There is a weblog called Monsters in Real Places. You draw a monster and place it in picture. This week’s submission calls for the use of a Vancouver Olympic mascot in city close to you. I created “Quatchi” at the Coeur d’Alene Resort. Yes, I know that my version of Quatchi is less cute and is sport’n a tude. Go figure! A quick Friday morning distraction. Drawn and painted in Photoshop.

The descriptive blurb that is supposed to accompany the picture:

“The now famous Vancouver Quatchi, with the Winter Olympics behind him, settles down to some golf and sunshine at the Coeur d’Alene Resort. Shhhh … he is about to take his shot.”

The Website: Monsters in real places
The Real Quatchi (and friends)

Yep, three posts within the same week. Life is getting back to normal. School is covered, Studio work is doing good, and I actually spent time with the family this weekend. OK. So, a client gives me a thumbnail of a character they want drawn for a product display. The client sells (amongst other things) custom barrettes for little girls. This client gives me a thumbnail for the design / illustration and gets me started.

Over the course of my career, I have seen hundreds of client provided illustration thumbnails. They range in quality from the vaguely intelligible hieroglyphic, to the amazingly adept.

This is an example of one of the latter. The thumbnail gives me great distinguishable lines, direction, size, product display, gender, and proportion.

When I receive thumbnails from clients, I will often provide thumbnails back to make sure we are talking about the same thing. In this instance, I drew a nice tight mockup in Sketchbook Pro, directly from their thumbnail.

I finished up the illustration, in Adobe illustrator using a custom pressure sensitive brush. To top it all off, I have been using it as a classroom sample for an assignment we are currently working on.

I been working on a few different logos these past couple of weeks. One of them was for a new imprint of Bitterroot Mountain Publishing called living oracles. My sketches around the idea started with The oracle of delphi and the concept of a font of knowledge. I worked several thumbnails that included water but after some playing around I ended up with this book motif that also looks like a Grecian column. I included a tongue of fire over the column / book as a representation of the spiritual foundation of this imprint. The books will be inspirational in nature.

After years of stringing my tablet to my computer; Often at the expense of comfort or natural positioning, Wacom has introduced a wireless solution. The only question left to be unanswered is why they did not send me one to review?

Now I have two pads on my wish list. An iPad and now a wireless tablet. Hmmm … I wonder if I cold get the two of them talking via my Sketchbook Pro iPhone app? Now that would be VERY cool!