Comics!

This summer I took a short form comics class with Shannon Wheeler (creator of Too Much Coffee Man). My Topsy comic went over really well with the class, so my peers decided I was going to draw the cover. This is the result:

Handlettering and patterns are fun! I need to do more of both.

Happy Birthday to Me!

On October 26th I will be turning 26! Golden birthday!

Birthday Cat! 'Cause it's almost my birthday!

Bonus drawing of Mr. Snorkers, a very classy pig. I would like to imagine that Birthday Cat and Mr. Snorkers would be great party guests.

Portrait of Poe from the Waist Down

Last winter break I thought, "Why don't I try to draw a portrait of someone from the waist down?" Here is the result of that idea. 

Edgar Allan Poe from the waist down. Fitting 'cause Halloween is right around the corner, and Poe has got to be America's creepiest poet, right?

Cat Wedding

I went to my first non-family weddings this summer. Here's a card I made for my friends Liz and Travis. (Liz is a superb illustrator - you can check out her wonderful cut paper illustrations here: http://lizabethgoss.com/)

I'm clearly have a cat-drawing addiction.

Animal Doodles

I made a halfhearted attempt to get onboard the #inktober train this month. Managed to produce 3 drawings so far, based on twitter @Daily_Doodle prompts.

#cowboycat

#matadormouse

#teachertortoise

2014 Marching Band Tee Shirt

It's that time of the year again, my one regularly commissioned project! I've been doing the tee shirt for my high school marching band for the past few years, and it's been a fun challenge since the theme is completely different from year to year. To check out some of my previous tee designs, click here

This year's theme was "Goddess of Fire" and I was able to use 2 colors (plus the tee shirt color). Fancy!

The '70s psychedelia-inspired design (I looked at lots of music posters).

An idea of what the front and back of the tee shirt should look like. 

Topsy's Shocking End

Bad news: It's been over a month since I've posted.

Good news: I'll have brand new full-page comics to post over the next few weeks! I've been taking a short-form comics class with Shannon Wheeler (creator of Too Much Coffee Man) and it's gotten me back into drawing on a daily basis. I've learned lots of fun and exciting things, like how to letter a comic.

Our first week's assignment was a historical comic. I have a soft spot for elephants, so I wrote and drew a comic about Topsy, the elephant that Thomas Edison electrocuted in his "War of the Currents" with Tesla.

Topsy's story has been getting around - a whole episode of Bob's Burgers was based on it. Below is the main song from the episode, "Electric Love," covered by Stephin Merritt (of the Magnetic Fields - so many science-y references!) and Kenny Mellman.

More plants!

Here are a few more Pacific Northwest fauna drawings for the new Ooligan site:

A pine branch!

Another pine branch with more pine!

Strawberries and leaves.

I like how these drawings turned out. I need to work on more art that isn't so cartoony.

Plants!

Cute animal drawings does not a website make, so I needed to do some Pacific Northwest flora drawings to balance out all the cartoony animals.

A fern. These are relaxing to draw.

Another fern. Also relaxing.

Trillium. There is a lake named after this plant in Oregon.

Cute Animals!

More drawings for the new Ooligan Press website. Who knows what our webmaster is going to do with all of these, but she's brilliant, so I think these drawings are in safe hands. The internet pretty much runs on cute animals, so it makes sense to fit them wherever we can on the site. Can't wait to post screenshots of the site when it goes live!

Beaver!

Chipmunk!

Fish! They're supposed to be salmon, but I think they're probably not very accurate. Also, it's hard to make some cute because most of them are hella ugly (especially salmon).

Tired huskies. The faces are kind of weird, but whatevs.

A raccoon for the 404 page. It just makes sense.

Nature Drawings

Here are a few images I've put together for the redesign of the Ooligan Press website:

Branch!

Leaves!

Log!

Pinecones! (Really hard to draw!)

I don't quite know what our webmaster is going to do with all of these images, but I'm glad it's getting me to draw more. I have a few more drawings to crank out soon, so those should be posted here soon.

Dam Good Books

Here's another little thing I whipped up for Ooligan Press:

I offered a beaver-less option if the press wanted to be a bit more high-brow, but I'm happy to see the little guy made the cut.

Ooligan Press is putting together "Dam Book Bundles" - basically a collection of 3 titles that our press has published. The titles are offered at a discount because you're buying multiple books. It's a pretty sweet deal, and you can check it out here if you want to buy some excellent titles from a student-run independent press. Check it out for the puns alone!

Even More Dragons

Because I have some drawing abilities, I couldn't just design a book and be done with it. No, I had to illustrate the book as well. I left things to the last minute (as usual), so I only had time to work up some line drawings. I'm content with the way they came out - I think the quality of the line in these drawings compliments the rest of the book's design well enough.

Here's some handlettering I did for the title page (of course I had to put spikes and a tail on the "g").

I love this sleeping dragon drawing.

Chill dragon is also one of my favorites.

Here Be Dragons!

For my Book Design class this term, I had to design an entire book (it was awesome!) so here are the cover comps I came up with:

This first one had some nice elements, but it looked a bit old for the target audience of this book (middle-grade level readers).

I really liked this design as well, but it looks like an adult book.

This one was the clear favorite of my peers. It was by far the most age appropriate, and since it's a book for younger audiences, I could get away with having an image-based back cover. The author photo and bio is much more of an adult book element anyway.

Here's the final! I made some suggested improvements, like handlettering the text on the cover and adding the dragon's arms to hold the banner. I obviously redrew the front and back illustrations as well, and added some cracks around the dragon butt to add to the illusion of the dragon breaking through the back of the book cover. My classmates liked where the colors bled outside the lines in the comp, so I replicated that in the final. I moved the ISBN box to a more sensible place as well.

I had some trouble finding reference images for the dragon's butt, but as multiple people reminded me, dragons aren't real so I could draw it however I liked.

Dancing Cats

Continuing the week of cuteness, here are more cats (if you need more cats drawings, just scroll through past blog posts). I was supposed to have a finished spread for the SCBWI-Oregon conference, but grad school got in the way, so I only finished the line art. This summer I need to color it in. Of course, nothing I do is going to compare to Jon Klassen's work, but a girl can dream.

Initial sketch:

The text from the spread I picked to illustrate: 

"Eight cats tap...tip bowler hats in pink tuxedos, canvas spats"

Left page refined sketch:

Right page refined sketch:

Left page line art:

Right page line art:

Super-Sized Squirrel

You may have noticed a trend on this blog (not in the last couple posts, but in a bunch of my cat drawings) that I love drawing really obese animals that look more like toys than anything living in the wild. The following is no exception.

I put together a t-shirt design for my peer mentoring program. We have a thing about squirrels (they're in all of our program newsletters), so it was a no-brainer to draw this up:

Embrace the squishiness!

Here's a picture of mentors wearing the shirt with my design on it:

MAPS Re-branding

Ooligan is not the only rebranding I've worked on this term. I wound up reworking one of my own designs for the MAPS team, a group of peer mentors that I am responsible for organizing. Conveniently, this means I can change the look of our brand whenever I want, because I have the power (please read that in a He-Man voice because I think he says that).

Anyway, long story short, I had to update the logo to make it digital-friendly. It lost a bit of it's character, but it's sleek-looking! Also, I learned what kerning was.

Original:

Revamped:

A fancy button I made that connects to a fancy webform:

All of the revised work fits with Portland State University's visual branding guidelines, which is probably important if this mentor group is going to have any longevity. Hooray for learning graphic design things!