Michigan State Rose Bowl, 2014

Christmas Gift for my mom's husband, Rex, a big MSU fan (as should be each and every one of us). 

I suspect I'll be asked to produce a few more of these over the next week or two. I am not only not opposed to, but completely encourage anyone who would like one for themselves (an original, not a print, looking very much like the one below) to
send me an email. Price and turn-around will be based very much on demand.

Nami from League of Legends - Commission

A friend of mine who has been a very supportive fan of the blog commissioned this illustration for her boyfriend (who is apparently a big fan of Nami from League of Legends) It's much harder to remain fluid and loose when I'm aware that someone is plans on parting with actual money in exchange for my work. 

Whomever designs these characters with all these intricate little ornamental details needs to be taken out and shot.

Gift card sketches

I was going to sketch some bags for the kids teachers to put whatever "thanks for not throttling out kids" Christmas gift we got them. Then my wife got Greyhouse Coffee gift cards for all the teachers (speech therapist, music teacher, etc.). So I went a different (and less time intense) route.

Snoopy Claus

Last bag of 2013.

Merry Monster Christmas

Young Dracula and the Mummy getting into the holiday spirit.

You're a mean one...

Beppo the Super-Monkey

If you knew there was a Super-Monkey character (shown here in the style of Art Baltazar's SuperPets and Tiny Titans), you get a gold star.

If you knew his name was Beppo, you get all the gold stars.

Beppo the Super-Monkey

Elf on the Bag

While everyone else's elves where busy getting into all kinds of holiday mischief throughout the house, our elf ("Boy Christmas", inventively named by a 3-year old Talia) was posing for lunch bags.

Blue and Gold

I wasn't done with pint sized versions of superheroes, I guess. But I didn't feel like hacking Yale Stewart's style this time. 

Blue Beetle and Booster Gold, the preschool years.

Jr. Flash and Green Arrow

Anyone who watches Arrow can probably guess which episode I was watching when I sketched this JL8 style duo.

Olaf

Once again, I was up well passed my bedtime when I hastily sketched up this bag. And its companion, which was more or less identical. Not sure what happened to the other Olaf. Perhaps it melted on the way home from school. This is why I usually take picture before  they go out into the wild.

Olaf

Frozen

A friend of mine checked in on our animals while we were away for the extended Thanksgiving weekend. He has two 8-ish-year-old girls who have become fans of the blog. So these are "thanks" bags. Which works out good for his girls, because they didn't even have to come check on the animals.

Elsa and Anna

Mr. Procrastinator and Little Miss Exhausted

I was so dead tired the night I drew these, I didn't even have the energy to find my phone to photograph them (hence the back from school wrinkles).

Little Miss Fun and Mr. Tickle

Monsters University

Mike and Sully were a little rushed. That seemed to be the trend for most of a lot of the following week or two.

Mike and Sully

Gobble gobble

I thought it would be fun for Wolfboy to make a second holiday appearance. I didn't reference his last appearance; I'm still playing around with character design for him. Apparently, I haven't settled on a color either (probably because I wanted him to contrast from the turkey, which is the color I would have otherwise chosen).

I hope everyone out there (all seven of you) got enough turkey for Thanksgiving.

Hawkgirl

Just because we watched some Justice League this weekend.

Hawkgirl

Smart car

It had been a while since I gave my little motor-head a car bag. And I was hoping to to force myself back into a higher degree of quality (the industrial design precision of things like cars forces me into that. The real challenge is for me to stay loose while working on something that demands I stay tight).

Aquaman and She-Hulk. Limited and limiting resources.

I took my markers to work, hoping to get some bag-time at lunch. I did not. Then I forgot to bring them home. So my marker supply on hand consisted of old, mostly dried out orange, green and black markers. Sure, I could have been innovative and done something with water color or colored pencil or just scrounged up a sharpie and gone black and white, but I just wasn't feeling it.

I decided to use this as a opportunity try to get back into the groove of loosening up and pushing for speed rather than detail. This shows up in a negative way in Aquaman's face, which I didn't pencil sketch (and thus pencil-erase and correct) upfront. On the plus side, I think it worked quite to my advantage by the time I was warmed up and moved on to She-Hulk.  I think that I also managed to make the drying green marker to work to my advantage there.

But just to keep me from getting too proud of myself, my daughter expressed disappointment that there was an angry green man on her bag.

Aquaman

She-Hulk

Donated lunch bags for benefit auction

I recently discovered that one of my high school classmates (herein referred to as "Steve", because that is his name) is fighting with stage 4 colon cancer.  It doesn't sound good.

A friend who is helping out with a benefit for Steve and his family (we'll refer to her "Bambi", for pretty much the same reasoning) suggested I donate some lunch bags for a silent auction.

