Fury Swipes!


A little something for #PokemonDay! This isn’t *the* Meowth, but it’s *a* Meowth, and *any* Meowth is one of my favorite Pokemon.

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to figure this out, but when I’m drawing digitally, I do way better with a jaggy scratchy brush than a smooth one. I think it’s probably because I’m scruffy and scrappy like Meowth. 😼

Head over to my Instagram if you want to see a bit of behind the scenes video!

#HappyPokemonDay nerds!

American Ninja

I haven’t played Street Fighter in ages, I was always always bad at it, but I love it dearly. And I’m always happy to see the next generation of characters, so here’s some fanart of Kimberly, from the upcoming Street Fighter 6! Happy 35th Anniversary, Street Fighter! 💪❤️

Yatta!

What can I say, I love an obscure costume variant! Here’s Chun-Li as seen in her outfit from the original ending of Street Fighter II. ✌️

ink on paper

a few marker sketches from the past year plus…

a blue dragon…

 
an Oliver Queen/Ken Masters mash-up..

 
Doctor Leonard “Bones” McCoy…

 
and a practice Dr. McCoy (TOS era version) that actually turned out okay, along with a bonus Data…

His theme goes with everything…

Here’s one of my favorite Street Fighter characters, Guile!

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I lieu of me rambling at length, just listen click on the video below and get psyched for whatever you’re doing:

(This is a late post for Friday. Hanging in there at 2 missed posts. I feel like catching up on those last 2 posts is the procrastinating blogger’s equivalent of “losing the last 10 pounds” for a struggling dieter.)

Help The Cheerleader Commissions, Round 18! AND TWO ANNOUNCEMENTS!

Today I’m posting another round of commissions for Help the Cheerleader. To read more about my involvement with this fundraiser, please CLICK HERE. Before I get to the sketches, I have two announcements…

* * *

ANNOUNCEMENT #1:

As you may or may not know–the Cheerleader won one of her appeals and the courts are now recalculating her fees. For the moment, Help The Cheerleader donations are on hold because we don’t know what the final amount is going to be–it’s entirely possible that after the adjustments, the amount owed will be covered by what has been raised so far.

So, as of a few weeks ago, our goal was likely attained, but several people remained on the commission list. I decided to complete the remaining commissions and simply ask the requesters to donate $20 per sketch to the charitable cause of their choice, strictly on the honor system.

It was important to me to honor all the requests, because without the requests, we never would have generated the attention which brought in donors who gave to the cause even though they couldn’t get sketches. The chain of events was fragile, and with any missing component, it’s possible that we wouldn’t have been able to raise such a huge sum.

Thank you, once again, to every last person who donated (whether or not they were able to get a sketch), and to every person who helped spread the word!

ANNOUNCEMENT #2:

As of earlier this week, ALL COMMISSIONS HAVE BEEN COMPLETED AND DROPPED IN THE MAIL!

We initially had well over 150 commission requests, but may people never responded to our follow-up emails. By my final count, that’s 108 finished commissions. This includes 88 commissions with donations going directly to Help The Cheerleader, and 20 commissions with donations going to the honor system (as outlined in Announcement #1, above).

I still have a couple weeks’ worth of commissions to post, so please stay tuned! For now…

* * *

Here are the last 3 sketches paid for by donations to Help The Cheerleader:

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From left to right:

AND… the first 5 sketches for the honor system donors.

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From left to right:

Tune in next week for more commissions. Thanks for reading!

Help The Cheerleader Commissions, Round 11!

Here’s the eleventh round of commissions that I’ve finished for Help the Cheerleader. To read more about my involvement with this fundraiser, please CLICK HERE.

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From left to right:

Also, just an FYI for those who are curious–the sketches are NOT drawn to scale–I size them for the blog posts in order to give a sense of character heights. The actual sketches are all close to the same size.

I will continue to post new commissions next week! And even though commissions are closed for now, remember it isn’t too late to donate to Help the Cheerleader.

MACHO WEEK!!! (Part 2 of 3, The Moldy Oldie Edition)

MACHO WEEK continues, with a piece of vintage nerdery from my archives, drawn and colored in 1999. TWELVE years ago.

Let’s think about this people. That was before 9-11, before the dot-com bust, before the (still ongoing) energy crisis, before I owned a car or a DVD player. I was fresh out of college, just starting out full time at the day-job after interning there for 2 years (same day-job that I have today, by the way), and living in a tiny studio apartment that paradoxically had a huge walk-in closet (which I filled up with comic books and action figures–mostly Beast Wars at the time).

