Sad Holiday, Part Two

Here's the finished version of Monday's post. I've had a terribly busy week; a week chock-full of misadventure, misfortune, anxiety and calamity. Due to these troubles I missed a couple of days at work and had very little time to complete this project.
...Fortunately, my deadline had a little wiggle room and I was able to get a few hours at the very end with which to tidy this up and make it presentable. It's not nearly what I had been hoping for in terms of craftsmanship, but-- to be honest-- that rarely is possible in my profession anyway.
...Jeez, am I whining today? I think this picture is making me sad.
...Created in Photoshop, with a touch of Illustrator for the patterns on a couple of the colorful papers the characters are set upon.

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The End 
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Sad Holiday, Part One

Here's my preliminary doodle for an illustration that will run on Wednesday. It is to accompany a story by Most Excellent writer Laura Casey about dealing with grief and loss over the holidays.
...For the initial concept, I thought "A collection of presents, all of them opened except for one." That seemed like a sorrowful idea to me. In order to inject a little more information and empathy into the thing I decided to use toys as the gifts, and have the gifts themselves emote and gather around the one unopened package.
...It probably won't be easy to read on its own, but buttressed by the story I think it might be pretty effective. Doodled in Photoshop!
...Final tomorrow!
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To Be Continued...

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L.L.A.P.

Here's a Preview cover I whipped up for work a couple of weeks ago.

...There were plenty of photos for the event, but they weren't quite right. I took a picture of my hand and did a quick trace/draw. I did a fairly careful painting of my hand and progressed about 1/5 of the way with that; then I decided it was ugly and opted to go with a more graphic treatment.
...I ran that crappy cutout filter on the original picture of my hand and used that as reference to paint from.
...There wasn't much time for this project and I responded to some quick art-direction by email over a weekend. Artist and page designer Jennifer Modenessi dropped in the text and made it look better than I thought it would.

Drawn in P-shop!

The End!

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What the...?

Again, it has been a long time since I've posted. Busy with my job, busy with my other job, busy with chores and busy with visitations.
...Here I am, trying to start this up again. Alas, I haven't done anything new except for a small collection of head drawings (surprise), but here's something a little different.

This is... well, I have to idea what this is. I did it-- years ago-- I kinda remember it, but I couldn't tell you why. It has to be one of my first digital paintings. There is a very transparent glazing building up of color and layers; something I was fascinated with when I began drawing on the computer. I don't see any textured brushes used here either, so this was done before that discovery, as well.
...No point to it, I'm guessing. It was probably just an exercise in painting with photoshop, back when it was new and exciting!

THE END!
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