#comics

Happy Mother’s Day, 2020!

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there. It is a very weird situation to try to celebrate the people in our lives that have played such vital roles during a pandemic when we can’t, or shouldn’t, be physically close. Whether it’s my own mother, my grandmother, my wife, my sister, my aunts…all the mothers in my life and my family have had a positive impact on my life, and it’s very fair to say I wouldn’t be here in one way or another without their love and support over the years. I love you all, and thank you.

Being

New Shirt Update: It’s Plunger Monkey Dynamo Time 2.0!

Hey, look at that! Another new shirt already! We are 3 months in to 2020 and I’m still on pace for my goal of 6 new shirts this year, so that’s good. I turned this one around relatively quickly (for me), but then again, it’s not a super complex image. Then again this is me we’re talking about, and I could very easily have spent another several weeks spinning my wheels, noodling around on details and variations and second guessing myself and never being ready to call this one “done”. I have found that generally I need to force myself

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

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

Make Mine Marvel

Well, true believers, I don’t have it in me to be particularly fun and witty right now. It wouldn’t be terribly appropriate, either.

I’m guessing if you’re a regular reader (all 2 of you) or if you’ve found your way here somehow, you probably know who Stan Lee is and undoubtedly heard about his passing on November 12, 2018. His is a name that can be placed on the same list of world renowned creators who have had a major impact not just on future generations of creators but on entire cultures alongside the likes of Walt Disney (and probably George

NEW SHIRT ALERT: The Steampunk Fish has arrived!

Check it out!

Everyone’s favorite flying steampunk fish!

I crafted this image in Clip Studio Paint, which, as I’ve said many times, I love using on my iPad. It worked great for designing this shirt, and when I sent it over to Photoshop to do some final tweaks (the logo, metadata, converting it for upload, mockups…) it held up perfectly (I was a little worried about how the process would work, but it was PSD to PSD, so I shouldn’t have worried. Then again, this is me and this IS technology…). I noodled away

Inside Toby’s Brain: MediBANG!

You thought I was going to forget to update the site this week, didn’t you? DIDN’T YOU!?

Me too. But I ‘membered.

I think this may be the last of the big catching up posts. About a year ago, when my Samsung tablet still had that new tablet smell, I was looking for the “perfect” drawing app to suit my needs (I’ve got several favorites, but the search will continue). I stumbled across the free app, Medibang Paint. It looked pretty robust, and it was free, but the interface was “weird”, so I set it aside and decided to focus on the

Gallery Update: I’m Baaaack

Hello! I’m back from my two weeks in the woods wrangling Cub and Boy Scouts! It was a great experience (and with the week at Cub Scout camp being my fifth and final, it was a bit emotional), but very draining. I’m still trying to get back into the swing of things and remember what the heck I was doing before I left. In the meantime, I thought it best to catch up on some posting while my brain sorts itself out.

Waaaaaaaay back at the end of June, my youngest son finished out his last days in our little elementary

Tablet Art: Smile For The Camera

Right. So, once again, there’s been a gap in posting. There’s been a gap in studioing, too (yes, I’m making that a verb). I had to spend a week performing my civic duty by serving on a jury in a particularly disturbing trial. If not for the subject matter, the whole experience was actually kind of interesting and rewarding. I have a new found understanding of and respect for the concept of a jury of one’s peers. I’m glad to be back in the studio, though.

The first tablet drawing I did (a few weeks ago, now), after finishing up that

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,

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