Welcome to TMBG Tuesday, where I post pictures inspired by the band They Might Be Giants.
The first painting is based on You Probably Get That A Lot from the album Join Us. I think it’s probably my favourite TMBG album!
This song is a love song to a cephalophore. What an absurd idea! I just love the imagery.
It’s the debut of my Mega Evolution paintings! My goal is to recreate the moment that each Pokémon shows off their newly Mega-Evolved form.
I got started on these a while ago but hit a bit of a wall after painting 8 Pokémon. I had inked versions of Mewtwo ready to go for ages but didn’t get around to finishing them off until the impending deadline of Blaugust came along. Yay deadlines!
In the time since I started this project they’ve gone and announced new Megas, but eh. I’ll just be aiming to illustrate Kalos accessible Pokémon. If I find the time, I’ll add Blaziken and co in!
Here’s the first (and largest) batch, featuring Kanto Pokémon.
  
 
 
Yup, it’s Simulacrum Sunday, which means I’m posting art based on real things. People, still lifes and landscapes, I guess! Hopefully my representations are more satisfactory than, uh, un[satisfactory].
We’ll start the series with some Reddit Gets Drawn paintings I did when procrastinating from AVCon stuff a few months ago. I had a short burst where I forced myself to draw each day and heading over to Reddit to find models to paint was very convenient.
I tried not to spend too long on each painting. These are a couple of my more successful attempts!
This post is a little late as we went out to dinner, then spent much longer hanging around than anticipated. I fell asleep on the couch and everyone thought that was a good excuse to play a few hands of poker while I was non-responsive.
Here are some recent little scribbles, experimenting with a couple of things. I’d been watching Revolutionary Girl Utena for the last couple of weeks and wanted to experiment a bit with hair!
This first picture is kinda based on some Utena fan art I found, but it’s also inspired by recent depictions of the AVCon mascot Ayvee. I’m also trying to decide on a new paint colour to add to my collection, and I experimented with paint from a sample sheet to paint the hair. I still haven’t decided on new colours to get! if you want to make a suggestion, the Daniel Smith watercolour range that I use has an extensive offering. I’m looking to get another blue and maybe some more earth tones. New colours are a tricky thing!
Some more experiments with hair and a frilly outfit kinda also inspired by Utena. Last week I bought a new white gel pen, which is a little more effective for applying highlights and covering inking errors than the old pen I used. Leaving the whites of the paper unblemished is always the most striking and effective way to depict highlights but the gel pen works great in a pinch.
Is it Blaugust again already? Oh my!
For 2014 I’m joined once again by John and Thom. Jimmy will hopefully get some stuff up for the last week of August, but will otherwise be absent (he was doing too well, after all, so we sent him off to Sweden). I’m also joined by a host of new Blaugust challengers:
Mark, Paul, Mason, Michael, Rosie, Kevin, Pichy, Laura, Jimmy 2, Shaun, Grant, Brad and probably a few others! Peer pressure is a wonderful thing.
This year I’m aiming to get at least five posts up a week. After last year’s shameful showing I’m a little wary of promising too much but for each day of the week I’m also aiming to get content somewhat like the following up:
Today’s fan art pieces feature characters from a comic that I also drew last year. It’s the SuperFogeys! Here are a young Spy Gal and Captain Spectacular.
Laura brought around some marker pens the other week and I tried them out on a drawing that I decided to turn into Spy Gal. However I forgot that the characters in the SuperFogeys only have four fingers on each hand! John noticed while I was drawing but because I was yet to put the black on Spy Gal’s costume, he assumed I was drawing an alternate version of the character who has the “correct” number of fingers. Nope. Whoops.
The markers were a bit tricky for me. I guess I’m just not that used to how unforgiving they are. So I retreated back to familiar ol’ watercolours for Captain Spectacular and the below painting of Dark Maiden. (Who I also forgot to only put four fingers on, then had to fix half-way through inking).
Man, I love Dark Maiden’s costume!
I painted this one on Thursday but I’ve been mulling over a title for it since. At one point I considered titling it “Between”, though I’m not sure what that title would have referred to exactly. “Nocturne” came to me not long after.
Inspired this tumblr post.
Practice pieces from the last couple of nights. I’m trying to get more comfortable with leaving the white of the paper shining through. It frequently requires more forethought than I usually have while painting.
This is my submission for the Losing Altitude collaborative art book, featuring endangered bird illustrations from a ton of talented artists.
Since I like ducks, I chose to paint the Laysan Duck for the book. The Laysan was at one point in critical danger of extinction with a population of only 7 adults and 5 juveniles. By the 1950s they had recovered to around 500 individuals and later a small population was moved to Midway Atoll to ensure that any disasters on Laysan would not result in the extinction of the species. My painting is named “Midway” for Midway Atoll – it also makes reference to the fact that conservation is a continually ongoing process.
New watercolour paintings! The Eevees started on a whim but I got them done in a weekend, which was pretty cool. They’re my largest watercolour painting to date.
Liepard was painted for NerdbotMk2‘s Twitterdex project.
Mega Venusaur may be the start of me drawing all the mega evolutions. Iunno.
