The Last Ninja Turtle

Been working away on commissions from the con and so I haven't had a ton of time to play in my sketchbook. That said, I took a trip down to Utah with my wife a few weeks ago, and while we were driving around I started musing about what the last story of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles would be like. At first I wondered who the last remaining turtle would be. It seemed obvious that it would be Leonardo, but that didn't appeal to me at all. A little more consideration and I realized that it had to be Raphael. Raphael who was always so full of vitriol and rage. I'd pick things up mid story, with Splinter assassinated by the Foot, and Donatello and Michaelangelo killed in battle. The ever present tension between Leonardo and Raphael would have died with their brothers, and they would be methodically working their way towards a final showdown with Shredder. And then Leo would fall. From there it'd be a lot of gory bloodshed as Raphael tore his way to the heart of the Foot clan, and finally ended Shredder.

Quick Study

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Req-A-Sketch

Holy crap is it hard to make something look big without throwing in a human body, or something recognizable from human culture (ie a building). Random organic/naturally occurring shapes just don't do the trick.

For those who may have missed it, this would be the Colossal Grey Terror. Here's the request:

Hi, I would like to request a sketch of a Magic card drawing.

The card details are as follows:
Name of card: The Colossal Grey Terror.
Cost: 4 colorless mana, 3 green mana, 1 white mana
Card type: Creature - Cat
Abilities: Reach, Forest-walk, Plains- walk, Mountain-walk,
place 9 regenerate counters on card when cast. Remove one after each regenerate.

Quote: "No tree can withstand the power of a cats sharpened claws" Power: 8/8 Thanks, Jenn

You'll note that I ignored the vast majority of the details here. It's something that I wrestled with for quite a while. When I first took a crack at it I spent over an hour trying to build the body of the card. Placing in mana symbols and endeavouring to make it look just like a real magic card. That was a giant pain in my ass. In the future I'll be enforcing my "sketched in an hour or less" rule, to ensure that I don't distract myself too much from other projects. Hopefully that will help push me to be faster so that I can get something like this done a couple days after getting the request, instead of several months later.

Up next is a 2 week vacation, so I won't be posting anything close to finished work until next month. That said, I'll be trying to blow through as many sketches as I can so check back to see what I've come up with.

PS, Big thanks to Jenn for being so insanely patient. I feel a little guilty about not delivering a finished piece given how long it's been, but I think it best to move on to other requests. Hopefully she'll give me another shot soon... I've got a lot a cat reference kicking around now and I'd hate for it to go to waste ;)

Conan

Trying to catch up on some of the sketches and such that I had planned to do in the past. I seemed to have skipped the colossal grey terror by accident (I'll get to it next!) and have landed in post apocalyptic Conan territory. Hope you like!

Angont

Ramping up for the con, and the con itself, has really pushed me into work mode as of late. Between that and all the positive feedback I've been receiving lately, I'm pretty jazzed to keep my nose to the grind stone and see what else I can do.

And so I'll be trying to catch up on the weekly creature designs over the next little while, as well as tackling several other projects. I'll try to keep you all up to date as I move forward. For now, the Angont!

 I've put together a loooong list of things I'd like to spend some time on (and yes, req-a-sketch is on there) so look forward to seeing a lot more from me in the near future. That said, I'll be reining myself in in terms of time spent on each piece. I found that I was losing hours and hours to what were supposed to be simple sketches, and it was becoming a problem. So for now I'll be trying to stick to the hour mark... ish.

Check back soon for my thoughts on the con.