A couple of years ago, when Nizzibet and I were still sharing a house with Jason, and we still saw Emily and Marnie on a regular basis, we had the occasional meal together. On this occasion we started joking about what sorts of animals we were. We didn’t self identify, we picked out the animals that the other people were and then invented a combination. It was one of those you-had-to-be-there moments. I no longer remember which of us was supposed to be which animal combination. I do remember that Marnie didn’t care for the combination we’d chosen for her.

A month or so later I sketched out the animals with the intention of doing finished illustrations and giving them to Nizzie, Jasson, Emily and Marnie. But I never got around to finishing them. So here is the first of four.

Usually if I’m going to put a background on a drawing I have the background at least sketched out in the original piece. In the case of the Mutant Bug here I hadn’t even planned to color it when I drew it. I had no background in mind. But a background seems necessary for it to feel finished. The background here was done with Photoshop watercolor brushes and then run through a blur filter.

Next add color to the not so green areas of our Mutant Bug; in this case, the mouth and claws. Give the eyes reflective highlights while we’re at it.

Next I duplicate both the original color layer and the shadow layer, setting both to multiply. On the new color layer I erase out areas I want to have highlights. I use a filter blur on the new shadow layer so that the shadows don’t have such stark lines to them.

The shadow is added on a separate layer in Photoshop. The shadow is the same color as the bug. The layer is set on “multiply” so that the color combines with the layer below it.

As can be seen by the date on this illustration, I drew this critter recently. Over the next week I’ll post the stages of a process I used to color it. The beast itself was lurking in my imagination for a day or so before I had a free moment to capture it on paper. That often happens. Some creature or character keeps jumping in front of my mind’s eye until I finally sketch them out.

The t-shirts that I designed for the Black Seal are now available through Cafe Press. My designs are the Mandala and the King in Yellow. I don’t actually know who designed the Seal on the black t-shirt.

As can be seen by the date on this illustration, I drew this critter recently. Over the next week I’ll post the stages of a process I used to color it. The beast itself was lurking in my imagination for a day or so before I had a free moment to capture it on paper. That often happens. Some creature or character keeps jumping in front of my mind’s eye until I finally sketch them out.

This is the final sketch from the 1997 sketchbook. This guy looks like a character from The Cauldron, a cops-versus-magic series that I’ve tried to get off the ground a couple of times. Neither time was in ’97 so either he’s not the guy I’m thinking of or I did this sketch quite awhile after I’d filled the rest of the sketchbook. That happens. I’ll think I’ve filled a sketchbook, start working in another one and later discover a couple of blank pages in the older book.