This is my entry for last week's Illustration Friday theme of "wilderness". I did draw it on Friday, but have been so busy with other thing meaningless online things (and a bit o' work) I almost forgot to upload it ... eep!

I drew this on the back of some glossy insert that I found in one of my Terminator DVD cases. No pencils necessary ... just straight to some nice black medium Sharpie. I don't know if anyone wants it, but it would make for a nice mantelpiece somewhere.

Thanks to an equally relaxing and productive morning, I managed to wrangled up my earlier drawing into this fun vector. It's sized just perfect for your iPhone, but I am thinking it would make for a great poster print. What do you think? Anyone got recommendations on a place to print them at? I've only ever used Cafepress, which is slightly pricey.

Although it doesn't directly relate to the drawing, this is what I read today to start my morning:

"For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse." - Romans 1:20

This has been sitting in my "to finish" folder for quite some time and now thanks to all of the daily pieces I have been working on with the Blob Brush, I finally found a style I was okay with for this something special for all you iPhone users out there. Get ready for the Halloween season by putting this little moster guy on your shiny Apple screen.

Download the full 320 × 480 size here.

A sneak peek of the monster I drew for this month and the upcoming revamping of the Dra Studio website. I was getting really frustrated with both all of my physical inking solutions ... my brush-tip markers were dull and I still can't get a steady flow running from the quills.

So after trying three times, I just gave up and finished this guy off in Illustrator with the nifty new blob brush.

Pretty much anytime Mel and I start talking about anything Yeti, I have to draw it. It's like I have this Himalayan fever and the only cure is letting it out with pencil, pen or Wacom stylus.

For this piece I did my typical pencil drawing, covered over with felt-tip marker and then digitized with the normal "Brush" tool in Illustrator ... but once I got to that point, I wasn't entirely happy with it. So I decided to give the solid colors and limited lines look a try (a difficult or at least different style for me) ... it was only going alright until I dropped in CS4's new "Blob Brush" then things really took off. The simple filing and inside selecting goodness it brings has me happy enough to switch my shortcut for the "b" key to Blob for the time being. Hopefully that will mean more goodness like this for you guys in the coming days.

Two side notes. One, you should probably know about the I Love the Yeti blog and two, Norm and I were completely enthralled by the awesome augmented reality fun that is the Living Sasquatch project.

I also went through a few minor revisions of this piece in making it nice for the iPhone, including moving a few elements out of the way of the lock and date overlays. That was made much easier with the iPhone Photoshop template that Adam Jones put out. I realized there wasn't an Adobe Illustrator version of an iPhone template, so I whipped up a quick one, which you can download below:

iPhone Desktop/Wallpaper Template for Illustrator CS4 (.ai)

P.S. Shout out to Tyler for passing the Bible Comp. What what!

The other day I was spouting random seeds of wisdom, that Courtney coined “golden nuggets” … enjoy! Oh, and I hope you enjoy my friend Hurly here …

• Indecision leads to missed opportunity.
• No one will think of you as a women until you acknowledge yourself as one.
• What she lacks in determination, she makes up for in non-committal.
• Your bad choices can only lead to worst results.
• If God is my constant, you are the variable.
• Customization is the first step to habitualization.

You can view the high-res version of the final piece here.

Yesterday was such a great day … enjoyed a yummy lunch with Courtney and Jodie, fell asleep on some soft couches in IKEA and got to hang out with a bunch of old (and new!) friends, including Nathan G., Eddie, Rosie and Sarah. I drew this guy over dinner at Chick-fil-A … again, using the sweet, sweet Brushes iPhone app.

What had happened was (yes, Mom. You have to say that in a ghetto voice) … in anticipation of getting paid last Friday, I scheduled a payment in advance. Then, actually ON Friday, I made the mistake of paying the bill anyway. After several phone calls, I was able to have our bank reverse the payment (and hopefully all the resulting overdraft charges), but it going to take like five days and now it kinda sucks to be not just $0, but in the negatives. Gah!

Oh and with this sketch, I was kinda trying to give a node to Willie Baronet’s fantastic style of clean simple lines. It really doesn’t compare to his work, but I like how it turned out overall.