Sometimes we get carried away with our costumes and sometimes ... they carry us away. Sadly, it's an epidemic that claims more kiddy trick-or-treaters each year than stale circus peanut poisonings. Do your part to save the children; add an escape hatch level to every costume BEFORE they leave the house.

Cue "The More You Know" music, please Jerry ...

My entry for this week's Illustration Friday theme of "expired". I think this started out as me yet again trying to work up a propaganda-style poster (hence the color palette), but almost immediately realizing I don't have the right mindset for it. Instead, I spent some time getting more acquainted with Illustrator CS4's much-improved-but-still-goofy inline Gradient editor.

I guess the only thoughts behind the IF tie-in are for you to think of expired milk. If you open it up, icky things are bound to escape. ;) Laters.

My entry for last week's Illustration Friday theme of "focused". Even though I drew it early on Friday night, I totally spaced on uploading it. Let's see if I can still make the deadline ...

Oh and it's actually a good mix of a bunch of different pens. A little Crayola marker, a bit of Black India Ink and Windex and just a touch of White-Out.

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

My simple and fun entry for tonight's Illustration Friday theme of "skinny" ... mainly just me playing around with simple shapes and vectors. Enjoy!

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)

I have been get a crazy ton of things done at work today. Managed to resolve the "double contacts" issue I was seeing on my iPhone after the 3.0 upgrade, thanks in great part to this helpful article. I also used Terminal to enable the old skool but nifty "hot corner" indicators for a machine at work ... making it plenty easier to remember which corner of the display will start the screen saver.

Then I got kinda distracted by this amazing tribute to Maurice Sendak's wonderful Where the Wild Things Are book ... but really, can you blame me?

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