Cute animals with ereaders

The digital department manager at Ooligan Press is the reason I've drawn many cute animals over the past year. She's the reason my silly animal drawings are all over the Ooligan Press website, so when she requested some kitchy animals for her instructional ebook guide, I was happy to oblige. Without further ado, may I present cute animals with ereaders!

Thursday Afternoon Comics: Swine in Space

It's time for another edition of Thursday afternoon comics!

I drew this one pager over the summer for a comics class, but then it took me forever to scan it in. Anyway, enjoy "Swine in Space"!

Happy Groundhog's Day!

These groundhogs are proper gents. I remember Groundhog's Day being a much bigger deal when I was little, but I also grew up in and around Pennsylvania, so it might be more popular around there?

Jazzy T-Shirt

Let's get this sketch blog back up and running!

Here's a t-shirt design I drew for a jazz-related project at Ooligan Press:

It was deemed a little too folksy for a jazz t-shirt, and the style wasn't quite right for the target demographic, but it's a nice little composition. Someone brought up Michael Cera when talking about the design, which is a compliment of the highest order for me. I loved Juno. :)

The black and white drawing is below:

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.

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

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.

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.

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:

Ooligan Press Blog Branding

I've completed my first year of grad school. Crazy! The next few months are going to be relatively light, responsibility-wise, so expect to see new material pop up in your news feeds on a regular basis. Unless I get really lazy this summer...

Anyway, what follows are some blog badges I created for the student-run publisher I work for, Ooligan Press. We're working on rebranding the Press and changing up the website, and my silly little doodles are part of it all.

First time around I created everything in Adobe Illustrator, which made everything graphic and clean, but these were missing the hand-drawn/human element that is an integral part of the press' identity.

These initial badges aren't bad, but our digital and social media department lead was looking for something that is obviously made by the human hand. So I went back to the drawing board (literally), and came up with these:

You may notice I was roped into creating a few more badges. This is not the last you'll see of the Ooligan-related work I did this term.

All of the Cats

Here's something I did a few months ago for the Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC) in Portland. They needed a half-sheet sized catalog cover to promote classes and events offered in February and March of this year. To the surprise of no one who has skimmed through this blog, it features cats.

The Valentine's Day image was the front cover and the St. Patrick's Day cats occupied the back cover.

National Poetry Month

To celebrate the end of National Poetry Month, here is a line drawing of one of the all-time greats: Emily Dickinson.

This piece was published in the Winter 2014 edition of the Portland Review, along with a drawing of Edgar Allan Poe (which will show up on the sketch blog in the near future).

Birthday Goose

Made this for my sister's "golden" birthday last fall. I'm glad she understood my weird humor.

Front of card

Inside of card

Mr. Tea

A fun 80s mashup between Mr. T (who pities fools) and Mr. T (who has tall teeth) at a tea party (naturally). This piece was part of "Jibbart Jabbart: A Mr. T-Themed Art Show & Experience" at the PhilaMOCA in Philadelphia.

Line art

Picture from the show (c/o Ben and Amy Leach)

My art on the wall! (c/o Ben and Amy Leach)

Another view (c/o Ben and Amy Leach)