Where the Adventure Guys Live

 Any excuse to draw a castle.

Adventure!

No real reason for this one. Just the sort of thing I draw when left to my own devices.

1000-lb Nothic

When your D&D group dispatches so many goblins that your allied Nothic overeats AND the DM's wife watches "1000 Lb. Sisters," you get this.

For those unfamiliar with the show, here's one of their promo pics:

And for those who don't play D&D, here's what a Nothic usually looks like:

Two things - Dungeons & Dragons and reality TV - that were never meant to be brought together, but I couldn't resist.

#dnd #dndmemes #dndart #dndbeyond #1000lbSisters #1000lbsisterstlc #TLC

Christmas Gnomes

I'm into both Christmas and gnomes, so this was the inevitable result. Merry Christmas and happy holidays everyone!

Poor Carl

I was carving a pumpkin, and it occurred to me what pumpkins would think of the whole thing. Didn't stop me from carving a bunch more, but it did bring this to mind.

Happy Halloween!

Dungeons & Dragons Zoom Background

 Been DM-ing a D&D game on Zoom, and each week I try and find a new background. And I figured, why not make my own? So here's what the gang will be seeing the next round.

If anyone wants to use this as a D&D background (or an office meeting, if you have a rather open-minded work environment) feel free to download and use!

TDAC - Food Geometry contest

This was my entry for the They Draw and Cook: Food Geometry design challenge. I had a lot of fun with this one, getting to combine both painting techniques and Celtic interlace, two of my favorite things. Aaaand it was one of the winners! It will be shown in an upcoming issue of UPPERCASE magazine.

Jingle Bell Rock

...beats Jingle Bell Scissors.

More Malawi!

Here's another one from the Malawi schoolbook "How Animals Move." The way I did these is that I did a tight pencil drawing, scanned it in, and cleaned it up. Then, so I'd have something to work with, I added flat color behind it:

My wife pointed out that the colors look very Dr. Seuss! That's why I chose this one to show the process.

Afterwards, I add all the details:

I'll be posting more of these soon. There were 7 books in all!

Malawi - 84 color pieces of art!

I recently finished up a series of drawings for schoolbooks in Malawi. An awesome project, and one that let me learn a lot about a country I did not know much about! But they were monster deadlines - there was basically 6 months of work due - in 2 months. Yep, 2 months. There were a few weeks there where all I did was draw and sleep (more of the former than the latter). But now that it's finished, I'm really happy I did it! It feels like a real accomplishment, and for a worthwhile project as well. 84 drawings - and that's not counting the 40 or so other drawings done in the same time period for other clients as well.

Here's one of them - fish swimming in Lake Malawi. I'll be posting more of these in the mear future!

Fishing

I based this drawing on a sketch I did while camping (same camping trip that I came up with the Hobbit Day idea. Did a lot of sketching that weekend!).

One evening we went down to the lake to go fishing, me with sketchbook in tow as well as tackle. At first, my daughter tried fishing. Then, she tried skipping rocks. THEN, she decided it was more fun to just take big rocks and hurl them into the water.

Surprisingly, we caught no fish that night.

Go Math Academy - Part 2

More Go Math Academy artwork, this time for the older grades. More down-to-earth, as it were (especially since the other screens for this level were in the clouds, and they wanted to keep them distinct). This was a definite challenge, in a great way. If you've seen the other work on the blog, you can tell I usually go for more a cartoony or children's book style. So this was a fantastic way to really get into more painterly, detailed art. I definitely will be bringing this type of sensibility to work in the future as well!

Go Math Academy - Part 1

Go Math Academy is an online math program for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, for kids up to grade 8, and I really enjoyed working on it! Here are some backgrounds I did for one of the lower grade programs. I always liked science fiction as a kid - if you had told me then that I would grow up to draw giant space stations as a job I would have been incredibly happy. Come to think of it, that was the case when I was working on it, even not knowing that as a kid!

Threadless contest - please vote!

Threadless is having a T-shirt contest for Monsters Inc. and Disney. This is my entry - if you like it, please go to http://beta.threadless.com/monstersinc/boo-23/ and vote. You'll have to sign up, if you haven't voted on Threadless before, but there's some really great art there so it's worth it just to browse. Any votes you could send my way would be greatly appreciated - thanks!