Stepping Stones

Apprentice frogkeeper, plant enthusiast, and connoisseur of eclectic facts; currently a freelance illustrator and ardently NoAI.

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Fat fish done in Procreate. 

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Two pieces done for Star Wars: Card Trader by Topps!

If you're a collectable card person (and like Star Wars), this Topps app pretty generous about trading and free stuff — and the community is pretty active — so if you're interested definitely check it out!

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Brandon Bernard (the AD) was awesome, and pretty much let me choose whoever I wanted for the first character... and since I like her design and haven't painted her nearly as much as I wanted to, I chose Enfys Nest (from Solo).

For the second piece I could choose any of my favorite Leia scenes... and (for better or worse) mine is Leia's last meeting with Luke in TLJ. :'( Just a really great moment (if sad!), and a fun challenge to fit both characters in a vertical format.

I couldn't ask for a better client than Topps, and this was a really great project to be a part of!

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AD — Brandon Bernard

Client — Topps (2023)

Photoshop + Intuos 5 on a Mac Studio

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Card art (plus sketch) of Khonsu for Delver's Guide to Beast World, a 5E campaign with lots of cool critters and new races!

This was finished in the middle of last year, and was a lot of fun! I pretty much got to do whatever with this character and that's never a bad thing. :D

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Took an old unfinished painting, redrew it, then finished it up. This shows my general process pretty well — Rough Sketch > Sketch > Rough Paint > Less Rough Paint > Final Paint. 

The original composition (not shown here because it's old and bad) had the creature in a half-zombified state... and although that’s theoretically dope as hell, it didn’t really tell a story and (as a consequence) was kind of boring. “Local Commuting Monster Surprised By Meteor” ended up working better.

The background is simple — I made an initial lasso tool shape (liquified to give it a fish-eye lens look), then used a fuzzier graphite-textured airbrush with low flow to paint the bulk of the sky. The meteor was painted on top, with some Hard Light layers and regular paint on top to make it “feel” bright without getting too white. The creature brightened up significantly as I painted, because... well, a more “realistic” look for the lighting isn’t always the best route (as much as I like the darker look, in hindsight). As a consequence, the BG had to be mildly desaturated to prevent my eyes from bleeding out.

Waffled a bit on if it should stay portrait, or make it a more standard 4:3 size... ended up going with a 4:3 proportion midway through, as well as changing the background land to dark clouds. I painted it with about an inch of margin (you can see this in the last WIP) to give me wiggle room for displaying it. Sometimes I'll add notes on top of my painting when I'm down to the wire (in the last WIP again) to help remind me what I need to focus on. For optimum progression, I added the finished painting at the end — no idea if new Tumblr will loop it to the beginning.

Starseeker, 2023.

Used Photoshop for the initial rough sketch, redrew it in Procreate, then took that back to Photoshop to do the heavy lifting. OSX as always, with a Wacom Intuos 5 as my trusty tablet.

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Had this one laying around awhile, tantilizingly close to finishing. Finally got to it today! Heavily utilized Kyle’s gouache brush pack for this one. I think it looks a little more like pastels, but maybe I’m just not great at using “real” gouache. 8)

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Some Procreate doodles!  Would love to finish these up in gouache on panel — I have a Cobalt Violet burning a hole through my pocket, but it was so pricey I’m almost afraid to use it. 8′(

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Some inky drawings. The dragon whale and turtle thing were for fun, and the skull was for a screenprint test (that ended up soooo terrible, hahaha).

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Study of a driftwood, with a Porg on top. Painted well before the ninth movie, which killed a lot of my desire to draw Star Wars fanart. 8'(

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Some more freelance work, done last year. 

I do love me some weasels. B:

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I sorta like the unfinished look, so I stopped. :B

Never a bad time to draw Freya from FFIX.

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That moment you realize you drew two creatures in a similar crouching pose. Hashtag Good. 8)

Been awhile. I should probably get back into the habit of posting work!

Creature work for Shadowrun: Howling Shadows.

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Various sketch commissions (around 30m to 70-ish minutes each) I finished today & yesterday! They’re excellent practice, and I’m feeling better and better the more I do. XD

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Another batch of sketch commissions! 

Middle one was supposed to be 25 minutes (I kept erasing and restarting, ugh), and outer two are probably about 70 minutes each. These are fun challenges, and I’m trying to do my best to force myself to make quick decisions. :D

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Royalty has such a lovely character. :B

A bit over an hour, PSCC.

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A 45-minute doodle. I’m trying to do a bit more edge control in my paintings, and why not draw a pterosaur bird?

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A little doodle of Neri for alradeck. She is an excellent subject for warmups!

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New SCG Regionals playmat, inspired by J.C. Leyendecker’s work. He’s one of my favorite artists — sort of an art rockstar of his day, "virtually invent[ing] the whole idea of modern magazine design."

I have no idea how he’d draw goblins or dragons, but hopefully this is close enough. :B