Tobywan

About Tobywan

My brain makes me draw stuff that isn't there, and this is where I put it.

Year End Review

As I currently type, we are being smacked with a snow/ice/sleet/thunderstorm. Hopefully the power stays on long enough for me to finish this and get it posted.

2019 has simultaneously felt incredibly long and stupidly short (like, really? There’s only one more day left of 2019?). Before I get into everything that did (and didn’t) happen this year, who wants to check out the annual xmas card envelope art? Anyone?

Your opinion is irrelevant, because I’m going to show them anyway.

This was the first envelope I drew in 2019, and it went

Inktober 2019: Now With 100% More Plungers!

I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to do Inktober at all this year. I’ve had too many other things on my mind, too many other projects and outside “real life” stuff vying for my attention. I figured I had to at least give it a shot, though, and if I was going to bother, I needed to come up with something to make it even more interesting for myself. That’s when I decided to incorporate PMD. I fell way behind right out of the gate, but the first several prompts inspired some pretty clear images for

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Enter the (Forest) Dragon

I’m pretty proud of that title…cuz, like Bruce Lee…Enter the Dragon was a Bruce Lee movie…my wife’s name is Lee…I’m a big Bruce Lee fan…I’m a big fan of my wife…it’s allllll connected.

Anyway, it’s September, so that means it’s time once again for another annual tradition I started (this being the fourth year): drawing a dragon for my dragon-loving wife for her birthday. I do these in Procreate on my iPad Pro to take advantage of the time lapse feature, but the fact that I use it so infrequently leads to problems for me. I have to relearn how to

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STOP! Moleskin Time.

Hey, look at that. I posted last week and said I would post this week, and here I am doing what I said I was going to do. Time to post the annual summer camp moleskin sketches.

As I mentioned last week, summer camp this year was an emotionally challenging one for me. It is the first year since I became a leader and started attending summer camp that my middle son did not camp. My oldest son has always been more on the extroverted side with plenty of self-confidence when it’s needed. He was the one who wanted to join

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Obsession, Compulsion, and a Hobby.

So. This is my first post in how long? I have no idea where the summer has gone.

That’s a lie. Time passes as it always does, and I continue to be oblivious to it’s passage until a big enough chunk of it to be noticed has slipped away. I also am aware of the things I’ve been doing or otherwise occupied by that have used up that time.

Today is another day in a long line of days like today: too many things I want to do, too many things I need to

An Age-Old Question: Chicken-Squid or Squid-Chicken

Well, which is it?
This began as a sketch in Affinity Designer on my iPad so I could experiment with some of it’s features I downloaded it for (like mesh transform and texture maps). I never got around to that as this sketch took on a life of it’s own. I switched over to Affinity Designer to turn this into a complete vector image. It was incredibly time consuming, but I love the crisp edges and lines that come with vectors. And as is normal for me, I put a

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Happy Mother’s Day 2019!

Here it is, the 2019 Mother’s Day card for my awesome wife!

Another year, another card for my wife on Mother’s Day. The dragon/kids keep growing. It’s always a challenge to come up with a new image, as I usually try to have it reference something we’ve done of note over the past year. It’s tough when the things of note are often the same, like hikes we’ve taken. We certainly try to hike a lot, so reflecting that is fine. It’s just coming up with scenes and compositions that aren’t

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New Shirt Friday: 10 Things for Your Torso!

It’s New Shirt Friday time! As promised, here’s the much anticipated (well, not really) 10 Things shirt!

I wish I could say I came up with this design idea myself, but it was my middle son that inspired this. I was going through a gazillion variations for a 10 Things shirt when my son peered over my shoulder at my iPad and said “Oh, I thought you were going to do each page in a grid”, similar to the Faces/Emotions of Vader (or Chewbacca) shirts (I have them both). It’s brilliant.

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New Shirt Friday: 100% Plunger Monkey Approved!

You know, I should have titled all these weekly posts as New Shirt Friday: (insert appropriate and/or witty subtitle). Oh well.

Anytacos, it’s New Shirt Friday again!

I like the badge/stamp motif. I came up with several variations of this particular design (not uncommon for me) and struggled to chose one to go with. The others will likely get a few tweaks and be available at some point. Maybe I’ll do a new 100% Plunger Monkey Approved shirt every year or something. It’s a simple, clean design and I like it. I had wanted

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New Shirt Alert: Eye of the Tiger 2.0

It’s later than I’d like, but it’s still New Shirt Friday! Despite the kids being home for April vacation this week, I’m still hitting my weekly goal, which feels good. I spent a lot of time this week tinkering with a whole variety of different shirt ideas in between life and parenting interruptions. I was mostly done with this week’s shirt design earlier in the week, but I made a few tweaks all the way up until listing it moments ago (partially because I forgot to do a few steps). After working on the image intently for a few days,

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