't. <3 br="">

 I wanted to add a background thing to the original set of these characters that I made, so I decided to make up a circular photo frame thingy. I really liked how it turned out. Hope you guys enjoy it, too.

 

A variation of the halloween square spider I created. Just playing around with layouts, color, etc.

Just some random stuff

 Bees are so much fun to create. I drew this awhile ago actually, but just thought I'd share him now, as I've been especially busy lately.

Just a crazy duck. Practicing with different brush techniques/etc

Some Black and white (mostly) doodles

 Just some silly doodles to try to get back into the swing of drawing. Have been too exhausted, busy and uninspired to draw anything for some time.

 I really like playing around with black and white images. There's something so striking about them, even when it's just a silly image of a zombie-like boy with a pig on his head.  ;)

And last, but not least, my favorite, Sir Oinks A Lot!

Rain Rain

It's pretty hot where I am today so having a little rain this way might be a pretty good idea actually. 

Just a silly little journal/page layout thing for fun.  ;) 

 I'm not really sure what kind of bug this is. A cricket maybe? Grasshopper? I didn't use any references and just created this for practice. I kind of like how it came out though.

 Just wanted to practice drawing some hello kitty heads for some reason. *

 Three Powerpuff Girl drawing variations to practice my layout and composition and...whatever else.  ;)  (My favorite is the first one.)*

 I think I would like to turn this into a Christmas card or calendar picture or...something.

Another practice web/game design idea I've been wanting to do.  I'm not really happy with how this one came out though, so I may play around with another idea later.  These are all for fun and practice so far.  The design layouts have been helping me work on putting my work together though.  And they're extremely fun to create.  :) 

*All characters belong to their respective owners.

 I created this silly thing last night of some things I've already created, just to work on more placement/design practice. I think it looks more like a scrapbook layout this time around rather then a web site design idea.

 

 I liked my busy bee layout design so much that I thought it might make a cool journal design. Except I have no coding skills (or premium membership) so I doubt this will ever be used. Still, it was fun putting it together. I thought it make make a good book mark design, too.

Bits and Bobs

Just some random things. You may or may not see these later in other things. ;)

Practice pieces

 I didn't have a lot of time to work on much last night, so I took a few precreated items and added a few new simple shapes to create this as a quick web design idea. I really like putting pages together like this and working on my placement. I definitely need that kind of practice and it's been very inspiring so far. :)  I'd have never imagined that trying to think of a web page design would give me so many ideas. LoL!

Just something silly I created.

Read

I've been trying to push this latest style into something a bit more fun.  I really like where it's going so far.  This is a little practice piece I came up with over the weekend.  I added some texture to the layers.  And I've been trying to create more 'scenes' or idea pictures, rather then just random items with no concept or design.  It's definitely helping to get my creativity flowing.  Creating this way is more about creating shapes then dealing with lines so it's more like putting a puzzle together. 

Food and cats

Decided to play around with creating some foodie items. I really liked how they came out.

I thought I'd play around a little more with the food and cat I created. I can't figure out which background color I like the best. ;)

Fortune Feather Teller

I've been in the mood to create vibrantly colorful, weird creations. ;D

I'm going to put up some items available for purchase on Deviant Art and you can also purchase this via Society6.

 This wasn't the idea I originally had in mind, but this is what came from mindless doodling while trying to practice on vector-ish work. It makes absolutely no sense, which seems to fit my work quite well.

Worms?  Or something... I'm not sure what most of these are. Practice I guess. They were fun. I need to practice placement/perspective more. I never seem to line anything up right, especially on faces. Doing simple stuff like this helps...I think...

I may try coloring some of these. I still don't feel like I've got a specific technique I prefer to draw in. :/ But I think I'm getting closer each time to finding it.

Some random things and weird practice.

 Some weird painting practice things.  I don't even know... O.o

 This is a bit out of season but I couldn't seem to help myself. I've been wanting to do a creature in this style for ages and this is apparently what came out of my head.  :p

These are just some hideous scribble pages of me trying to get back into my drawing groove after going a week or so of having almost done little to no drawing.  :/  I hate when that happens.  It feels like forever before I can get back into my drawing groove.  >.<  Hopefully this week won't be so quiet around here and some good ideas will eventually pop into my head.