I didn't know Steve especially well. But what I remember of him, he was a stand up guy. Friendly. Decent.  Kind. And even if that had not been the case, this kind of heinous cancer is tragic to see in one so young. And, he's important to a lot of people who I do know well and are active in my life. So their frustration and concern becomes mine. A few hours of my time seems like a pretty small donation, in the big picture.

I discovered that, when I actually care about the quality of the work, it's really hard to stick to the "about a half-hour" rule I've tried to set for myself. So, in the end, I spent about an hour a bag. I was also surprised at how the final product was effected by that extra half-hour and the knowledge that this was for a good cause and real peoples' money.

Michigan State University - Sparty

University of Michigan - Wolverines

Spongebob Squarepants

Kermit the Frog

Superman

Little Delirium

After knocking out a number of bags for a benefit auction last weekend (more in a future post), I'm wanting to take it easy this week. And I recently bought this nifty white paint marker I wanted an excuse to try out. And we just read Jill Thompson's Little Endless Storybook. So there you go.

Little Delirium

Little Delirium and Barnabas

My Little Ponies

My daughter recently discovered My Little Pony: Equestria Girls was added to Netflix. This means that in the following week, she watched My Little Pony: Equestria Girls more times than I would be wise to admit to a social service representative.

The story, which should clearly be a shark-jumper but somehow is not, revolves around one of the Ponies (Twilight Sparkle, for those of you pretending not to care) traveling to a parallel world where everything is more or less the same, except everybody is human instead of ponies.

This prompted the curiosity as to what we might look like if we were ponies rather than people. 

These bags were my answer.

Winnie the Pooh, and Tigger, too.

Winnie the Pooh and Tigger, too.

What a wookie!

You may hear my 5- or 6-year olds singing "Chewbacca! What a Wookie!". They have never watched Kevin Smith's Clerks, I assure you.

Chewbacca

SuperNuts

Good grief! Even when being cast as a super-hero, Charlie Brown can't catch a break.

I was too tired to devote a whole hour this night. While peanuts has proven to be good go-to subject matter when I'm short on time or energy, I wanted to at least do something fun with it.

Wonder Lucy and AquaBrown

Wolf cub

Because my son loves "puppies".

Who?

My daughters class has an owl theme thing going. So I did a little screech owl. With a hat, because it's getting cold.

Who?

Wolfboy and the Mummy

Closing out halloween week lunches with this last set of little monsters. My daughter 's got her wondering: "Why do mummies always wrap themselves up in all that toilet paper?"

Wolfboy and the Mummy

Drac and Gilly

Little monsters, round two.

I'm very happy with the character design for Gilly. I've probably made over a dozen of random doodles  the last couple weeks, trying to figure out how to make a noseless, hairless swamp creature into an infectiously cute little girl. I think I nailed it.

And sadly, the young Count fell victim to a poorly closed thermos half full of soup. He did not make it home from the lunchroom. He may be only the second bag this year that I have been unable to save.

Frank'n'bride

In honor of Halloween and inspired by Yale Stewart's re-imagining of the Justice League as 8-year-olds, this weeks bags will feature junior versions of the Universal Studio's monsters from films of the 30s, 40s and 50s. It's a little something I've been doodling with, considering rolling into a web-comic series (Don't get your hopes up. These plans almost  never transpire).

Universal is pretty vigilant when it comes to protecting copyright of Frankenstein's monster. Which is why our little romantic hopeful has no facial scars, no neck bolts (though his ears are kinda bolt-ish) and the flat-topishness of his head is debatable. Not that they care about my kids lunch bags, but in the event that I ever do spin these characters into a web-comic, I'm not totally unprepared.

It's time for Animaniacs!

...they're zany to the max, there's boloney in their slacks...

Which means that in the intro sequence of every episode of Animaniacs, the creative team was making a joke about "hiding the sausage" in full view of their mostly elementary school audience. If you think that's absurd, do a google search, you'll find they did much worse.

The Warner Brothers and the Warner sister, Dot

Draken and Shego

This raps up the Kim Possible week of lunch bags. Draken may be incompetent and filled with malintent, but I think even he would have made better decisions regarding the production of the Kim Possible franchise.

Draken and Shego

Naked Mole Rat

My kids both really enjoy Rufus, Ron Stoppable's pet naked mole rat on Kim Possible. I would enjoy it if we could see him on on a DVD of seasons three and four. But sadly, Disney is negligent that way.

Rufus, the naked mole rat

Kim Possible

So here's the stitch: Kim Possible was a rarity. An action/adventure comedy with a strong, capable female lead, produced with enough sophistication, charm and wit to be enjoyable by kids of any age and their parents. And Kim wasn't just capable. She was a relatable, positive role model - confident, independent, kind, smart, and made good decisions (insofar as one can as a teenage super-spy), or at least learned from the bad ones. In a media world where 'tween girls are encouraged to grow up in all the wrong ways, way to fast, that bare-belly short shirt was relatively tame.

