2019 June | Eye Opening Design

Mermaids

Every year there is a art challenge called Mermay. For the month of may, artists are encourage to try and post a new mermaid every day. Having a busy work life and young family, I don’t always get the chance to participate, but in 2018, I managed to do it with just pen and ink drawings. Over the next year, I managed to flesh a few out in colour. These are the result.

I tried to go for a variety of different styles. Though I think there is something that links it to me every time. So despite my feelings (and reputation) that I am some sort of design/illustration chameleon, I do seem to have some sort of emerging style. Enjoy!

Among the Ruins

Nobody ever came here.

The monolith rose out of the only oasis in the Sea of Broken Glass, or Quaa Rouchar, in the local dialect of the desert nomads who managed to survive out here. It was built eons ago in the hopes of banishing an ancient menace from the land. One thousand souls were sacrificed in the dedication rite, so determined the ancients were to rid the land of it’s tormentor. It was never permitted to happen again, And it was thought would never need to happen again. So the ancient blood rite was forgotten, and place abandoned. Even the reason for the monument’s existence was a faint and distant memory. All was well.

It worked, didn’t it?

Sarna knew otherwise. And he had a plan on what to do about it.

This was a redo of artwork long abandoned by me (it’s not just ancient monuments that get left on the dustbin of history). I wanted to monumentalize something that is ordinarily quite small. In this case a chess piece. A knight. Was fun to really play around with the sunset style colours.

Started out as a pencil sketch in my sketchbook that was totally repainted digitally in Photoshop. Enjoy!

A Boy and His Bot

“This is no place for the likes of you,” said the giant robot. His old gears creaking as he bent down.

“Come with me. For an adventure. I’ll not harm you.”

This was a fun one to draw. Started out as a pencil sketch. Was scanned into the computer, and colour loosely dropped in behind in Photoshop. The lines were then redrawn over top with a fairly gritty brush in Photoshop. I tried pretty hard to preserve as much of the original line as as I did that. I wanted to keep everything fairly loose. Adding in the texture to the robot was my favourite part.

I can’t take full credit for the design of the robot. In my son’s Kindergarten class, the had an in class assignment to build their own robot to teach them about different shapes. This monstrosity was all my son’s doing. I just added a few details.

Enjoy!