#copicmarkers

Gallery Update: Animal Totem Cards

If you’ve been following me on The Facebooks, you know that a big event in the real world happened last week: namely my middle son and his den crossed over from Cub Scouts into Boy Scouts. I have very strong and fond memories of my own crossover, so as their den leader, I felt compelled to somehow connect my experience to theirs. One of the memorable parts of our Arrow of Light ceremony was that our Cub Master, dressed in full Native American regalia (which isn’t kosher these days for good reason), gave each of us an animal

Gallery Update: My Face x100!!!!

With all the ups and downs in studio time I experience, I’m pretty happy to have pumped out the 100th cartoon self portrait. I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable drawing myself without picture reference and I’m much more willing to push expressions to their extremes without crossing that undefined “realism” line. Now that I have 100 under my belt, I’ll be looking to change things up a little. I haven’t figured out how, yet, but I think this milestone is a good point for it, whatever it will be. I’ll still continue doing the daily self-portraits, they have become a

Gallery Update: 80 Shades of (Toby) Gray…

If you’ve been following me on the Book of Faces, then you know I’m still chugging away on the whole manga self-portrait thing. My style has been developing, and I’m quite pleased with several of the drawings, but I don’t think I’m producing consistent enough images yet. I’m getting a little too caught up in the abstraction of the linemaking (something I’ve always loved) and often forgetting to pay attention to the underlying anatomy. I’ll get there, though. Here are the next 32 portraits, collage-style.

Manga-style self-portrait practice #56 is NOT supposed to

Gallery Update: A Recent Exploit of Plunger Monkey

Alright, time to do a little posting catch up from December-ish 2015…

As a select, special few of you know first hand, when something positive and worth celebrating happens to someone I care about, I tend to take the opportunity to craft them a custom Plunger Monkey card to commemorate the event and express my congratulations and shared joy. Graduations, weddings, births, those kinds of things just scream for Plunger Monkey’s perspective or reaction.

Back in December, my childhood friend, Aaron, tied the knot with the love of his life, Junko. They are two wonderful people and I’m very happy that they

Inktober 2015 Recap

Now that we’re half way through November, I’m finally getting around to doing a recap of my first Inktober. In case you missed it, Inktober is an annual challenge started by artist Jake Parker. The goal is to do one ink drawing every day for the month of October (or as many as you can manage) in order to improve your skills with ink as well as foster the good art habit of daily practice. When I decided to take up the challenge, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to do a drawing every few days, much less every

Stuff and Things

Well, this is by far the longest I’ve gone between site updates since before I started this website (think about that a moment…). Where the heck have I been? What have I been up to? Why is the typical Monday update happening on a Thursday? Why are squids?

Please, hold all your questions until the end, but since you asked:

  1. It’s been summer vacation, which means my studio time has been sporadic to non-existent whilst the kids are home, running amok.
  2. I’ve been being the stay-at-home dad, dealing with fights, bickering, complaints, etc. But we’ve also manage to have a lot of fun,

Sketch Book: Polar Chimera

(Yes, that’s yet another “new” logo/variation…I can’t stop!)

So I’ve had griffons and chimeras on the brain lately. I’m not positive what started it specifically, other than seeing some beautiful artistic interpretations while browsing through Pinterest looking for visual inspiration. One artist, who goes by RobtheDoodler on deviantart.com , did some wonderful owl cat griffon drawings that really got my brain spinning (go check out the series of drawings he did of his critter, they’re awesome!). What would various griffons look like with different combinations of birds and cats? Why not different sizes? What about other mixes of animals?

Gallery Update: Happy Graduation, “Jack”! (and some other stuff)

Hey, maybe I’m back on track with site updates! Of course, this is the last week of school for my kids, so who knows what next week will bring.

Anyway, I’m powering through a headache to bring you this:

Toby-Gray-PMD-David-graduation Better take the warning seriously…

Hopefully this arrived in time for his college graduation party yesterday, otherwise…oops. One of my cousins, who really shouldn’t be old enough because time shouldn’t be moving forward, graduated from college recently. His family threw him a party yesterday, but, being 2+ hours away and busy, we weren’t able to

Gallery Update: Sketches, Random Doodle-age and Some Stuff

I got to do a bit of non-digital drawing this weekend, which is always nice. I’ve been wanting to get outside to do some drawing again, and I finally had an opportunity/excuse. My generous and awesome wife took the kids to a local park while I did some chores before meeting up with them and their friends. Once I got there, they ended up taking off to sell some popcorn for Cub Scouts for a short while, leaving me at the park with my sketch book, pens, and markers. It was really nice to just sit, observe, and draw. I

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