Drawn to Distraction

One of my best buddies Christopher Fritschi wrote his first novel last year titled “Hero-The Unknown Territories” and asked me to design the cover. It’s a really funny and entertaining romp through familiar sword and sorcery but in his unique way Chris turns it sideways and makes the genre really fresh and fun. I had a lot on my plate but after reading the manuscript I had to take a stab at it, ultimately it didn’t work out  I didn’t quite get the imagery he had in mind and I got really bogged down with my regular clients so he had another artist complete the project but I hope to illustrate the volume for him in the future. You can find the book here and I highly recommend you not waste any time and read it today as a matter of fact you should purchase several copies to hand down to your grand children.

You can find Chris’ website here.

The sketches were some of the character concepts I liked and below them are the first few cover roughs, now go butter up Chris with compliments so he gets volume 2 written faster.

Tilgar character concepts

Dimished Tilgar in his armor

Tilgar's gauntlet

Cute little rejected sketches waiting for your love, approval and brains.

zombie babies need love too

maybe they could find a home on the "Raisin Brain Crunch" cereal box

I whipped up some cowboys for a friend recently for a possible western styled gig but it turns out I made a wrong turn at Albuquerque, they needed critters not cowpokes, so I thought I’d share em with y’all.

the Hero and the Reverend

Assorted Town-Folk

Assorted Town-Folk too

This is my second stab at drawing my FB friends he’s my nephew Nick Parks but his um “nickname” is Chester. He is a really creative musician and artist now living in Portland, Oregon.

I like “comfort” movies. Comfort movies are like old friends that just let you be yourself and don’t judge or guilt you out they just bring comfort and a sweet sadness that makes you feel not-so-alone. One of my favorite comfort movies is Amalie which I watched last night and so today I felt compelled to sketch her from the bit where she’s in the photo booth in the Zorro costume.

Audrey as Amalie as Zorro

Back in the day 2 of my best buds Mark and Jeff used to have plenty of “arty” adventures, including making arty short films on video. My favorite title was “Burnt Pogens” I was thinking of them in light of my “draw all my pals on Face Book” project and Imagined what if there was an animated documentary on the life and times of Mark & Jeff. It would have to be called Burnt Pogens, so here is my rough idea of what they would look like as animated characters. I scratched these out from memory so unfortunately I don’t have any photo reference to show, but I think I caught their spirit pretty well.

Mark & Jeff circa 1980