Life Intruding on Hard Boiled SteamPunk Girls

Life and the Intrusion of its Stuff

I've been a little light on posts lately, and there's a reason for that. It's a good one. Give me a minute. 

Oh that's right, mostly it has to do with trying to burn the candle at both ends. If you've been reading this blog you know that I have a regular 9-5 gig. Lately, due to a combination of this and that (I won't go into specifics here) things have been more demanding, which means more working late, which throws off my schedule for the evening, and I'm ultimately pretty tired by the time I can actually sit at my computer and try to spin gold from the rough straw of a blank page. 

Family life is something else altogether. The time I get with my wife and my daughter is the most rewarding thing in my life right now, but it has its own demands. Anyone who has ever had a toddler will understand. 

Then there's wrestling with the recurring existential dilemmas, but that may be a topic for a different post.

Doodles: Hard boiled SteamPunk Marker Edition

Life stuff and the wall of thorns it has thrown up in my path notwithstanding, I have not been idle. In a previous post I mentioned that I was learning to work with some professional art markers I'd ordered. Here you can see some of the fruit of those labors. 

The SteamPunk character was drawn from a photo reference I found in a quick Google Image search...and will probably never be able to find again. It's a good thing I downloaded the original. The second image is my own, but I used an image from the Rockstar Games video game "L.A. Noir" to help with some of the details. It helps to make it feel authentic. You just can't pull a fedora out of your butt and...wait...that sounded weird. 

I really like the way the markers feel and the depth they add to my drawing. Since I started working with them I can't believe I didn't start buying sets here and there much earlier. 

With the same markers I did a couple of drawings for people at work. One was the "Awesome Possum" because I overheard one of the ladies I work with say that a couple of times to people she had on the phone. I thought it was hilarious so I drew a hip possum in sunglasses. The other was a kind of manga-styled-self-portrait of me making a "happy food face" for another of the ladies at work who brought in homemade mini-cupcakes for the office. 

Unfortunately I gave both of the ladies the original work and didn't get a chance to scan either one. The cupcake face I'll probably be doing again. One of my coworkers suggested putting it on a t-shirt. I've been thinking about it and it occurred to me, "why the hell not?" The same co-worker said I should be putting more of my art in a blog. He was right about that, so I should give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to putting some of my drawings on apparel.