Hourly Comics 2013-8-1

I did a self-imposed hourly comics day on August 1, 6 months until real hourly comics day!  I guess it's a practice run. It sounded fun, and it was. :)

So here is my boring life for a day:

CATS TALKING WORDS has its own website!!!

http://catstalkingwords.tumblr.com/

It’s only a tumblr, but for this project I think that works just fine. You may remember some of my Talking Cats posts on this blog in the past. Now that I’ve completed nearly 100 of them, I really wanted to start posting them in earnest, but didn’t want this blog to become cluttered. The purpose of this blog is to give an overview of all of my artistic goings-on, so I won’t be hosting any ongoing comics here. This is the green room of the Wingéd Elf Girl. ;)

I started the Cats Talking Words tumbler a few weeks ago and update it every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 12am. The cat comics are appropriate for all ages (unlike some of the content on this blog, haha) so feel free to direct any inquisitive children or old folks to it. Hopefully they won’t be too confused.

Bart Bruinsma Concert Poster!

Oh man, I suck at writing blog posts when I'm stressed... Which is probably why I often don't do it at all. But I NEEEEED to post this one - if you're located in the Netherlands, read closely!!

It sounds like an awesome show, and is next week!!!

This was a REALLY fun project.  I enjoy working with musicians a lot, and have done several album designs, but this is my first concert/tour poster design.  Bart had a lot of cool ideas that I was able to incorporate, and I. Love. How. This. Project. Turned. Out.  I made several other concepts for this poster, these are some favorites (sketched traditionally ink/pencil/watercolor pencil with some digital enhancements/text):

One goal was to make use of the negative space of the paper, to make that space intentional, since Bart would be printing these himself without trimming. I had a lot of other ideas for the poster's palette, too, which were a LOT of fun because Bart wanted it to be somewhere along the lines of a COLOR ASSAULT, which I rather enjoy making... :)

UPDATE 2013-04-16: I got a question from @DannyMonzillo about which parts of the poster are traditional and which are digital, and figuratively smacked myself in the face because I had originally intended to talk a bit about that but forgot in my sleepiness.  In the final design, the drawing of Bart's face and the background illustration of someone getting shot were drawn traditionally with ink, and integrated digitally.  There is supposed to be nothing flat in the design, so I went traditional for these elements to get the texture of a brush in.

There are also several textures (photos/scans) layered in, which I got from my own homemade texture archive and these STELLAR people: lostandtaken and Simply Textures!

Here's a PRO TIP: Bart wanted some secondary imagery in the background of the poster, something you'd notice on a second look. Hence, the illustration of someone getting shot layered in like a texture in the largest dark-blue part of the final design, around Bart's face.  Here's a section of the raw scan:

Looks pretty funky, huh?  You can even see the seam where I had to tape on another piece of paper.  But there's a method to the messy odd-colored madness: I used the select color range tool in Photoshop to pull the black sections and the green sections out of this drawing onto their own separate layers, and then manipulate their color independently. You can use any second color, I just had a brush pen with green ink on hand.  I used this trick a bit in the drawings of Nick and Eli previously. MY SECRET IS OUT! Hope someone's able to put this method to use in their own situation, it's VERY useful for digitally integrating hand-made elements. :)


IN OTHER NEWS.  I'm currently working on illustrating a comic book issue for the indie series "The End" by Shawn Murphy, which is really kicking my butt... HOWEVER, it's coming along nicely and I hope to finish it within the next 3-4 weeks so I have time to prepare for HEROESCON!!!

Happy Birthday to Nick and Eli!!!

Late, as all of my birthday greetings are recently, and late for Fanart Friday... BUT.

I drew Kevin awhile ago, so I figured I'd better draw the rest of Walk the Moon! These past two weeks, both Nick and Eli have had birthdays, so here are their BIRTHDAY PORTRAITS!  HAPPY BIRTHDAY NICK AND ELIIII!!!!!

Nick is attempting to be an anthropomorphic fox, and Eli is looking the way he does every darn time I see him:

I got the chance to use some of the textures I've been hoarding the last week!! Does that ever happen to you?  You find a bunch of sweet royalty-free textures up for the taking and end up downloading like 50 of them? No?... (Diana gets the credit for inventing the phrase "texture hoarding", by the by.)

*AHEM*  The texture on Nick's portrait came from this guy, and the texture on Eli's from this guy. SHARING IS CARING!!

Original sketchbook page (used the green ink as a key for color manipulation):

*deep breath*
HAPPY HAPPY BIRTHDAY, FROM ALL OF US TO YOUUUU, WE WISH IT WAS OUR BIRTHDAY, SO WE COULD PARTY TOO!!!

-From your elf

anywayican

The first week I bought Walk the Moon's Tightrope EP, the song "anywayican" got quite well stuck in my head. I got bored during a break at work, and made a quick doodle on a post-it note. Colored it this evening:

Hooray for dancing blue alien chicks! OR, how about this version:

Do we prefer more common colors? ....Eh. No preference here. :)
The original doodle!

THE FLU

I don't have the flu (probably), but I do have other things I need to work on so no official Fanart Friday this week. Instead, here's a perfectly charming germ (drawn for a goofy story; Germ to be printed and handed out)

I hope you enjoy it muchly. Happy Friday!! :)

Gorgeous, Perfect Ella

I didn't get her face *quite* right, but I think it's still pretty obvious who this is. :)

Brush pen and graphite.

My husband said I'm not allowed to have a crush on her because "that would be weird".  So I supposed it'll have to be a secret crush (add her to my list of dead people I have crushes on). Because seriously... Ella Fitzgerald is just beautiful. She's the original Queen.