Tobywan

About Tobywan

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

Gallery Update: Baby’s Are Like Squids…

I’m finding it difficult to not spend all my studio time working on It’s Plunger Monkey Dynamo Time!, I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I’m making some progress towards some big goals/ambitions…but I’m completely not touching some others. Hrm. I need better time management skills, but that’s nothing new.

What is new (see what I did there?) is that my good friend and his wife are due to have their first child any time now. Obviously this called for the traditional, custom PMD card:

Toby-Gray-PMD-and-Squid-for-Aaron-and-Junko No, this

Gallery Update: Milk, A Body Good, It Does

Firstly, be sure to check out the latest installment of It’s Plunger Monkey Dynamo Time! if you didn’t already. I think I’m going to try to post new installments on Tuesdays and Fridays, we’ll see how long that keeps up, though. If I can’t stay far enough ahead, I may drop back to once a week.

Secondly, I didn’t spend time in the studio yesterday because I was volunteering at my youngest’s elementary school for Art Day. I helped run a few different stations that saw the kids producing different types of art, filling in where ever the staff needed me.

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It’s Plunger Monkey Dynamo Time!

I’ve been hinting at it for weeks now, but it’s finally up and running! The official It’s Plunger Monkey Dynamo Time! comic strip! I had no idea when I embarked on the Inktober challenge last year that it would eventually lead me to something that’s been a pipe dream clattering around my brain for years. One of the many reasons I had never featured PMD in his own comic of any type was that I was having a hard time nailing down his personality and how I wanted to “use” him. I had this vague sense of who he was,

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Gallery Update: Coco

I’m really not looking to go into the business of painting portraits of people’s late pets, but in the last year I’ve found myself doing just that 3 times (so far…everyone else’s pets had better stay healthy). I finally added the first two to the gallery, Quegan and Max, which I had somehow blogged about without adding them. Anyway, this is Coco, my author friend’s beloved puppy that passed away earlier in 2016 at 15ish years old, if memory serves me right (EDIT: memory serves me wrong, she was only 6). She

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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

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Gallery Update: Look! Up in the Sky! It’s a Bird! It’s a…Well, It Is a Bird…

It’s been far too long since I’ve updated the site (I hate how much I say that…I hate how much I say “I hate how much I say that” when referencing how long it’s been since I’ve updated the site, too). As usual: life. I have something biggish planned that is slowly in the works. I was close to having it ready last week, but ran into a hiccup. I’m excited about it, but y’all will just have to be excited about my vagueness…though if you’ve been paying attention to the tobysbrain facebook page, you’ve probably already got

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Gallery Update: Plunger Monkey in the Mail

The end of February isn’t too late to talk about last xmas, is it? Or the last five xmases? I’m still catching up on blog post ideas I had but didn’t have the studio time to put together. Anyway, at some point over the last several years, I started trying to personalize a few of the annual xmas card envelopes with some PMD themed randomness. I think I started out with just 3 recipients, but now I’m up to 6 or so. If I had the time (and the ideas), I would do it for everyone I send a card

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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

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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

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Gallery Update: Pet Portraits

Hey, another week, another update! Consistency!

I’m still trying to catch up on some of those blog post ideas I’ve mentioned several times now. I have a few more to go. I finished up a page in 10 Things and I was slowly trying to wrap my head around the next, very complex page when I got the go ahead to rework another project, which will tie me up for most of the week, I think. I’ve continued with the daily manga self-portraits. It’s getting tougher to come up with interesting expressions, but I’m still finding ways to have fun with

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