Yay. On a lark, I entered the design contest at Popdeck. They’re a bit like Threadless, but for skateboard art. I wanted to do a deck design for my portfolio anyhow, so I thought I might as well enter it. A short while later and, look at that, it won.

If you want to get your consumer on, here’s the place to do it.

This is a link to a wallpaper sized version. Here’s a detail shot and some process:

I just finished a tee for the upcoming Defcon hacker convention. It was a fun project where I was afforded a lot of creative freedom. The end result is a tee I’m really proud of. There’s a killer spider, a “web” (Get it? Har!), and some hand lettering. What’s not to like?

I initially offered three quick thumbnails, seen below. After those, there’s some process, too:

Process:

I’d have posted sooner, but I’ve been busier than all get out. I was the featured portfolio on Coroflot for a long spell (screenshot below) and I got a heap of business as a result. If you haven’t signed up, I recommend it. It’s free and it works!

In addition to Coroflot, I’m going to be signing up for The iSpot. I’ve heard good things from friends and, well, you don’t make money without spending it first. Between the postcards, iSpot, Coroflot and other sites of its ilk, and my own self promotion on the tubes, things are working out. I’m working on an Ex Libris from a comment on this very site, a magazine cover, a children’s book, and some other stuff at the moment. More on that soon!

As I mentioned a few posts ago, I intend to explore some of my comic characters as series of images rather than narratives. I don’t have the time to explore four or five different properties as stories, so I’ll be satisfied with developing them as art pieces.

A character mentioned and shown previously was Robothead Nikolai Sodorov. He’s a down-on-his-luck, Russian-speaking miner with an extremely sunny disposition in an America of the future. Across the city, in the high rent district, a professor unwittingly lets loose an army of sentient, but angry, robots.

Nikolai is injured in a battle with the robots and the professor saves Nikolai by grafting one of the robots to the top of Nikolai’s head. Nikolai feels grateful to the Professor and vows to clean up the city, ridding it of the robot menace meeting scads of adventurers and mercenaries tasked with the same endeavor in the process.

I think these can make for some interesting prints (more to come on that later today, I hope). They’re a lot of fun to draw and sort of act as a plot outline for a greater narrative that I can revisit at a later date. Fun!

Here’s the final image for the latest piece, titled the same as this blog post:

And some process:

At this point, I hadn’t finalized a model sheet for Nikolai and his facial features are in flux. Still, the composition is good and I can continue refining the details and nailing down colors.

After the above color test, I proceeded with inks, and resolved how to draw a wide-eyed Nikolai. In all my previous attempts, Nikolai had his eyes cheerily clamped shut. That’s his default state, more or less. Making him appear surprised by eyebrow machinations alone proved pretty impossible, so I strayed a bit and let him have two black marbles rattling around above his cheekbones.