So… I confess, this was drawn to impress a geeky girl who I was talking to at the time. Believe it or not, the subjects in the illustration were our common points of interest–and there’s the Macho One himself, front and center! Oh, and I’m in the picture too, inbetween Optimus Prime in Pikachu, because apparently I have a raging ego. For what it’s worth, I think the girl was in fact impressed by this. However, things didn’t work out for a number of complicated reasons which I will not bore you with. You know how it goes.

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Man, just look at this thing. It was one of the first things I ever colored in Photoshop, and I thought I was pretty hot stuff, using the Dodge/Burn tool to render the shading. WHAT WAS I THINKING?

And yet, here we are, twelve years later. My drawing is a little better, and my coloring is much better. And I still pretty much won’t shut up about Macho Man, Transformers, Batman, Pokemon, Miyazaki movies, and Bruce Lee.

Tune in on Friday for the final installment of MACHO WEEK!!!

Plumbing the Depths

So I actually finished this drawing on Friday night, but didn’t have time to post it until now, which is, you know, super-lame of me.

Aaanyways, here’s everyone’s favorite plumber:

I’m just playing around with doing some marker sketches (actually, there’s color pencil in this one too). I do not consider this experiment a success. Will be playing around with markers on and off in the coming weeks, please humor me.

Squawk.

Sometimes, like a jerk, I waste hours and hours playing Angry Birds, a game meant to be a casual distraction, which has instead become an obsessive… obsession. Other times (still like a jerk) I post a super-late blog. Here is such a blog post now:

On Friday night I was too tired to draw, so I went to bed with the intention of playing a few levels of Angry Birds and then going to sleep. Fast forward to: me staying up until 9:30am, when I finally went to sleep (cursing at myself all the while). Woke up a few hours later and headed to the Long Beach Comic Expo, where I hung out with Dustin and Peter Nguyen (they are not related!), and drew this. Peter was kind enough to lend me a pen so that I could ink it. I drew another piece too, which I came home and inked, and will be posted this week in a timely manner, unlike today’s sketch.

I’ve been in sort of a rut lately, in addition to being busy with assorted other things. It was very eye opening to me that I was able to go hang with some friends, and even on very little sleep, bust out two drawings very quickly. I guess even weirdo recluses such as myself need to occasionally leave our secret lairs and get a change of scenery.

(But seriously, Angry Birds is really fun.)

Brother Vs. Brother

OKAY. Late, but here it is. Mega Man versus his brother Proto Man:

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I drew this on my iPad. It’s an improvement over my last two iPad sketches, but I’m obviously still getting the hang of it.

Powering Up.

I’m powering up right now, which is my shifty and dishonest way of saying that today’s post is merely a preview of a real post. Started an iPad sketch that got a little too ambitious to complete with time in short supply, so here’s just a portion of it:

The entire complete sketch should come next week! Sorry I’m such a lazy slacker these days!

Pokeballs To The Wall

Been a looong week (note extra O’s), so I’m about to give myself a little break and get started on my copy of Pokemon White. Before I go, here’s a little something I drew in Sketchbook Pro on my new iPad 2, with a capacitive stylus from Boxwave:

This is rather primitive, but it was fun to draw. I will be posting the progress of art that I produce on my iPad over the next few weeks and months, and I might even write up a super boring post detailing my thoughts on the device. But for now.. TEPIG, I CHOOSE YOU!

Have a good weekend, and please donate to Japanese earthquake and tsunami relief in any way that you can. Here are a few ways:
– Text REDCROSS to 90999 to Give $10
Dustin Nguyen art auction
FansProject Blessser

Robot Chicken (not the one you’re thinking of)

Today’s post features Scratch from The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. He’s the cohort (and brother) of Grounder, who I posted a drawing of last week:

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As I did with Grounder, I interpreted Scratch with more of a Super Robot feel. This time I was specifically going for a look that resembled the animal-themed Mavericks from Megaman X. I think the final result is a little more tough-looking, while (hopefully) maintaining the cartoony fun of the original.

More Sonic fun coming over the next couple of weeks… but not next week… in case you were wondering.

._.

The only Dave Coulier reference I will ever make: Cut! It! Out!

I have a cool Cutman trading figure sitting on top of my scanner, so I was inspired to do my own take on him:

I was just sort of working out how I would interpret the character, and randomly decided to take it a step further, and render him with markers and colored pencils. This was fun and quick to do, and as always, it feels nice to bust out some traditional media rather than the same old Photoshop stuff I’m used to. Plus, I feel like being on graph paper inherently improves a drawing of a robot.

By the way–some time last year I finished using up the cache of scratch paper that I mentioned in this post. However, I have since found another sizable cache of old college papers and homework… so today’s piece is drawn on the backside of a piece of graph paper containing my Chinese vocabulary words. Zhen de!

(That means “Really!“)