My nephew lost a tooth recently, and inspired this particular piece. Full size -here-. Now, even though this started out as a quick sketch/joke image, it quickly turned into a very fun exercise in edge control and limiting myself with layers. I've always had a bit of an addiction to layers in Photoshop, and have recently been trying to work on single layer images to force myself to really consider the image as is, rather than saying to myself, "Oh, I'll just fix that later on another layer." Invariably, that particular vein of thought is forgotten, and the image looks sloppy. That, or I'll have to look through many many different layers to find the one that has the thing I'm trying to fix on it. This technique however is very simple, and I've used it successfully before on both a Jelly-Fish and a Mermaid (NSFW). Working with only black and white, and a brush with opacity and flow controlled by pen-pressure, I use this to paint in the lines, and then use the eraser to sculpt in the line by erasing from the outside in.

    Well, here I am. I never thought I'd end up here in the blog-o-verse, but these things have a way of catching up to you. "But why?!" You cry out, "You've got a comic! That should be your blog!" Well, you are correct, mysterious internet person, I do in fact have a comic. One that I'm working
anxiously to reboot. Those goals are the exact reason why I'm beginning this blog. My comic, although very dear to me, is not a way to showcase the other art I create, and my portfolio, which the rest of this site was constructed for, is no way to show the process work I create. This blog is a happy middle-ground. A place to organize my thoughts and process work, in a much less formal environment than putting it directly on my portfolio page. I have so many sketchbooks, all of them chock full of doodles and beginnings. All of them are good images, but they're either not developed enough to turn into fully rendered drawings or, more likely, I'm simply lazy. By taking a selection of those images and posting them here, it gives me a direction for the sketches to go. In recent months, I've learned that I've been simply drawing from muscle memory on a lot of my images, and not really exploring how it will look, or conversely, I've gotten so locked into the construction lines of a piece that by the time I come around to drawing the figure it's already stiff and lifeless, and I move on. My sketchbooks are filled with half finished arms, legs, hands, faces, and who knows what else. By sharing these pieces I can show you both the triumphs and the failures, and hopefully we can both learn something along the way.