inktober Week 3

These were all done on vacation in Maui, amazing trip!

Inktober Week 2

Inktober 2014 - Week 1

Just missed Sunday cuz, well, you gotta go outside sometime! On to Week 2!

Recent Sketch Dailies

Here's a few things I've done recently for Sketch Dailies on Twitter - it's a community that throws out a daily topic that literally thousands of artists take part in. These ones were days when I needed to clear the cobwebs out of my head to focus better on things that I'd been working on. I wouldn't call these sketches really but more experimentations/exercises. The topics were "Three Blind Mice", "Jackalope" & "Selfie".

Seven of Seven Cover & Process

My old pal, Scott Ralph, contacted me recently and said something like this, "I'm writing 9 novellas that are going to combine together into one giant story, wanna do covers for all of them?" To be honest, I haven't read anything Scott's written in 15+ years when we were in art school together but he's always been a great storyteller so I said "Sure!" I was pleasantly surprised when this first book was so good that it had me on the edge of my seat the whole way through. I really love it and am so happy and proud to be a small part of the team putting this big story out into the world. Scott tells me that book 2 is shaping up as we speak and I'll be preparing to do the second cover very soon.

In the meantime you can buy the Kindle ebook of this on Amazon right now for 2 bucks (apparently you can download a Kindle app for Android, iOS and PC if you don't have an actual Kindle). After the jump, check out some of my initial thumbnails and rough sketches for the cover.

Swedish Chef & His Hot Dog!

 More Catch up posting! This was a Christmas gift watercolor painting for our good friends Clay & Elliwati Stricklin (and their wire-haired dachsund Nick!) Clay posted an awesome video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWB-EMCmrTo) a few Halloween's ago where he dressed as the Swedish Chef and threatened Nick with a short life as a hot dog - this painting was meant as a tribute to that. Check below for a photo of Nick and the initial thumbnail from a night where the idea struck and I scribbled it down without remembering what the Swedish Chef actually looks like.

Sneeze!

I've been pretty lax with this blog since, like a lot of people, I started using Tumblr (check out my Tumblr blog here: http://chrispurdin.tumblr.com/). I may switch over to that entirely at some point but, for now, I'm going to bring this one up to date over the next few days. Starting with this illustration I did for the SCBWI Tomie DePaola Award Contest - not a winner but I had fun making it. Check back tomorrow for what's next!

Holiday Original Art Sale!

These paintings that I've been doing for fun are starting to stack up, so I opened a store to cut 'em loose. All pieces are watercolor/ink on bristol board.

I have no real experience pricing original art so I bet you could talk me down on the prices if you tried!! Check it out here: www.chrispurdin.bigcartel.com.

eVault Ad & Goodbye Laika Friends!

 I was recently commissioned by fashionbuddha here in Portland to design, storyboard and animate this ad for eVault, a server company. It's a pretty fun campaign where they've asked a bunch of different animators (you can see all the spots here: http://www.evault.com/BestCase/) to animate in a wide variety of styles. I (you know, the guy who's trying to get a side career in children's books going?) was asked to animate the script that involved a, let's say risquee film cast and crew falling threw a ceiling onto a server. I thought it was a pretty funny concept and it was a lot of fun to bring to life - it's not often in animation where I'm asked to design things pretty close to my own personal style and that was also great. I also purchased Toon Boom Harmony (the software I've used at Laika for years) to complete this and it worked like a charm.

Which leads me to one other piece of business - I resigned from Laika recently and am currently swimming in the freelance pool. Send business my way! A huge thanks to everybody at Laika for the last 10 years, we've been through a lot and couldn't have done it without their support. I had so many great friends there and hope we can all keep in touch and continue to work together.

Plesiosaur Watercolor

Gus & I were drawing dinosaurs and I decided to paint this friendly fellow up.

Page 3 of My New Comic + Process

And here's page 3 of this as-yet untitled comic. At this point I think it would time shift to the beginning of the story to tell how we've gotten to this point...which I still have to figure out. I've written pages of stuff down but nothing in script form yet - I am getting kind of excited about it now and am thinking about how best to create & distribute. Anybody with experience/opinions on that kind of thing, I'd love to hear them - I'm thinking of trying to do it as a one-page-a-week web comic and see what comes of it.

The linework was drawn in Manga Studio 4EX and colorwork in Photoshop CS6. Here are some early thumbnails for this page (used legal paper and pencil!), followed by the roughs for anybody that's interested in seeing that kind of stuff:

Page 2 of My New Comic

So a long time ago I posted the first page of this comic here. I got busy with other stuff and wasn't really happy with how that page turned out, I left it to ruminate for awhile. So I flipped some stuff around and decided to try it out this way. I still have one more page in this little segment of a much larger story and I may take another left turn with that - these are sort of my process testers for when I go full bore into this. All feedback is welcome, after awhile it gets hard to tell what's working and what's not!

It Always Feels Like Somebody's Watching Meeeeee!

Been getting the comment lately that my style may be better suited to kids that are a little older, so I thought it might be fun to try out some black & white, chapter book style illustrations. Here's my first and it was really fun to do - excited to try some more.

Octopus Just Inkin'

This started out as a sketch I did in a meeting at work (see below after the jump) that I dug enough to do something with. I got the idea to try setting it up as a screenprint but then got carried away with color and texture - still tried to keep it simple with bold color. Still like the idea and may re-purpose it that way (would love to turn this into a band poster someday - bands? anybody?) Also like the barracudas in the sketch and may turn that into something too... Check out the sketch after the jump:

20,000 Leagues Under The Sea - Family Movie Night

Been awhile since I've posted a Family Movie Night piece, and this one's been in the works for awhile. Did The Black Stallion before it but not crazy about how it turned out. "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea" was one of my favorite movies as a kid and I was thrilled that Gus got just as into it - but c'mon, maybe the squid wanted to sing along too! Some process points after the jump: