Yesterday was “Penguin Awareness Day” and I missed it.

So sorry about that.  Here is this little guy to prove that I’m aware of penguins, no matter what day it is.

Now that I’ve re-done my website, I want to be more diligent about producing work for this blog.  Here is the first of (hopefully) a series of cartoon character designs.  What do you think?

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone in the US! And, to everyone outside the country, happy Thurday!

Happy Halloween, everyone!

Here’s a not very scary haunted house and a look at the family that lives in it. Click the image to enlarge it.

The house is real object I built and photographed. This is only the second time I’ve tried merging hand-made objects with my illustrations.  The first was this castle. What do you think?

Disney bought Marvel Comics. I just had to draw something to commemorate the news.

So here is Donald Hulk and Spider-Mouse for your enjoyment…

Of course, Spider-Man, Hulk, Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse are copyright and trademark their respective owners.

Here’s a look at the food chain in action.  Some fisherman is going to get a much larger catch than he expects.

It’s been forever since I posted anything on this blog, sorry about that.  Various projects have gotten in my way recently. I’m ready to announce one of those projects: Crazy Cal Presents. It’s a new web-comic drawn by myself that will tell a variety of humorous stories. A new page is up every Monday, so I hope you check it out.

As an artist, I’m always trying to stretch myself,  I like to find new ways to do things. For this image, I wanted to do something different than my usual illustration. So I built the castle out of cardboard and photographed it.  The hand-drawn characters were inserted into the image using Photoshop. This was significantly more time consuming than I expected it to be, but I think I got a great image out of it.   What do you think?

(click on the image to enlarge it)

 I enjoyed painting the baby so much, that I decided to paint a more complex image.  But at the same time, I didn’t want to give up the pen and ink work that I love so much.  So I’m trying something new… one part pen and ink, one part paint, and liberal amounts of Photoshop to get everything working together.

I might explain this new process in more detail at a later time…

I liked the Laidly Worm illustration (as seen in my last post) enough to color it.  Click on the image to see it even larger…

Also of note, I’ve updated my portfolio pages of this website with more art, many of which never made it onto this blog. So check it out.

Some days, I draw cute little cartoon characters. Other days, I draw big aggressive things like this. Click on the image to enlarge it.

Last week, I discovered the English fairy tale “The Laidly Worm.” I had never heard of it before, but I was fascinated by the story. It tells of an evil witch who takes over the kingdom while her stepson, and the rightful heir to the throne, was away at sea.  She also transforms her stepdaughter, the princess, into a terrible dragon, known as the Laidly Worm.  The Prince, being the dashing fairy-tale hero that he is, returns home to slay the dragon and depose his wicked stepmother. He’s about to kill the dragon, when he discovers that he’s about to kill his own sister.  Of course, he doesn’t, instead he breaks the spell, stops the Queen, and everyone lives happily ever after.  There are longer versions of this story all over the net, just google “Laidly Worm.”

I was so interested in this story that I had to illustrate a scene from it. So here is the Prince as he confronts the Laidly Worm, while the Queen casts one last magic spell to slow him down.  This is one of those drawings that grew on me as I worked, becoming more complex than I had intended.  I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to go ahead and color this or not… we’ll see.