TEN YEARS OF DRAWING SCOOBY! A Milestone In My Life!

I had completely forgotten all about what day today was when I woke up! November 21st marks my 10th Anniversary of drawing Scooby and the Gang and so I burned out this piece of celebration art around lunch time and just finished it after I slapped some color on it! What a milestone I think it is to me. It's a chapter of my life and in today's world how many people can say that they've worked on something that long? Most people change jobs and careers so often nowadays that when someone celebrates a long stretch on something, I think it's to be celebrated.

I still remember doing my Scooby audition back in September of 1999 while I was sitting in my cubicle in the art department of The Franklin Mint! I used their library to help me in trying to do as great an audition as I could to win the work and they had the perfect reference books to help with my backgrounds so I could create a creepy mood. As it turns out, I did win out and in late November I was working on Scooby full time for the next year and a half, which was great since The Mint was laying off and would be closed a year or so later. Every year I do a certain amount of Scooby stuff and I've never really gotten tired of it since I've been lucky enough to have gotten to work on many other licenses in-between while I recharged my creative batteries and avoided any kind of creative burnout.

So all in all, it's been a great ten years and the Mystery Machine rolls on as I ride in the back with Shaggy and Scoob! Pass the Scooby Snacks!

SCOTTCAST - Episode 3!

Here is the third episode of ScottCast! In this 40 minute show, I talk about the standards for good character design and then I talk about and play a few audio treats to get your imagination working! Give it a listen!

ScottCast - Episode 3!

HAL & AL Back In COUNTRY WEEKLY!

The November 16th issue of Country Weekly Magazine is now out on the stands and Hal & Al are on page 25! We got a full page story on the Hal & Al Miracle League Benefit Concert that happened in September and this full page story marks our 4th time in CW this year! You can click on the pics to see the bigger version!

Even Monsters Need Love...

Something cute and fun...even Monsters have a heart! Burned this sketch out quick as I remember and it got used on a kids book last year. I threw some color on it to make it pop more.

HAL & AL "Baton Rouge Christmas Parade" Free Promo CD Art!

Here is the final artwork I just loaded up tonight to Oasis CD Manufacturing. This Hal & Al CD will be given out December 12 at the downtown Baton Rouge Christmas Parade as a free gift to the first 1,000 people there. It was all paid for by Hal & Al's sponsors and that's why it's all logoed up more than usual, including the CD itself! I reused a lot of art from previous stuff I've done to get it done quick since it was a free promo.

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Above is my original version of the art for the CD label but tonight in the 11th hour when I was going to upload it, I noticed that it was four colors instead of three! I forgot that white was a color as well! So I quickly opted to make the text black. I like the green on it since it broke it up more, so I'm posting it here so you can see it as well. Below will be the final manufactured version.

HAL & AL Benefit Concert "Thank You" Ad!

Here is the ad that was made after the Hal & Al Miracle League Benefit Concert that ran in two magazines as a 'Thank You' since it raised over $100,000 that night!

A Night With The King Of Rock And Roll!

As I was gathering images off one of my external hard drives to put on my new website, I came across this pic of Elvis that I digitally repainted over back in 2003. I wanted to test my Photoshop skills and the best way to do that is to do something harder than normal and so I scanned the cover of this LIFE magazine special featuring ELVIS at 450dpi and then digitally painted over all the text parts to make it look (hopefully) like the original unfettered picture of Elvis. There were some liberties taken with his shirt under where the ELVIS was written but I tried to get it as close as I could to what it looked like under the type. I didn't have a copy of the actual photo without all the text to see how accurate mine was, but I think I got it close. Some of the folds were hard to figure out how they went and it took some time to get it right, but I think this is one of my best digital repaints that I've ever done! Looking back I'm quite happy with the results. I remember it took me most of the night and it must have been around 4-5 hours total to get it as flawless as I could while keeping the pixel texture intact that was picked up in the scan.

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If anyone else would like the original cover to try their hand at repainting over it, I'll load it up and post a link for any brave souls or Photoshop Jedi who want to give it a try.