This Is What Happens When You Sketch At 5AM.

Gift for a friend. I hope he likes it.

For Jasper, my OC, I chose a specific breed: Irish Sport Horse, aka Irish Hunter. I'd consider that the equivalent of picking a race.

This was very closely related to his personality and character concept, not to mention his physical build and appearance (though, I didn't realize until later that I'd made him Irish and gave him a green coat).

His swooshy forelock was inspired by Superman's iconic curl of hair. I wanted give him a sort of hunky-dreamy sort of look. The ponytail and black ribbon bow was inspired by 18th-century hairstyles (Think Will Turner or Lieutennant Norrington from Pirates of the Caribbean).

I actually did draw Jasper as a human at one point... I really should dig that pic up, I liked how it came out.

Hey guys

I’m just wondering, do you people with like pony characters make up the specific way your character would look if it was a human- like hair styles, race, etc.

I mean like

do you decide on the race your characters

do you decide on the body type

i mean whut.

Hokay: after the Imp sitting on his own arm, and the carbuncle sitting on his own belly, I’m pretty sure the post colonic subtitle for the comic would be Perceptionality: an X sitting on their own Y. X3

So here we have a lady sitting on her own hair. Not much to say here, except that I wish I could have been more aggressive with removing the page shadow, but I would have lost too much of the pencil lines in the process.

I’ve mentioned previously that there are numerous people in the world of Perceptionality that are almost, though not quite entirely human. Whelp, this is another one of them. Prehensile hair can be very useful, when you need an extra hand to hold something, or a seat I guess. It’s also worth noting that in any tabletop RP that I get the chance to play with prehensile hair, I will do so without hesitation. It’s great.

Portrait I drew this afternoon. It started out as a warmup, but turned into a little exercise. When I draw, I'm usually very sketchy. When I want to do something with a little more finish, I do a moderately-sketchy drawing, and ink it as neatly as I'm able. It's a bad habit, and one I've been trying to correct for... well, years now. So I tried to get things as neat as I could reasonably manage.

Came out okay... better than my usual, at least. If I'd been sensible, I would have used something softer than an H2. 

This is Caleb, pilot of an interplanetary courier shuttle. It's a bit of a hotrod: all engines and reactor, minimal cargo and passenger capacity. His parents operate a large mining operation in an asteroid field but he wants to prove his competence before taking over the family business, so he's taking some time to make it on his own and earn a reputation. Fielders are big on that sort of thing.

I freakin' love Huskies. 

I just noticed that I forgot to add some black around his right eye. Blorg.

Online, Five By Five, Alive and Amplified

Well, I finally got my internet all hooked up at home. You know what that means?

We's gonna be Livestreamin's tonight! Probably 4 or 5 hours from now... That's gonna be around 6:30PM (Eastern Standard Time) for me, 5:30 for those of you in on the east coast of the US, 4:30 in the central US and Mexico, and 6:30AM for those of you in the middle of Russia or Indonesia.

Still taking suggestions/requests for what to do! I'm gonna be drawing stuff this afternoon and screwing around with it digitally for the Livestream... if you'd like to see something, now's the time to speak up. Ask and Submit buttons are right over, you know how to use 'em. I might take requests in the stream, but I'd rather do the drawing and inking on paper in advance (I have a webcam, so I may be able to stream some traditional work. I don't have any of it actually set up yet, tho, so that's speculative at this point).

One thing in particular: If anyone has B/W or grayscale lineart they'd like to see coloured and rendered, I'd totally be up for doing some of that.

At any rate... see you there!

Concept art for June and Jove, characters for a sci-fi comic. Same setting as James, but different storyline.

AI's use virtual appearances for things like video-calls and AR appearances. To make themselves instantly identifiable as AI's, but easy to relate to as people, they use appearances that are lifelike, yet unfeasible or "impossible."

The most standard element of this is to use a  hybrid of animal species for a base appearance: June's a combination of rat and eland, while Jove is a mix of cat and dog. June's rigid gauntlets and boots don't cover the joints (knees and elbows, that is), which is a normally an important consideration. Jove's spandex tights... well, most spacers in this setting wouldn't be caught dead wearing something so flamboyant.

These aren't quite final designs... I'm still deciding on how to mix the features. And I'll probably be giving June a tail.

I need to work on those horns, too.

Here we have two of Syzygys pals from way back in the war: Cerbearursus, the three headed Grizzly, and Russel, the black bull, who is not black in this image because inking and rendering digitally would be way too much work... there’s a story behind Russles name, which I may tell at some point or another. We’ll see. I’m pretty sure I could do a whole webcomic of just these guys and Syz sitting together around a campfire telling war stories.

Funfact; I scribbled each of these guys in like five/ten minutes apiece, if that, and have never been able to draw either of them ever again. I didn’t even have refs for bulls or bears at the time (and it shows). Sometimes, magic just sort of happens, all by itself,  somewhere between the page and the pencil, and you spend the rest of your life trying to recapture it. They’re far from flawless, but even so, I dunno... I just like how they came out.

These pics are particularly messy: construction lines all over the place... you can still see most of the box I used to block in Cerbear. See why I don’t normally post my pencil drawings?

A bunch of quick and loose drawings. I do these as warmups whenever I'm having a hard time getting started and when I need to play around with poses for comics. No refs, just a heap of sticks and spheres.

I can't remember how long it took to do them... maybe three minutes per figure, though I usually go back and spend a few minutes cleaning up the ones that I like.

Man, I've been neglecting my tumblr.

Not dead, just busy. I'm trying to get this comic thing started, which involves a lot of design and concept sketches. Which are messy. So, I'm filling out three pages of sketchbook a day, but very little of it is presentable.

...And drawing dodecahedrons. I'll post about that some other time.

Here's another charcoal thing, I love it. Windy oaks have got to be the very epitome of spooky trees. 

An Icosahedron. A while back, I figured out a nifty trick for drawing them at any angle whatsoever, and even in perspective.

Hatched it for penmanship practice. Nice little refresher exercise.