Pauper Game Day

This weekend I hosted a Magic the Gathering Pauper event at the local gaming store and everyone who came out had a blast! For the previous Pauper Magic event I hosted, I created an exclusive token card as a give away for each participant. This time I expanded on the idea and created four separate tokens within an interlocking panorama as seen above.

They were well received and I was very happy with the results. The last few days have been so busy. Having just returned from a funeral out of town on Wednesday, I only had a few days to finalize the tokens. There were several long nights and I am still bleary-eyed from the experience but I loved it. My wife was very supportive of my efforts even though she knew it meant time away from her and the kids. The "kids" (our cats) were a little confused by my efforts burning the midnight oil. Patches probably thought daddy was in trouble for some reason.

Daily Doodle - Monster Inks

Inked this while listening to the Escape From Illustration Island podcast with Kevin Cross earlier today. They had a good discussion about changing their styles. One thing that stood out to me was Kevin's comment on how challenging a simpler cartoon style is to achieve. That's one of the things I have struggled with in my own work; just how cartoony or quasi-realistic to make it. How much detail to include. Every piece is a single step in a never ending journey. I created a second version as well and after staring at them all day I'm not sure which one I like more. Or less. One seems heavy handed and the other seems littered with unnecessary details.

//DOUBLE EDIT:

Here's a completely different version I sketched and inked. Not sure if its better or worse than the others or simply different.
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In other news, this weekend I took a day trip up to Charlotte for Heroes Con and had a blast. I got an opportunity to reconnect with some friends from college as well as meet some others I know online. It was a great experience and really got me excited about my work and the comics industry at large.

Daily Doodle - Pauper Monsters!

Here are a few sketches I'm working on for a token card. They will be giveaways as part of my next Pauper Magic event coming up later this month. I hope to top the Goblin I did in January in complexity if nothing else.

Wedding Invitation Sketches

 

Working on an off-beat wedding invitation. Here's a compilation of some of the sketches involved.

Oodles of Doodles

I filled up another sketch book recently and thought I would show off a some of the funner ones. Enjoy!

Daily Doodle - Dragons

Someone on MTG Salvation suggested I create a humorous cartoony dragon as a future project. One of the aspects I really enjoy about cartooning and illustration is exploring the different options available within the subject matter when I'm starting out. So here are a few initial sketches along those lines.

Daily Doodle - Character Sketch

Here's another Daily Doodle. Another character design for a comic story I'm developing. Worked on it while watching/listening to Otis Frampton's ArtCast on Ustream.