Howland Illustration

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Woohoo! Angelica Jane vs. Cthulhu is done! Though I loved just having Cthulhu and the red sky and oily seas I love the finished painting even more. I'll probably do one of just Cthulhu, at some point, but he works best as a shadowy background figure here. A.J. is browsing through a book familiar to all who have seen Evil Dead and she looks pretty disgusted (and reasonably so) by what she's found. Hopefully she finds some way to put the 'ole Cthul-meister back to sleep in there, somewhere. Also a way to conjure up a boat of some kind.

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And as promised, more canine-related fun! Here's a new T-shirt to celebrate MechaWolf and Special Reserve Games working together. Special Reserve Games produces and distributes collectible video game editions in small batches and getting to help create these special editions is friggin' awesome! Their mascot/friend/spirit animal is Sarge, a giant and beautiful St. Bernard. So, for the shirt we've got a mecha wolf on one side and Sarge on the other. I created it in Adobe Illustrator and I'm really digging how it came out; I hope y'all do too. Take a look!

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Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn! You may remember I started this painting a 'lil while ago; I loved the background so much that I couldn't bring myself to paint over it until now. And now I'm glad I did! This is the next in the series of paintings featuring Angelica Jane vs. monsters and she may have bit off more than she can chew, this time. I still need to add some waves and of course A.J. herself, but I'm really happy with the progress. The runes on the obelisk took me the entire length of the movie "Deep Blue Sea", in case anyone was wondering.

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T-shirt is done, man! It's celebrating MechaWolf working with Utomik and it was wicked fun to work on. I've wanted to do a more detailed piece in Illustrator for a while so I really went to town with all the details and I love how it came out. Mechanized wolves and mushroom clouds just make for naturally great subjects and go together like post-apocalyptic peanut butter and charred chocolate. Or something like that, anyway.

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So I've been lucky enough to get to work on some promotional stuff for the upcoming open world martial-arts game "Absolver"! You run around fighting people and learning martial arts to fight people better and it looks awesome. It's sorta like a third-person Street Fighter game where you wander around instead of just being stuck on one street, I'll be doing a bunch of cool stuff for it, but first up is a hand-painted PS4 we're giving away! You also get the game for all the platforms it's available on, a badass wearable mask like the ones worn in the game, an artbook, some stickers and energy drinks! I'll be painting the PS4 next week and taking in-progress shots so you can see it coming together. If any of that sounds cool, you can enter the giveaway here - https://gleam.io/0BoIY/absolver-playstation-4-giveaway

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Alooooha! All sorts of cool stuff has been going on and I'm finally going to be able to share it. First up, we've got a Shadow Warrior 2 comic to go along with those scrolls that took over my life for a while. This first comic deals with the "sword" or "katana" scroll and there's one more after this. As an interesting note, the good folks at Special Reserve games did a poll on which of the four scrolls people wanted the most; "Sword" "Treasure" "Demon" or "Butt". Believe it or not, "Butt" ran away with 53% of the vote, which is pretty awesome. It would probably be my first choice, too.

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Up and at them! This heroic 'lil gal is Mards first dog, Speeko. She was dressed up as Super Dog for Halloween (Speeko, not Mardy) and saved many a day while melting a few hearts in the process (metaphorically speaking). This painting is based on one of the only surviving pics of the lovely lass and I started it as an example during a Paint-Your-Pet class. I spent some more time polishing her up at home and this weekend I finally added some glitter to the mask with spray adhesive for that final super-heroic touch. Arch-nemeses "The Trash Pandas" not pictured.

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Look! Up in the sky! It's some birds or some airplanes or some... *record scratch sound* ...jellyfish!? So the 2017 Plein Aire convention was a blast! It was great to paint alongside some incredibly talented artists and the folks at the Masterpiece Canvas booth were awesome. I picked up some new tricks, made some new friends and even got a free burger for lunch one day because of a restaurant error in my favor! I'm not too much of a landscape painter, so I used the beautiful sky during the convention as a backdrop for a significantly more mike-like composition involving flying jellyfish, as seen here. The canvas is 12" by 48" and it was a lot of fun to work in such different dimensions. I was originally gonna paint some squid but I've already done that so I settled on jellyfish as an alternative. They have all those cool tendrils and are so effortlessly floaty they seemed a natural (?) fit. That said, if you happen to see floating jellyfish drifting through the clouds you should probably stay away; they have a pretty nasty sting and are surprisingly feisty. Also, maybe check the expiration date on your meds.

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When I've idly daydreamed about having my own radio show (as we all do, right?) I've always imagined my moniker would be "Howlin' Mad Mike". Handily, it would also work if I was a fighter pilot in either of the World Wars. Since my chances of becoming a popular Top 40 D.J. are only slightly higher than my chance of being a hotshot fighter pilot in wars long gone, I've sorta (SORTA) come to terms with never being able to use that clearly awesome call-sign. Still, howling is in my blood, so when we decided to do another shirt for MechaWolf and to make it a riff off the infamous Three Wolf Moon shirt (look it up, it's glorious) I was happy to get cracking. Here's the tee in all it's glory, though we may make a few tweaks before printing it. I wanted to work on my vector art skillz so I sketched it out on paper and then popped it into Adobe Illustrator to create the final version. It's perfect for a big Friday night out and will no doubt impress the gender of your choice. Howl on my friends, and here's Howlin' Mad Mike, signing off!

