Jolly Old Saint Nicholas, lend your ear this way...

WELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL it's getting to that time of year again. One of my favorite seasons, I think only second to Easter. Or maybe tied with Easter.
And what with my parents singing secular Christmas songs in the kitchen, using YouTube as a karaoke machine, (we don't sing the religious ones 'till Advent starts, we're Catholic in case you haven't noticed, anyway) so I thought I would get into the holiday spirit and draw a picture of Jolly Old St. Nicholas.
At the First Council of Nicaea.

If that doesn't get you in the Holiday Spirit I don't know what will!

Varried Version of Rider Pride

and one lonely bomber fan. Also Erin's shirt is one of those "future Rider Fan" shirts. I did take some liberty with this picture. Namely we can't fit that many people on our couch, and there is no way in Hell very-pregnant-Erin would be sitting in the middle.

At the Doggie Spa

True Story.

Little Black Mouse

Just a little animation exercise.
I'm going to do more little exercises like this more often, including a few e-cards I'll probably send to a few family members.
And I dunno why the background in the still shot is pink, when it's supposed to be gray. Guess it was a rendering thing.

Characters

Continuing with the Sports boards, here we have the Hockey Player. It was obvious I wanted to incorporate ice in his design, but without making him look like The Iceman from X-men. (You now have the 90s cartoon theme from X-Men running through your head. Ha Ha) I also wanted to keep him a little 'Other Worldly' so I made what little skin you see on his face a bit pale and sickly and, of course, gave him the glowing eyes. The scarf-mask he's wearing is a bit hard to make out, but it's a skull mask. Again I left his jersey grey to be altered for different teams.

 

This next one is not one of the sports themed board characters. I designed this character with a rather intricate background in mind. I originally wanted the background to be an ocean with a lot of shark fins protruding from the surface a few sharks breaching the water, transitioning to a city with tall buildings and this character in the middle. Buuuuut, I kept over-thinking it, and I was losing the character in the background. So after much wailing and gnashing of teeth and trial after trial, I ended up making a brick background and the character crashing through the wall. Which in itself took forever since I drew and coloured the bricks individually, trying to mimic the texture of real brick walls. Completely forgetting there was a much easier way to accomplish that texture. Oh well. The REALLY annoying thing, is that as I type this, I have figured out a way that may have worked better for the design I originally had in mind. Rats. Enjoy this character. ENJOY IT!!!!

20 minute skull drawing.
This drawing always makes me laugh. I drew it for the background of a board which features a Skeleton character longboarding. It took me 20 minutes to draw the skull, and I forget how long to colour it. I then copy and pasted it multiple times for the background, and adjusted the sizes and layering. What makes me laugh, is that the company has used this skull for another board too. It's funny how I will pore myself into one design, like the shark, for hours and hours, growing more and more frustrated as I am unable to get the result I was going for, and then praying it will be accepted. And then my little 20 minute drawing will be used on 2 separate board designs. Frustratingly Hilarious.

Even More Designs

I was asked to do some sport themed boards for KickIt Longboards, but they didn't want the characters to be your typical athletes. Instead they wanted the designs to be more intimidating and only resembling human. For the basketball player I decided to make sure it had wispy wings and large teeth and canines. As I roughed it out, I added a tail to the creature since it was beginning to remind me of a bird of paradise. So it became the Basketball Player of Chaos instead. In the finished design, you don't really notice the tail since it is covered in shadow and obscured by a basketball hoop. Either way I'm glad I threw it in.

I left the jersey grey, and put it and the rags on separate layers on the photoshop file so that the colors could be changed to match different teams.
This turned out to be one of those drawings that you have an idea for, but you know its going to be a pain for colouring due to the details. The little wispy hairs took majority of the time in completing this design.

The Firey Football Fiend.
After giving wings to the basketball player, I found myself going for a sort of elemental theme for each sport. So for the football player I wanted to incorporate rocks some how, but I didn't want the rocks to be just rock shaped armor. So after some research on rock monsters, and a bunch of thumbnail sketches, I came up with this:

 

I'm rather pleased with how it turned out.

Longboard designs and charchters

This was the first design/character I was commissioned to do for KickIt Longboards. For those of you who don't live in Saskatchewan, or have few memories of your experience here, we get some intimidating looking clouds that slowly advance, and makes you wait for the destruction it wants to unleash. So it didn't take me too long to find a storm cloud I could reference for this design. I don't like storms, they keep me awake with a terrified dog for most of the evening and the really bad ones threaten to tear the roof off, or knock over the trees around you.But I do know quite a few people who love storms, quite like this little dude.

I didn't even notice until my brother pointed it out, but there is a face in the storm cloud. See if you notice it.


 When I make these designs, I usually draw them on paper first and go over the drawing with an India ink pen, then I colour them in photoshop. I have an old tablet, so I find I have more control drawing with the paper and the pen then I do with the stylus. But it tends to get a bit tricky trying to draw a background on paper that will fit a whole board. Luckily, I can rely on the Layout Design classes I took in college, that taught me how to draw backgrounds for camera pans, to create things like this:

And of course Character Design helps with things like this: