Corgi #2 at WonderCon 2015

February 18, 2015 in Comics, News, Animals

Get ready to stretch your stumps, wiggle your tailless butts, and iron your superhero capes, because Heavenly Kibble Guardian Corgi #2 is on its way! Here’s a nice splash page preview of the upcoming comic!

I’m bustin’ my behind on it, and am closing in on the finish line. Barring injury, death, or cupcakepocalypse, I’m aiming for release in time for WonderCon, April 3-5 2015 in Anaheim, California. I’m going to do the same thing this year that I did last year– and that’s that the first 50 copies will be signed and numbered for your collection-loving pleasure. So if you want one of those, you have to get your butt to Anaheim. WonderCon is a fun show, so don’t miss it!

2014 Year End Wrap-Up!

January 27, 2015 in Illustration, Animals, News

So... I know Christmas and New Years was a good month ago, but better late than never, I say! I had one heckuva set of Happy Holidays, and have been on the road since mid December. My nomadic tendencies aside, I've been working on quite a few projects that unfortunately I can't show yet. That doesn't mean I haven't been doing anything though!

Now that the holidays have passed I can show the fun corporate holiday card that I did for Kung Fu Monkey Productions here in Burbank, California. They're a fun bunch, and really let me have fun and do whatever I wanted with the material!

Then I was off to Georgia for Christmas, and Oregon for New Years where I received this truly amazing Christmas Sweater from my friends. They hand sewed all those little appliqué animals on there! They also don't really know how to sew. Blood was shed and friendships strained in the making of this sweater, but I love it and have been wearing it with glee.

That's all for now!

FoxDeploy.com Has some JoieArt On It!

December 10, 2014 in Illustration, Animals

Recently I completed another client job for the website FoxDeploy.com, a great blog about Powershell and other super high-tech programming things that I know absolutely nothing about. I know just enough coding to keep a website running, and that’s about it. The blog was celebrating its 100th post, and wanted a great banner image to go with it! And with a name like FoxDeploy, of course there were going to be foxes.

“Give me all the foxes” the client says to me cheerfully. “Lots of foxes, in fox-shaped hot air balloons!”

“Can I add confetti?” I ask, always wanting to shoehorn rainbows and glitter into my work.

“Foxes! And Balloons! And Confetti! YES!”

So congratulations to my client (and friend!) Stephen Owen of FoxDeploy.com, and here’s to another 10,000 posts on your blog!

Guardian Corgi Mini Comic

October 22, 2014 in Comics, Animals

I know I’m excited about Heavenly Kibble Guardian Corgi #2 being in production– are you? While you’re waiting, I decided to tide you over with these mini one-pager slice-of-life style comics featuring our favorite Corgi super hero! Here’s the first, and it’ll be available at DesignerCon next month!

A-paw-ture Science

October 01, 2014 in Illustration, Animals

“Spectacular. You appear to understand how a portal affects forward momentum, or to be more precise, how it does not. Momentum, a function of mass and velocity, is conserved between portals. In layman’s terms: speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out.” – GLaDOS

After my last Portal Corgi piece’s success, I really wanted to up the ante and do a version with the the “Chellsh” Corgi in the test chamber. I started this piece two years ago, but it kept getting forgotten or pushed to the back burner for various reasons. Hope you enjoy it!

"Atlantis" Process

April 02, 2014 in Illustration, Animals, Process

Who doesn’t like dolphins? As a kid, I was obsessed with Ecco the Dolphin. I played all three Genesis games in the series, the Dreamcast version, and even got into a fierce bidding war on Ebay for the original soundtrack. I once spent about five hours randomly punching letters into the passcode level select stage so that I could get past really difficult levels. Would you believe that over a year, I actually managed to hit enough combinations that I got every level in the game? I mean I finished the game the normal way as well… but yeah. I was obsesssed.

Many a dolphin drawing and Ecco fanfic came out of my overly excited, young self. My favorite book was A Circle in the Sea by Steve Senn, which is fins-down the best dolphin fiction I’ve ever read. I even wanted to be a dolphin when I grew up– the major hang up was that I’m not a very good swimmer, so there went that dream. Whoops.

So now that I’m a “grown-up” (sorta) I thought I’d use the 23 years of practice I have on my 6 year old self to make a cool dolphin environmental painting. One day on my lunch hour I started doing thumbnails and concept sketches to decide what I wanted to do. I decided I wanted to tell my head-canon version of the Lost City of Atlantis– a city that was built by undersea creatures as a refuge from humans. The idea is that humans were never involved in Atlantis and certainly aren’t welcome there. We, the viewer, have discovered it… but a dolphin guard isn’t happy that we’re here.

I wanted to design what a dolphin sentinel that protected the city would look like. If a dolphin wore armor, how would it work? Obviously it would need to be articulated to move properly with the way that dolphins swim. It would need to function as both armor and a weapon, without encumbering the animal too much. I decided that lightweight armor would serve a dolphin best, as they would likely be a type of soldier/guard that relied on speed and agility.

The sort of armor I came up with is relatively minimalist. It protects the animals back, head, and blowhole. The front is bent upward so that the dolphin’s echolocation is uninhibited. It has razor edges, so that the dolphin could sail by an enemy and cause damage without having to manipulate anything. The big weapon though, is the narwhal-inspired horn in the front. It’s a magical element, so not only is it useful for stabbing, but it magically makes the armor lighter overall.

The city itself has a lot of round shapes. If you’ve read the aforementioned A Circle in the Sea, you’ll know that in Senn’s world, everything is circular to a dolphin. The sun and moon run on a circular path, the tides and currents are circular, a pod is called a “Circle”, and… well, y’know, the Circle of Life. So I wanted a lot of circles and curves in my Atlantis because that book made such a HUGE impact on my young mind.

The painting itself took six months from inception to finish. Why? Not because it actually took me that long to plan and paint. I’d say that only took maybe 15 hours or so. It’s because I did all the concept art and planning and then straight up forgot about it! Err… oops. That’s ok though, because I just finished up an Environmental Painting class over at Studio Arts taught by super cool dude Alex Ruiz, and the stuff I learned in that class really helped me bring this painting to the level I wanted it to be!

a super sweet animated GIF I made of the painting’s progress. Watch it and say, “Ooooooo, technology!”

Heavenly Kibble Guardian Corgi

February 20, 2014 in Comics, Animals

Just a little comic I’ve been working on recently! Heavenly Kibble Guardian Corgi: What would you do if you woke up one day and your dog told you they were a magical soldier sent to defend the Earth from untold evil? Shenanigans to follow in this 10 page, full color comic coming soon. I’m really excited about this, and I hope you will be, too!