"wuslam likes whales" (september slam and whale icons)

(final version)

I was asked to design a poster for our school's poetry slam team, and it wasn't easy. I played around with a couple of ideas:

(as you can see, none of them really went anywhere.) (though looking back, I kind of like the third one.) 

definitely rolled with the blue one. 

some sketches of whales:

 the silhouettes!

fanart 05 ("pokemon is the comeback kid")

done in Photoshop, using a crayonwax brush to achieve celshade effect

AND here's a WIP that I desperately want to finish. If only I had 1) all the time in the world, and 2) my tablet pen. (it is weeping silently in a package in a mailroom that was closed on Sunday and Monday)

that font's really awful because y'know, my handwriting, but I'll get around to fixing that soon. this was a story that i read online! it was alright, but the title was cool, so the fanart bug bit me. 

collaborative comic - the diary of dr. michael kaiser

W H E W. note to self: never try and crank out a comic in three days! it's unhealthy!

also not helpful that my tablet was out of commission, so there's that.
nonetheless, here it is. written by my partner in the comic club at school, kyle flagstad, and drawn by me.

figure drawing 04 ("nudity gets an inkover")

a series of 20 minute studies, all done primarily with ink (and some blue colored pencil on occasion)

(I really enjoyed doing these)

I'll post my charcoal 20 minute studies once I find the SD card for my camera (sigh). 

sketchbook 01 ("alex doesn't believe in normal graphite pencils yet")

some speech bubble fun on a flight back from New York. 

YOUNG JUSTICE! I love this show. I'm a sucker for DC (or Marvel) thrown into a melting pot of teenage drama. (But no, I do love the characters very much.) 

Good ol' OCs and halfOCs (Paper Mario redesigns turned into mine? So half they are). 

figure drawing 02 ("predictable warning: unclothed human beings up ahead")

Over the summer I took a figure drawing class, to brush up on my grasp of the human anatomy and also explore with stylizing the body. Before every session I would do a style warm-up for five minutes or so, to familiarize myself with my own style so that I wouldn't resort to hyper-realistic drawings during the actual session. 

Style warmup! 

30 second ink warmups. 

one minute, with blue pencil

one minute, with red pencil

more one minute drawings, with blue pencil

2 minutes!

10 for the two on the left, 5 for the one on the right. 

15 for this one ("I WILL STRETCH YOU, GOOD SIR.") 

and about 15-ish for this one (it was part of a 20, but I spent the other 5-8 minutes zooming in on his face and hat). 

Caption: "Welcome, ladies." 

personal 01 (character throwback + weird scenerystudy)

I stumbled across a folder chock full of old art and...well. Usually I'd go on and on about how horrified I was about how terrible my drawings were, but that's old and nobody cares about how much you hate your old art. 

In all honesty, yeah, there was the badbad stuff, but there were some neat things too. Some decent ideas, some not so bad drawings, some showing of understanding of anatomy. 

...Some. 

So here's a huge throwback post to all of the old ideas that I nearly forgot about. 

Pretty wonky lookin' anatomy going on here, but I was actually impressed with the one on the far right. I remember being pleasantly surprised when I finished that drawing; and right now I'm still somewhat pleasantly surprised.
Is that a bad thing? 

And the ...semi-update:

(I think these were all done in 2010)

(and this as you know, is 2012 material)

This one was entirely a product of a really, really weird dream that I had (2007, btw). There were two chicks in kimonos and they were swinging around fire-divinity-mirrors-basically-Okami-weapons in saturated rainbow explosions, bright white flashes and seizure inducing colors galore. 

And they were chasing a T-rex thief duo down for a stolen...Yoshi egg.

...I'd be pretty dumb not to forget that dream (I think I was on cold medicines during that time).

(2012, at 4 in the morning.)

And very, very unrelated, a picture that started out with me having way too many feelings about Cloud/Tifa being stupidly adorable and turned into some weird mix of "and you could be 14 again, sitting on that well without a care in the world" into a color/scenery study with celshading and lamenting over how Cloud's shirt looks like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo's shirt.