Webcomics, Orcs and Help the Hersheys!

Blog folks! How have you been? The year is almost up and things are going as well as I could hope. If you haven't seen yet, I started a webcomic a few weeks ago.
Head over to ImaginaryMonsters.com to check it out. The story is full swing featuring the adventures and mishaps of a disembodied slimy skull, and his necromancer and wizardly friends. Let me know what you think! It's been a lot of fun so far. I'm going to be keeping this blog active to discuss work/process/news (like usual) and ImaginaryMonsters.com will be more focused on my comics, and other things I make like books and posters. So stay tuned.

I'm getting super stoked for this January to arrive since Mike and Raina will be moving to R-Town. We're going to set up some shared basement screenprinting space and I'll be able to make some new killer screen printed oddities. Stay tuned for Eat World 2, some collaborative projects between Mike Turzanski, Tom Smolenski, and I, and who knows what else! I think we don't have any shows until next spring (MoCCA and Buffalo Small Press Book Fair), so we'll have some time to cook up a stack of awesome stuff for 2010.

Here's some recent work in progress for an Empty Room Studios concept art project focused on orcs. I've been making some big bruiser orcs to start with.




In other Empty Room Studios news, lately Rick and his family have been having a rough time making ends meet. Rocky Dohmen set up a blog to spread the word and hopefully help out Rick and his family. Please go check out helpthehersheys.blogspot.com/. I know the economy and the health care system has been rough a lot of us, but it is the holidays and if you can spare some support I encourage you to do so.

Stay warm everybody. The snow is coming down...

ArtOrder: Catastrophic Dragon (Earthquake)

Whoah! Dragon time. I've been trying to work on some environments in my downtime lately and yesterday I started getting really antsy. Environments are challenging to me since I usually draw things with legs and faces, so I decided to take a quick creature break. How convenient then that Jon Schindehette made this week's ArtOrder topic a dragon challenge! The topic this week was to create a catastrophic dragon...it's a new dragon subtype they're trying out that is sort of a container or carapace holding back elemental fury. The natural force for the topic is "earthquake". I thought about it and a really earth ripping earthquake would probably spill out magma like crazy. It's insides is a burning hot tumble of rocks, gems, and magma, while it's outside is like a rough and cragged hillside. It's body is almost composed like earth strata.

O.K. Dragon break is over, time to get back to drawing places.

Environment thumbnails 2

More thumbnails. I decided to shelve the creeper castle one for now in favor of something different. Most of my horizon lines were safe and in the middle before, so I wanted to try some more extreme angles (birds eye, worms eye...high and low vantage points). The upper left one in this new batch has me really excited so that's where I'm headed next.

Environments: Cradle of Life in progress

Here's as far as I got today. I'm calling this one Cradle of Life, depicting a tree / oasis in the middle of an arid desert. I'm going to try working in some birds and little critters flying / crawling around the place.

I sort of feel like it's not totally an environment piece but a design for this tree, but it's got me working on stuff that's not character / creature related for now. Gotta start somewhere!

After doing this image which is turning out to be very optimistic like I'm probably going to want to do the skull and spine castle...

Is that Bambi over there behind that root?!