This post is filled with purple.

So this was originally made for the cherry blossom season, but it was finished in time to be shown at Fanime this year. I wanted to do a tranquil, sakura-filled scene with a character, and decided to follow the course of one person’s life with it. The fleeting beauty of the sakura is a wonderful symbol for the fragility of life.

I also made a space cat stranded on Planet Paw.

Anniversary

A gift for a certain someone.

Morning glories

I started this as a daily doodle and kept obsessively rendering it. I take my princesses with chubby pixie ponies very seriously.

Holiday card for 2012

I hope everyone had a happy holidays! I had an extremely fun and hectic time visiting Mexico this year. Here's a compilation of the holiday card I made before I left.

the cats in my life

My grandmother hasn't been feeling well lately, so I made her a card with all the cats we've had in our lives. I think she liked it. :3

It's raining cats and dogs.

A bunch of my friends have already seen this, but posting this on my blog now. Yay!

Here, have a centaur girl I made. I'm going to try and post more often as well. :3

Figure drawing and sketch dump

Another sketch dump to prove I do things other than work stuff. ;)



Mall sketch page. 'Cause I like drawing people at the mall like a creepy stalker.



This is a sketch page where I drew stills from Janelle Monae's music video Tightrope. I highly recommend finding her video on YouTube, 'cause it's goooooood.



I had the pleasure to visit Italy thanks to my company, Crowdstar. I drew this distant household while chilling on the porch of our villa in a new Moleskine (yes, yes, I caved in and got one... because I wanna feel like a legit artist! D:)



30 second and 1 minute poses. Mixture of models from session 1 and 2.



Model 1: 5 and 10 minute poses.



Model 1: 15 minute pose (I think...)



Model 2: 10 minute poses.




Model 2: 10 minute poses? 15? No more than 15.



Model 2: 20 minute pose that I felt like caricaturing. Was fun! I should do it more like Stephen Silver suggests with life drawing. :3

Aaaaand, that's all I felt like showing. :D

Well hello there.

I haven't updated in a long time, so I thought I'd just dump a bunch of images (some old, some newish... saving recent ones for a later post, hopefully.) I've been busy with work and various projects, so that's the main reason.
At any rate, the doodle below is ooooold, but I still like it. It's all 'dances with vampires', haha. I had another sequential doodle where the vampire is dead 'cause she staked him right afterwards, but I left that one out.

A series of sketches from the sketchbook. I draw too many floating women with weird attempts at caricature. You can see I just fill up pages with no rhyme or reason. It makes me look crazy, but I take some private glee at how much it'll confuse my relatives later on in life.
Most of these are out of my head or on BART and various places. I think the only study I have is the one of "The Graduate".



Aletta insisted I include the old woman pocking her nose. I'm obliging.

Berkeley. Another old sketch. I think the girl sitting on the block is horrid, but like the building doodle. I still cannot draw cars.

And I can finally show this off on my blog, since all of these virtual gifts are live. You can check them out at the gift store at hi5.com . I have other stuff that I've done for hi5 in my portfolio, if you want to check that out.
I like the zombie and dragon the most. :3

Upo

I have started a new comic titled Upo (pronounced Oop-oh). This is a story that's rather near and dear to my heart, and something I've been silently goading myself to write for many years. The first 11 pages are an introduction to the world that this story is set in. I am currently posting the first two pages up, which are the same ones that are shown on the teaser flyer I've been showing around.
I am still in the process of getting a host, namely Comic Genesis. I definitely want to put it on its own domain at some point, but I want to see if it gets more of a following first before I do so.
I'm going to post the actual domain soon, hopefully soon.

You can check this blog for any updates on the comic as well.

Enjoy? :3

I have Grease music stuck in my head. :(

So, it's been hot. And school has been ending, and I've been having a pleasant bout of senioritis. As a result, I haven't sketched (!!) as much as I should have in the past few days... but I thought I was on a roll with my blog updates, and I want to keep up with this habit as much as possible.
Here's some relatively old sketches and bits from a project of Barron's (done in the past month or so).



These last three guys are bits that are put together in a finished painting. I'm going to work on the final a little bit more, and then I'll post it up as done, so keep an eye out if you're interested. :3

Animal farm

If you go to my online portfolio (http://ashleyboydportfolio.blogspot.com - or just click on it through my profile), you can see the nicely finished character pieces I did for Animal Farm. But I thought I'd put two scraps up here from that project that I and others liked.
The first one is an early character study of Napoleon, and the second is a windmill establishing shot.
You'll also notice that I'm updating more, which is a thing I want to regularly do now. :3

I was hungry.

This was for a project where I'm scrapping everything (including this) and going in a whole new direction, but I still liked these little dessert ideations. I quickly painted a few in Corel Painter 'cause I wanted to try the program out.

*tap dancin' towards graduation*

So I thought I'd share some of my stuff for Barron's class. This is my spread for this semester's zine, titled "Sweeet," where I talk about drawing crazy monsters as a kid.



This semester Barron assigned everyone to do covers for the zine, and normally we'd just pick one, but since this time it was a nice collection of pieces we decided to place our own covers on each of the copies. This here be mine. I know it's 'a wolf in sheep's clothing,' but I like foxes better. :P



...and another plein air study. There's problem areas, but then there are nice bits that I do like in it, so I thought I'd post it. Done in an hour and 30 minutes, I think.

An update...

I have a lot of stuff I could show, but I feel like none of them are in a finished state to really show, y'know? But then I remember that this is a blog, so it's pretty much assumed that everything posted on here is a work-in-progress.



At any rate, here's a 1 hour study done at a nearby park...



And a character design of Bill Sikes from Oliver Twist. The painting still isn't done, and I keep going back and tweaking it, but here it is for now.

I haven't updated in a long time, so I thought I'd just do an art dump. These are some viz dev shots I did for the BFA project, based on Sara Gruen's book Water for Elephants. We're done in class, but I still consider them to be works in progress. Any comments would be nice. :)

Every blog needs a cat sketch...

Canaan has a very soft, luxurious cat-bed he can sleep in at any time of the day. Instead, he prefers to sleep in a cardboard box filled with trash. We keep meaning to throw it out, but haven't the heart to upset his day.
...sketched in Photoshop, yo....

Locksmith Character Design

Here is my evolution for a character design of a locksmith located in San Francisco. The only stipulations was that the character had to be intimidating at night, yet still a "nice guy". I'm still developing him, but I thought I'd upload my current works-in-progress.

This version had to be more realistic, like something seen in ILM. I realize I could have made him much more realistic, but I err on the side of whimsical in designing characters.

In the next iteration we had to take our character and go the opposite direction (making them more fun and whimsical). I think I can push it more, plus there are several things I need to fix on him (breaking up his design some more, making the composition of it flow better, showing more sketches of him actually locksmithing). Overall, I think it's getting there. I like his boots. :p

Photoshop studies

I'm trying to get better at Photoshop, so here are some studies of people I did today.

This one is of Alyssa (her art blog is on my links to the right, btw, so do visit). She was Photoshoppin' me too, so that's why she looks so serious.

And this is JP. He's playing Magic. Haha, I realize both of these are extremely stiff, but ah well. My main goal is just to practice painting in Photoshop, since my Viz Dev works look so muddy. :[

It scares me when you do that.

This was in the Spartan Daily today.

I had fun painting it~ :3

And this was a first pass with Viz Dev. It's based on "The Drowned Giant" by J. G. Ballard. I was hoping it would be a nice, finished, in-house picture but no... I must redo it because it still has problems. Ah well, I like drawing drowned giants.