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Category: Illustration

Character Design/Color Scheme

 It’s no secret that I’m a big nerd so of course it also shouldn’t be a surprise that I play D&D. It’s a ton of fun and it means I get to hang out with my closest friends at least once a week. The snack food doesn’t hurt the experience either.

 

After starting a new campaign, I finally built my own character from the ground up and now I have Baerdora (Baer for short) who is a dragonborne monk. He’s a lot of fun to play and, since I enjoy him so much, I thought it only appropriate to give my first created character his own, true design. I also took advantage of a wonderful tool at paletton.com to help decide his color scheme.

 

After I finished drawing his design, I chose the base tone for his scales and tossed in the RGB code into Paletton and clicked through my color scheme options, eventually settling on doing a triadic scheme. I had originally done quad, but I felt it was a bit too much for the few elements that would be used here. After settling in, it was easy to just export the color swatches into Clip Studio and go all out. In the end, I’m VERY happy with how he turned out and I can’t wait for next Saturday to give my punchy dragon boy more things to smack around.

‘Play the Dragon’ Cover Illustration


I was recently commissioned by my good friend Ryan Molina to do some illustration work for his upcoming book. This is actually the second book of his I’ve done art for and it’s always a blast to work with a fellow nerd.

Here, I’ve done an illustration of the iconic Dragon Ball protagonist Goku playing video games with himself – one adult, one child. I even snuck in a poster in the back of the cover of Ryan’s other book I got to work on.

You can find the book on Amazon and make sure to also check out the webpage for his whole group.

Trying SkillShare

I’ve wanted to try and expand my horizons and diversify my skills when it comes to design and I knew I couldn’t do it alone. So, I’ve decided to give SkillShare a try. SkillShare is a service where thousands of experts teach you almost anything under the sun – from motion graphics to sewing to, well, probably anything you can think of! So, I’m focusing on graphic design for now.

My first lesson was on fundamentals of design, layout, and using grids to direct the flow of design. Below are a few two page spreads that I assembled using what I learned through those lessons. They aren’t totally refined, but it was good to try something new and just get it out there.

Sticker Design Prompt

For a recent job application, I was asked to design stickers based off of two promts: “Thank you for making my party magical” and “Best Day Ever”. I put together a handful of different ideas using the required copy, some art assets I was given, and the option of making/creating my own assets to express the prompt. I had a lot of fun designing these which was a different experience than my recent works like character illustration and award design.

Zootopia-inspired Doodle

I was looking through a Zootopia art book and seeing all the little 2D sketches the animation team was going through, instructions on how to draw bodies and such and I wanted to give it a go myself. With lots of fun, smooth, curved lines it turned out drawing in this style was almost as entertaining as the movie itself. So, here’s a comic-book fox who can’t put down his phone.

Hijabi Hero

I was itching to do something fun and new in an illustration and, being a white guy, I generally stick to my defaults as an artist. So, I want to start branching out by drawing and designing characters who aren’t that sort of ‘default’ that people expect. And the result was this very neat and heroic Muslim woman sporting a very pretty almost lilac hijab.