More SCOOBY sketches!

Here are some old prelim sketches for Scooby I did I guess about 4 or 5 years ago. The one with the fish though is from the year 2000. I lose track of some things as I don't date the art after I do it. I don't know why I don't date it, I just never thought about doing it though I may regret it as I get older and can't remember the little things. These first two were done with a black colored pencil and and the last two were with a regular No.2 school pencil.

More GRIM ADVENTURES OF BILLY AND MANDY!

Here's some more sketches for Grim Adventures. Enjoy!

THE GRIM ADVENTURES OF BILLY & MANDY!

Here's some sketches for The Grim Adventues of Billy & Mandy. It's a smartly well-written show and I can highly recommend getting the first season on DVD. It was written for two audiences: adults and kids, and there are things that will make an adult chuckle while a kid will miss it altogether. I have had parents tell me that they don't let their little ones watch it though since it is edgier than the other cartoons on Cartoon Network around that time slot.

The Grim Reaper is my favorite of this series and he's a very simple design. As I posted before, the simplier the design the better the results. The more detail a character has, the more time it takes to draw it out many times over for a job. You have to design your characters so that you can draw them over and over without getting bored of them. That's a great sign if your design is working. I'll post more Grim art tomorrow!

More COURAGE!

Here are some more sketches for Courage The Cowardly Dog! The top one is from a prelim I did for the comic story I drew featuring that crazy, fear-filled, tentacled, little alien. It was a great story, and was my favorite thing I did with Courage because he met someone who was as scared as he was! The others were prelims for ideas I had for stories. I always had a problem doing Muriel and Courage together and getting their proportions right. It took me a while to get it down. Courage is a small dog so it's sometimes hard to match him up correctly with the other characters.

New HAL & AL Billboard in Baton Rouge, LA!

Here's the new Hal & Al billboard that's hanging up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana! I did the art for it about a month or so ago and now it's finally up! I did three designs total. This one and there are two for digital billboards that I did. This Hal & Al billboard is looking over the I-10/I-12 highway. For those who are down south you can check it out. My pal and co-hort Scott Innes sent me the photo of it tonight. We've had billboards up year round for the last two years to advertise the characters and TV Show.

And here's the art as I prepared it. Done all in Photoshop. There is a new Cox TV logo now, but that will be on the next billboards since they got it to us after our deadline with Lamar Graphics.

COURAGE THE COWARDLY DOG!

Here are some sketches of Courage The Cowardly Dog. I had a lot of fun with Courage over the years drawing him. I drew him off and on over the course of about 3 or 4 years. He's a nicely-designed character that is based on a simple lima bean shape. Very stylized with his paws and body detail made him easy to draw fast and I'm assuming to get animated overseas. You never know what you'll get back since the main production work for 90% of cartoons are done over in Honk Kong or wherever so the simplier your character, the better the results.

I still get a LOT of kids who LOVE Courage and always ask me what happened to the cartoon. Simply, he ran his course and he's been phased now out to make room for a new series of something else. You may still be able to catch reruns of the cartoon on Cartoon Network. They made 52 episodes total and it's a decent, well-written show. He had a great run of short stories in the comics as well. As for these sketches I posted, I do sometimes draw with a colored pencil instead of a normal lead one just to change it up and keep sketching fun. I'll post more tomorrow!

More SCOOBY!

Here are some more Scooby sketches. I like the first one a lot. It was drawn with a black Crayola crayon. I did the 2nd one that way as well. It's always cool to try new stuff to sketch with to keep it fresh. The third Scooby was a prelim for how Scooby would look in his Hawaiian Hula Dance look. It's got a lot of motion and a feeling of fun to it that I like. Then there are two of Daphne and Velma.




The Velma one was for a coloring book maze. I did the actual art at letterhead sized paper, but the final art was reduced down to around an inch and a half to fit a maze. This sketch is around...hmmm.....7 or 8 years old now. How the time flies!

VAMPIRELLA, LADY DEATH & DEATH! - The Bad Girls!

Vampirella, Lady Death and Death pin up pieces. I am posting these cutesy bad girls in honor of selling the original color art for the Vampirella piece at Wizard World Philly two weeks ago! All three of these were done in the 1996/97 as a pitch for a pin up in their respective books. Sadly, though they were appreciated and loved a lot, their respective publishers felt they wanted to stay with their more realistic versions. I think they rock the way I drew them, so now you get to see them as well...Hard to believe they're over 10 years old! They were colored with markers, pastels, white paint for the misty look and some color pencil. Ah, the days before digital art! I still love the Vampirella one!

YOGI BEAR!

