Sketch Madness!

I thought it might be fun today to go through a few of my boxes of loose sketches and I was right, t WAS fun!  I always love getting to see sketches and unseen works from my favorite artists including my friends.  So here are the best failures, castaways, works in progress I'll never finish, paintings that didn't turn out how I'd imagined, weird sketches and this and that that comes and goes across my art table.  (Bonus points for spotting the cartoons of my super cool dog Jeff!)  Maybe someday I'll go through my actual sketchbooks and upload some of that stuff too! Anyway, here we go…

This first group was to be a lead in to a dream sequence for the comic I'm working on.  I hadn't officially begun the comic and was just trying to get this down to remember it but it, like so much else, was abandoned. 

Most of the time when I sit down to paint I don't know quite what I'm going to do and often don't sketch even a rough design so I'm flying blind.  This results in having at least as many paintings fail as succeed.  But I like working this way, otherwise I feel I'd get bored after drawing the idea out a second or third time.  It's also fun because I surprise myself sometimes with the direction the painting will go in.

(the above was for a fake book cover for Frankenstein!)

For the next group I would paint a dozen or more basic figures in black and white or gray scale and then go back through and add features.

Next are some sketches for an illustration of H. P. Lovecraft's Randolph Carter character for my friend Michael Bukowski's very awesome Yog-Blogsoth blog, specifically the Guests in the Witch House series which featured guest artists.  You can check out the final design here.  As you'll see the idea was taken in quite a different direction.

These are sketches of my character design for the incredible Jenn Woodall's upcoming zine FIGHT!

The rest are a mish-mash of sketches for paintings for shows, action figure designs, Madball designs, character designs for comics, t-shirt designs, and finally text designs for the shop headers for Twamies and Medusawolf both of which I run with the wonderful and talented Kati Driscoll.