Illustrations and picture making by Samala.
It’s been awhile.
Here we have Portland City Commissioner Steve Novick, whose Twitter slogan is “Commissioner with a hard left hook.” I don’t follow politics, but I think he’s kind of amazing.
Whippet good.
Ode to Summer Being Nearly Over.
I had some time during a webinar at work today to doodle and ended up doing a little self-portrait for a new Facebook profile image. Two of the DJs at work fell in love with it and asked for their own.
I recently joined Reddit (woohoo, time waster!) and discovered a subreddit in which people around the world post photos in the hopes that one of the artists in the community will draw them. It’s a surprisingly good drawing prompt. I wish people posted more pet pictures though.
I had the most fun job ever land on my desk the other day: designing new staff t-shirts for the rock radio broadcasting station I work for. The directive? “Do what you think would look cool and we’ll go from there.” I’ve always loved iconography, so I whipped out some sketches to vectorize in Illustrator. I knew this was a laborious process, so I started to play around with the program (I haven’t used it since school, which was a few versions ago) and had a glorious epiphany. Illustrator CC has a grown-up version of the infamous ‘live trace’ tool. It’s basically a two-click process that allowed me to finish a day-long process in a matter of minutes. I’m satisfied with the product and I learned something new along the way. Color me tickled.
I’ve been working a lot in watercolor since my GMac died last spring. I found myself getting a little bored with it, so I decided to explore the drawing app ArtStudio on my iPad. I’ve owned it forever and never did anything serious with it. I took a photo and opened it in the app, which does almost everything that I use Photoshop for. I have a $10 stylus that I picked up at Walgreens, and I just dug in. I’m pretty impressed with the software. The tools are intuitive, and I like that you can rotate your drawing just like a sketchbook. This is just a work in progress that I’ll be playing with for awhile, but it’s been fun to get back into digital painting.
Some more fun character portraits from Armageddon MUD. We have one wind magicker, and one dwarven badass mama.
This is a piece I started right after Christmas and finally finished for Good PDX’s upcoming anatomy-themed group show.
Two of my sisters are getting married this summer, and my twin has involved me heavily in the graphic design for her invitations and wedding information website. She’s planning on an all-weekend throw-down badass camp-out wedding in the woods, and she asked me to draw some pictures illustrating the dress-up theme for each day of theweekend. Here we have Happy Camper day, Crazy Hat day, and Solid Color day.