It was The Disney Channel's most watched, highest rated show. For good reason.

So of course, they stopped production on it after three seasons.

Apparently, Disney had an attitude that once you had enough episodes in the can to survive syndication, you hung it up and moved on to the next franchise. Perhaps the feeling was that you're audience grew up too quick to bother putting in the cash to stay with them too long. Or maybe their was no substantive audience gain between three season's worth of content or five, kids will just happily watch the same thing over and over, ad infinitum, right? If it weren't a standing policy at the time, I'd have guessed they just couldn't figure out how to effectively leverage the lucrative toy merch--how do you sell action figures to girls, or action toys with a girl protagonist to boys, etc.?

Whatever the case, I'd say the powers-that-be had their heads shoved someplace unpleasant.

The powers that be did make one concession. A grass roots fan campaign convinced them to go ahead with one more season. They gave Kim a senior year, let her and Ron deal with all the high-school fun of a teen romance and prom and graduation. At least I think that's how it turned out. I'd go check, but the third and forth season have never been released on DVD.

Because the powers-that-be have yet to fully relocated their heads

Kim Possible and Ron Stoppable (and Rufus)

Hello Kitty

I did a Hello Kitty bag because I wasn't feeling the least bit ambitious and wanted something simple and quick. The level of my effort was directly disproportional to my daughters delight.

Hello Kitty

Patrick the Wolf Boy

Once again, I have to thank Art Baltazar for clean, simple character designs that my kids recognize and enjoy and I can swipe when I don't have much bag-time.

Patrick the Wolf Boy

Green Arrow

Mr. Oliver Queen here is probably the longest I've spent on any given bag. For whatever reason, I just didn't feel like doing the obvious follow up to the previous JLU Vixen bag (Green Lantern John Stewart). I decided I was in the mood for Vigilante. Drew up a sketch. Hated it. Started over. Still wasn't working. Went back to try a variation on the first one. Decided it was adequate. Then my wife pointed out that sending an illustration of a gun wielding man to school with our first grade son might result in complaints of inappropriateness, because: guns. Sadly, that has become the world we live in, has it not?

So I went with this. Because guns send a bad message of violence and whatnot, but exploding arrow projectiles are totally fine. Yes, this is the world we live in.

Green Arrow

Vixen

Just making the most of the newer, smaller lunch bag canvas.

Vixen

Along came a spider...

This bag comes by special request. My daughter wanted me to draw Little Miss Muffet. An atypical request, but it worked out, because I didn't have much time, and was still getting a feel for the new canvas size.

Magic School Bus

Unrelated to The Magic School Bus, I was at a different grocery store when I purchased replacement bags. They only had one variety. Turns out, that variety is smaller than what I'd been using. Wasn't hugely noticeable, until I sat down to draw something. I swear, it's like I lost a third of my canvas.

Magic School Bus

B'wanna Beast

The other day, while eating dinner, the family was discussing the relative merits of the powers various animal themed superheroes (we crank the geekometer up to eleven). When asked if they could think of any other super heroes with animal powers, my daughter offered enthusiastically "B'wanna Beast!" Because she rocks that hard.

For those that don't know (which I'd wager is most of you), Bwana Beast is one of the most obscure and even more absurd superheroes in DCs stable. His power, according to my daughter, is "he takes one animal and takes another animal and mixes them all up into a more powerfuller animal". Which, grammar aside, is pretty much spot on.

I think the indoctrination is complete. I fear there is nothing more I can teach her.

B'wanna Beast creating a "Dosh" and a "Cowl"

(Incidentally, according to the kids, Black Canary's canary cry trumps Vixen's menagerie of animal powers and Hawkgirl's flight and mace. We didn't get around to asking how B'wana Beasts animal jumbling would fare.)

The whole world.

My geography and conservation obsessed son discovered School House Rock. Making for an easy lunch bag art night for me.

Digimon

My daughter discovered Digimon on Netflix. So this is... some bird-thing. I'm not sure, because the Digimon she discovered is spoken in Japanese with English subtitles. My daughter does not read, but this does not seem to be interfering with her enjoyment. Perhaps she enjoys learning Chinese at school so much, she's decided to pick up Japanese at home in her spare time.

Stupid, stupid rat creatures!

We where reading more Bone the other night. And the kids absolutely cracked up at this panel. Repeatedly. I was prompted to read it several times. Even days later, they asked me to reread the sequence. Below is the page the panel appeared on -- the rat creatures had been bickering like an old married couple for the two pages prior. The rat creature's love of quiche (and its companion's frustration with that love) is a running joke in the Bone series.

Stupid, stupid rat creatures.