#penandink

Gallery Update: The Moleskin Awakens!

Hi! Yes, I’m still alive. I don’t know why I need to keep reassuring everyone of that. Why is everyone expecting me to be dead? Maybe you just like the sense of elation you feel when you realize I’m still breathing and working towards my Artistic Destiny (TM)? Whatever it is, I’m still here.

Now that the kids are back in school and all on the same bus schedule (gone are the days of 3+ bus stops a day for me. I drop them off at the bus stop at 6:30am, they walk home after getting off the bus in the

Gallery Update: Let There Be Star Wars!

On December 15th, the wife and I decided to surprise the kids after school by taking them to the first pre-opening day showing of Rogue One (yes, I thought it was awesome. This is not news). For a while now, I’ve been thinking it would be fun to do some PMD illustrations outside of IPMDT to commemorate certain events or happenings. Star Wars Rogue One was the perfect event, given the overall significance of Star Wars in my creative life. I’ve always thought of Plunger Monkey as somewhat of my alter ego, a manifestation of some of the crazier parts

Insert Clever Title Here

Alright, trying to get back into some kind of productive nightly ritual and put my tablet to good use. I have several other post ideas, but I’m skipping over those to get to this one…I just can’t come up with a title…

I love working digitally, but I miss “traditional” media. It’s part of the reason I’ve been drawing It’s Plunger Monkey Dynamo Time! exclusively the old-fashioned way, then scanning, tweaking, and formating the panels into strips. I like the feel of pencil and ink on different textures of paper. I like erasing the pencil lines to fully reveal the crisp,

Gallery Update: Moleskin Madness! Part C-Bell Unleashed

Yeah, I’m loving having this tablet to sneak in some extra work on. Not as much drawing on it at night as I would like yet, a lot of learning curve stuff for file management and customization and such, but it’s great for updating this place.

Speaking of updating, I’ll give a quick rundown of what I’ve been working on before tackling the subject of this post. I didn’t get anything done on IPMDT! today. I made a requested tweak to my latest cover for one of L.S. Gagnon’s witch books, then I started working on the next one. It should

Gallery Update: Moleskin Madness! Part 2-The Camping Strikes Back

Yes, kiddos, this is indeed my THIRD post this week. Having this tablet allows me to putter away at things during times when I’d normally not be able to be very productive (though right now, given the time of day, I could be in my studio, but I’m still recovering from being sick, my foot hurts, and lounging on the couch with my leg up is much more appealing than being in my studio chair right now).

Alright, time for round two of the recent moleskin sketching bonanza. These sketches were done while I was at Camp Carpenter with my youngest (still

Gallery Update: Moleskin Madness! Part One-Enter the Random

Phew! I’m back! I managed to get quite a bit of drawing in during my two weeks at camp, thanks to my trusty moleskin sketchbook. However, I’m so behind on updating this site, that I still have some moleskin sketches from before I left to share. I don’t want to overload anyone with a super image intense post, so I’ll do this in three parts (all with snazzy titles). This particular post will contain the stuff from before camp, the second post will be from my first week of camp, and the third post will encompass my sketches from the

Life and Stuff…

Wow, it’s been quite a while, hasn’t it? There are lots of reasons for that. Summer vacation started, which means my studio hours get seriously truncated and interrupted. Two of my sons decided to have medical problems that required some surgery (one of them an emergency case, but both are fine and back to driving each other nuts). I finally got the help I needed to do some serious repairs to my barn. Basically: life. It’s a struggle not to get swept up in the frustration of not having enough studio time, let alone time to keep this website up

Gallery Update: Happy Day After Mother’s Day!

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there, particularly my own mother and my wife. You may recall the lengthy retrospective-type post I did last year of all my hand-drawn Mother’s Day cards that I’ve been making for my wife since our first child was born. Well, this is 2016’s:

Toby-Gray-MD-2016 Those are supposed to be stars spelling out “Happy Mother’s Day”, but I don’t think I went dark enough with the sky for it to “pop”.

All this drawing I’ve been doing since the Inktober challenge has really

Gallery Update: It’s Tick Season…Yay.

It’s been a little while since an update. I’ve been plenty busy both in the studio and out. I’m wrapping up the camp shirt design, I think I’m done with another project for my cousin (still waiting for final word), finally finished up a gift/project for my nephew that became more involved than I originally thought (I got carried away), as well as finished up yet another project (that I can’t post about until next week…you’ll know why when you see it), all while churning away on the comic strip. Outside of the studio, there’s been a few camping trips

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