#10things

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.

Some Things This Way Come…Soon.

*Sigh* I wasn’t that far into this post before I accidentally clicked outside of the text block window and lost all progress, but it was enough to be annoying. I have a real bad habit of accidentally clicking where I don’t mean to, or just a hair outside of where I’m trying to, which usually launches some app that takes 12 minutes to boot up and 22 minutes to fully shut down. That’s the kind of relationship technology and I have most of the time.

Anyway, the original intent of this post was to talk about my recent wool coat project: The Tabbard

WIP: 10 Things Status

Well, for anyone who isn’t aware, I’ve been participating in the Inktober challenge. It simply entails doing one ink drawing a day for the month of October with the goal of improving one’s inking skills and fostering good art habits (daily practice). It seems it has taken up most of my studio time these days, especially because I’ve had the problem of falling a day or several behind due to weekend commitments and life thingies. I am currently caught up, though, with 23 drawings in the tank. I’ve been posting them to my Facebook page (which you should

WIP: A Bunch of Stuff

Still crazy busy around here, but I’ve actually been somewhat productive in the studio. I’m still plugging away at the 10 Things project, currently working on this page:

Yes, I am “cheating” a bit by continuing to copy and paste that army, but I do want to finish this project in my lifetime. The real trick, and what I hope will bring some added entertainment, is on these combined pages I’m trying to show increasing levels of interaction between the various “things”. Every time something new is introduced, the previous “things” react to

Process GIF: 8 Brass Monkeys

I finished up another page from the 10 Things project:

Toby-Gray-8-brass-monkeys-GIF Oooh, shiny monkeys!

The pages that are just a single phrase are a tad quicker than the combined pages. The next page, obviously, is going to be: 1 hen, 2 ducks, 3 squawking geese, 4 limerick oysters, 5 corpulent porpoises, 6 pairs of Don Alverso’s tweezers, 7 THOUSAND Macedonians dressed in full battle array, and 8 brass monkeys from the ancient sacred crypts of Egypt. These last pages are going to be tough. And nuts. Definitely nuts. But in a good way.

I’m holding

WIP: 10 Things

Some time last week I finally dusted off the 10 Things file and got working on it again. I’m currently working on page…well, I don’t know which number it will be, I haven’t been keeping track. But, it has 1 hen, 2 ducks, 3 squawking geese, 4 limerick oysters, 5 corpulent porpoises, 6 pairs of Don Alverso’s Tweezers, and 7 THOUSAND Macedonians dressed in full battle array on it:

Toby-Gray-10-things-1-7-WIP These last pages are getting complicated…

I have corner registration marks roughed in on a separate layer still turned on here. They just give

Seven…thousand…flippin’…Macedonians…

Well, I think I’m going to call this page done for now, other than some tweaks I’ll do when I go back through all the pages of this children’s book…

Toby-Gray-7000-Macedonians-FW Please, no more Macedonians…

I don’t even know how many hours I put into this page, but it’s got to be close to the combined total for all the preceding pages, even with all the cut and paste “cheats” Photoshop affords me. For those who don’t remember, I’m trying to illustrate a children’s book based on The Announcer’s test, partially popularized by Jerry

One hen, two ducks, three squawking geese…

One of the projects I’ve been working on lately is actually a children’s book based on a memory tongue-twister I learned as a Boy Scout. Myself and a few other members of my troop started performing it at any and all campfires we participated in. Once my tenure as a scout wound down, I sort of forgot about it until my own sons joined scouts. At the first campfire I was asked to have my den participate in, I dusted this little “song” off (I did another slightly easier favorite with my den). The wackiness of the “lyrics” always appealed

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