Tag Archives: funny

Pleased to Meet You, Hope You Guess My Name

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No, it's not Lucifer

No, it’s not Lucifer

Here’s the girl I was hinting at in my Thinking about Seahorses post: Princess Sealestia, Ruler of Aquastria. She didn’t make much of an impact in pencil, but maybe she’ll steal your heart in living color. This design is totally available for purchase in my store on a variety of fine products.

I wouldn’t call myself a brony or even a pegasister, but I do love My Little Pony. It’s earnest and honest, funny on multiple levels while espousing values that everyone regardless of age or gender should embrace. Not entirely sure where this idea came from; it just hit me one night, and when I told my stepkids, they thought it was hilarious, which was enough of a green light for me.

To create her, I had to learn how to select sections and use the gradient tool. It’s nice to be encounter challenges and then learn by doing. I also use layers and variation in transparency to create the bubbles. Her cutie mark came out of a few experiments. I tried a starfish, a big wave, various combination of little waves, and a gemstone before I decided to play with the sun featured on the rump of her pony progenitor. I just tweaked the colors and turned the rays a bit more tentacle-y to suggest an ocean-going effect.

Thinking about Seahorses

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Seahorses have been on my mind for a while. Who doesn’t love seahorses?

Seahorses at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum

Seahorses at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, taken June of last month.

They’re adorable, they’re soothing to watch, and they have the interesting characteristic of gender-swapping gestational duties.

Seahorse at Gumbo Limbo, a sea turtle rescue I visited last week in southern Florida.

Seahorse at Gumbo Limbo, a sea turtle rescue I visited last week in southern Florida.

The drawings I summon, whole cloth, from my head, don’t always come out the way I envision them. Sometimes I feel the muse is guiding me (as I did with Athena), but usually I end up with a cartoonish representation of a thing that I can describe better in words than in pictures.

This is what it looks like when I try to draw a seahorse from my own imagination with no referential images.

This is what it looks like when I try to draw a seahorse from my own imagination with no referential images.

A few weeks ago, I had a brilliant idea for a T-shirt, which I ran past my stepkids. They seemed to think it was a pretty amusing idea, and I’m very happy with the sketch I drew a few days ago. For this image, I looked at a bunch of photos of seahorses, but I also looked at the design of a popular cartoon I wanted to parody.

Can anyone guess the name of this noble lady?

Can anyone guess the name of this noble lady?

I’ll be working on the digital version of this image today, and hope to have a good design within the week (if you know what fandom I’m spoofing, you probably realize that her mane is flowing in the wrong direction, and besides which, I didn’t make her head big enough for her eyelashes), but first, I’ll be blogging a bit more. Now that I’m started to get page views and followers, I’m going to attempt to update 5 days a week!

QWERTYvsDvorak, the T-shirt Shop Part 1

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My first T-shirt design

My first T-shirt design. Buy it here!

If I had all the time and money in the world, I would have gone back to school and studied visual art or graphic design, but that simply wasn’t an option, and I had a pretty good idea of what I need to do anyway. The Trickster’s Hat was simply the first few credit hours in my personal graduate study of art. With my husband encouraging me, I gave up my day job devoted myself to drawing. I calculated I could cover my expenses from savings for two years, and if I couldn’t make some kind of impact in two years, I would move on and figure out something else to do with my adulthood.

I love my giralicorn!

I love my giralicorn! Available for purchase here.

Instead of creating art in a vacuum, which had been my basic MO for most of my life, I decided to publish my final products, here in this blog, but also on some T-shirts. I liked the quality and artist-centric philosophy of RedBubble.com and found the site easy to navigate. I acquired a Wacom tablet and forced myself to learn how to use it. Then I began drawing like my life depended on it. I knew that my work would be imperfect, and I embraced that. Whether or not people loved it, I was going to take this chance seriously.

Squid vs Whale, the struggle

Squid vs Whale, the struggle. Show your love with a T-shirt! 

You can acquire any of these designs, and more, on a variety of products: shirts of every size, style, and color, plus sticker, device covers, pillows, tote bags, greeting cards, and poster. Visit my online shop for more details.