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Bite the hand I fed you! Here's the next Game of Thrones sketch I'm doing. It's Jon Snow's direwolf, "Ghost", emerging from the shadows of the wierwood grove where Jon took his oath to join the Night's Watch. Ghost has the hand of a wight in his maw and when I read the scene this image sprung to mind and has been scrabbling to be let out, ever since. The limited color pallete was fun to work with and all that was needed for this particular image. Red and white for 98% of the composition and just a splash of blue to accentuate the other-worldliness of the wight's arm. I imagine there was a bit more room in the grove for oath-taking activities and such but luckily I picked up my artistic license the other day so I get to fudge these things a bit. Next up in the series, Tyrion or Viserys, but first, back to painting to prepare for the big Plein Air Convention & Expo, next week!

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(NSFW-ish)Wolves! And girls in bikinis! Always a good combo, and even vaguely fitting for a videogame/art collective/superteam named MechaWolf, which I'll be happily contributing to. This'll be a T-shirt/poster, though without the bra, which I added to not get Facebook's knickers in a bunch. I like how rough the wolf is and how solid the girl is, it's always fun to play with different styles thrown together. It makes for a certain visual excitement when done right, and a headachey mess when not done right. Hopefully this falls more to the latter than the former, but either way it was fun to create!

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Feeling cabin-fevery, I went to go have a beer at a bar yesterday and do a little sketching. Down the road from my new place is In Cahoots, which describes itself as a country dancehall/saloon and I like the thought of hanging out at a saloon so off I went! I was planning to draw Tyrion from Game of Thrones, but then I felt a little self-conscious, 'cause I had to sit at a table instead of the bar so I decided I better draw my surroundings (i know that doesn't make sense, I'm a wierdo). I had a great time and got some solid sketching in, even though everybody kept moving, which I guess is what I get for drawing at a dancehall. So here is In Cahoots, linedancers and all!

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"He (Ned) crossed the room, pulled back the heavy tapestries, and threw open the high narrow windows one by one, letting the night air into the chamber. The wind swirled around him as he stood facing the dark, naked and empty-handed. Catelyn pulled the furs to her chin and watched him." That there is a snippet from the passage in George R. R. Martin's first book in the Game of Thrones series that inspired this illustration. It's a great scene (that's just the start of it) and knowing what was in store for the characters made it even more powerful. I may color it at some point but I love the black and white so I'm gonna just jump into one of the next scenes that really spoke to me. I think it'll be one with a direwolf and some trees, but I also have one with Hodor, one with Daenerys and Viserys, and one with Tyrion, floating around in the back of my head. We'll see what happens; the Hodor one seems like it'll be really fun so that might jump ahead in the line...

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I feel like no matter which side of the wall you fall on, we can all agree Spicer has a pretty rough job. Whether this exact scene happened at any of the Capitol Hill bars, I can't say, but if I was a betting man, I probably put some money on it. Drink up, lil' buddy, drafts are only 4 bucks till 7!

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Happy St. Paddy's day! A great day to watch the entirety of the Leprechaun franchise and drink beer. I mean, really, any day's a great day for that, but it's nice do it while wearing green. So as you may or may not know, I've recently gotten a puppy. His name's Griffon, and he's adorbs, obvs. He also provides a lot of possible comic content, just by being himself. I've had this one rolling around in my head for a while, and I finally just had to put it on paper. I originally planned on making it really simple and cartoonish, but I just couldn't stop arting. So here's the first (and possibly only) Life With Griffon!

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And one lassst Christmas 2016 post! Noticing a complete lack of custom shoes in Mardy’s shoe bin (or stank box, as her friend Erin likes to call it), I took the season by the horns and decided to do something about it. So, I headed down to my local shoe emporium and bought a pair of white canvas Airwalk sneakers to start with. I taped the soles to prevent spillage (good painting starts with good prep!) and got to work painting the heck out of them. After drying, I gently scraped the excess off the eyelets and gave it all a quick protective spray to keep the colors bright, and voila! I love how they turned out and i’m happy to say they were a big hit. Reports are inconclusive on whether they make her go any faster, but her “cool footwear” numbers are through the roof! Obvs.

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Charisma! An undervalued attribute in RPGs, usually, but one I always like to pump up. The same way I need lockpicking skill to make sure i don't leave a single door unopened, I need a high charisma so I can ferret out every single dialogue option when chatting up a sexy NPC. That video game charm comes at a cost, though, and my fighting skills usually suffer. This generally makes talking my way out of a problem the only available solution and sometimes that can be problematic...