Hey there, it's Yogi Bear! Here's a couple of pics I drew of the "smarter than the average bear" on copy paper. Yogi's always been one of my favorite Hanna-Barbera characters and I have quite a few plush dolls, toys, and board games and comics featuring him that I've collected over the years. Unfortunately, they don't do much new licensing with the character so it's kind of a shame there's no work available. They more or less use the art they did many years ago and just keep reprinting it since I think the corporate end feels that these characters aren't known to younger kids like the newer shows that are on Cartoon Network. How many kids have the Boomerang channel? The same goes for pretty much all the rest of the Hanna-Barbera line except for Scooby, which they always create new stuff for. Kind of a shame that Yogi, Atom Ant, Quick Draw McGraw, and the Flintstones have faded away since the writing for ALL these old properties was WAY BETTER than the shows that are on today. Enjoy Yogi before he gets your picnic basket!

SMURFS!

Here come the Smurfs! I did these back in 2000/01 in Adobe Illustrator for fun inbetween Scooby work and have tried to use them as samples for getting potential Smurf work over the years. I had designed the first two as book covers so they are cropped quite a bit here to make them more of a single image with not much dead space. Maybe that future work will come to fruition when the CGI animated movie comes out next year...

VELMA & SCOOBY-DOO! - Rough Sketches

It's Velma & Scooby-Doo! Two more rough sketches I drew. The second has a cool Velma searching for clues look to it. Inked fast again with a Pitt Brush Marker.

Sexy Dress DAPHNE & Hawaiian Vacation VELMA - Rough Prelim Sketches

Here are two older drawings of Daphne and Velma from Scooby-Doo that I did for two projects. I worked out their costume designs on paper first before I did the actual book to get the right look that I wanted for the projects...

SCOOBY-DOO & SHAGGY TOO! - Rough Sketches

ZOINKS! It's Scooby and Shaggy! Drawn on letter-size copy paper with pencil and then inked fast with a Pitt Brush Marker. I starting to do some new Scooby work so I was getting back into the groove of it with these. I also sometimes use these sketches in the final work (whether it's for a comic book, product, etc.) if I like the designs or emotions the characters have. If I think I can use it, I'll lightbox it to a new sheet of paper and clean and tighten it up as I go. Waste not, want not. There are many times when I'll grab a cheap piece of paper and work the drawing out and then refit it to how I want it to look as a final piece of art.

Wizard World Philly and What Else Is Going On With Scott...?

Last weekend I went to Wizard World Philly and I had a table in 'Artist Alley' for three days next to my artist friends Mike Manley and Scott Cohn. Due to foot problems I was not there on Friday but I heard that it was dead so I don't miss missing the lost day. The show as a whole has gone downwards in terms of the number of people attending and the lack of kids in general who were there and were comic fans. I've done the convention every year since they started and every year it's worse. The only reason I still do the show is because I have certain fans who buy original art from me at the show every year so I feel compelled to do it. This year was the worse financially. If it wasn't for two original art buyers who made the show for me, I'd probably be crying. Haha!

The state of the comic industry is in trouble and needs new younger blood to sustain it. This is why I'm glad I do licensing art and comics is just 10% of my yearly income. These shows while fun to see my artist friends whom I don't see that often are great to go to and hang out at, but I go primarily to make money as a pro by doing sketches and selling books or other products I've worked on. It was just a weird vibe for the whole show this time. Everything was off. I only did 5 sketches total for people (I did much more last year) and sold a ton of comics. I had sold out of Strawberry Shortcake product in about 4 hours early Saturday morning, which has NEVER happened. I mean every storybook and coloring book went. Every show I go to has something different about it and what moves faster over something else so it's always hard to figure out what to bring.

I only do two shows a year and that's Wizard Philly (cause it's practically in my backyard and the cheapest show to do in terms of overhead expenses) and the Baltimore Comic Con which is run by my friend and super, big comic fan Marc Nathan. Baltimore though is a lot like Wizard Philly now in that it's more of a one day show really. The second day (Sunday) is usually always poor in sales. Baltimore does have a great artist list and it's one of the premiere shows that feature comics and their creators. Heroes Con does a great show too and is a pure comic show. I would recommend going to both if you are a comics fan.

In other news with me, I posted a new Alfie comic strip a few days ago and finished up the new June issue of DCM Magazine which went to press on late Tuesday afternoon and I got copies of the printed mag today.

As for other work, I have more Power Rangers I'm working on and two Scooby comic scripts for DC Comics I have hanging up to do as well. So it's busy work wise.

I'll also be doing a tutorial for 'how to digitally ink' for Mike Manley's DRAW! Magazine as well. I've had many people ask me how to ink digitally so a tutorial is the best thing I could think of to show fellow artists and fans how I do it. More on that as I post later.

Other than that, it's been a low key week after Wizard Philly and I've been enjoying the weather, taking it easy and enjoying life. As Ferris Bueller once said, "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."