blog: drawings

Some book sketches from today

Here are a couple of the sketches I did today in copies of Emperor of the Food Chain, using prompts supplied by each book’s future owner:

“Turtle Robot CEO”:

“Victorian Helicopter Squid”:

“Victorian Rocket Kitten”:

Here’s where you can order your own!

Also, Marksman George C. wrote me today, saying: “Just ordered the 5-pack. Since I wasn’t near a 40-sided die, this happened.” It’s a Roll-a-Sketch Randomizer! Thanks so much, George!

Speaking of drawings…

One of the other neat things in the new book is a Piranhamoose children’s story. Reader Sharon Bryan, a librarian at an Australian university, wrote me several years ago to say:

I was particularly impressed by the latest appearance of the Piranhamoose — so much so that I was oddly inspired to create some sort of fan fiction.

I may have been strongly influenced by the number of children’s books I have been reading lately… Anyway, the following nonsense came to me whilst riding my bike to work today, and I thought it was only fitting to send it to you to put in whatever “stalkers” file you may have for such things.

Attached was a delightful short poem about children who visit a quite dangerous zoo. I was so taken with the story that I got Sharon’s permission to include it in this book, and had my friend Phil McAndrew create a series of original watercolor illustrations to round out the whole package! It’s a cute little story and I hope you like it too.

Grab the book today! UPDATE: Artist Editions are done for now, thanks everyone!

Sketch Animations

Inspired by Anthony Clark, whose Tumblr is always full of fun little sketches and animations, I tried making some li’l animations of my own!

This one I call “PARTY ALL NIGHT”

That was just to get me into the swing of things. With a little more confidence I then attempted another one, which I call “FIGHT TO THE FINISH”

Feeling positively BRAVE I then spent most of a morning on this one, which I call “STOP TOUCHING THE BUTTON”

And finally, this image wouldn’t leave my head until I made it a reality — “DO A BAAA-RREL ROLL”

For the last several days I have been checking back in on them (on my Tumblr) and have been pleased to find that they’re still truckin’ away! GIF ANIMATIONS: The true perpetual motion machine??

Comic-Con ‘Roll-a-Sketch’ drawings

I’m at Comic-Con right now, and I’ve been doing a fun new thing I call “Roll-a-Sketch.” Simply put: I wrote down a list of adjectives and nouns (such as “underwater”, “ninja”, “backhoe”, “jam jar”, etc.) in columns. Then, a person chooses a column and rolls a die to randomly select one of the words — then does it again, to select a second word.

Then the fun part: I draw the combination, like this vampire helicopter:

For a few extra bucks the person can even roll FOUR times to generate a SUPER-COMBO like this Victorian submarine helicopter bulldozer:

But my favorite so far has to be the boxing rhino space tank:

And the best part is, the result is a fun sketch that the person gets to take home and keep!

So if you’re at Comic-Con, come by booth 1229 to roll for your own sketch! I’ll likely also be bringing this to other conventions later in the year as well — heck, I’d do this at the dentist’s office, if they let me. AND WHO’S TO SAY THEY WON’T??