Wednesday, January 30, 2013

DrawSumthinCool Specials: The Super Hughes!

So you ask what has Matt been working on while the blog has been sitting idle for so long?

Well sometimes people come to me for something a little more that I do in my normal DSC jobs.

This was a gig from a friend of mine I went to high school with back in the day.

She was looking for the one of a kind gift  for her Husband for Christmas. She contacted me after seeing a posting I had made on Facebook for the most recent family portrait. (Which will be a posting in the near future.)

She wanted the portrait to be the whole family as superheroes with their favorite hobbies and passions as their superpowers.

The image area (the size of the art not including borders) was 8x10. I penciled the art on bristol, inked it, and colored the image digitally in Photoshop, and added lettering and graphics in Illustrator.

She wrote up a lovely blog post about the whole process on her blog that you can find here: .Very cool blog post about me!.

Saturday, January 26, 2013

DrawSumthinCool 105: Neon Elisabeth

This most recent post is kind of a comeback for me for several reasons.

1. This is the first real blog post I have done in months.

2. This is the first new commissioned DrawSumthinCool I've been able to post in months (without spoiling birthdays or Christmas.)

3.This commission had a very special first for me.

I have been doing DSC (DrawSumthinCool) since 2008. As two thousand eight progressed we had no idea of the Pandora's Box that was opening for us. But even with the insanity that was going on at home, it was after I took a different job in 2009 that things got ever more complicated. After three months at the new employ,  I was downsized and had to take another job that I never really clicked with.


To be honest I was really unhappy, and I admit everything suffered.

I'm not proud to admit that. I'd like to think that I was a stand up guy that could sucked it up and manned up, but I didn't...

I spent a good amount of time being miserable, and making other people miserable. There were some not so proud parenting moments, not so proud moments as a husband, but I'm not here to talk about that stuff. This is an art blog, so this is the place and time to admit that my art had suffered.

Weeks and even months would go by without lifting a pencil.

I did work on stuff. Some good, some...not so good.

But then I got a new job. A job where I am much happier and allows me to once again work on my art once again because I am in a good frame of mind and have a schedule that allows me to work for large chunks of time without interruption.

I've even started doing a new version of DSC called DrawSumthinCool Mini! Which is just a 2.5 x3.5 version of the regular DSC line.

I'm sure you are asking yourself what is so special about this DSC?

This was the first time I actually got to watch someone open their DSC.

My client wanted something special for her daughter's birthday, and ordered the job earlier this week. She sent me some of the details of elements she wanted in the image including The Duck from the Duck Song, and the Pegasus from the Neon Pegasus video. (Which I have to admit that I have found to be a highly addictive song that I have now purchased on iTunes and it lives in a prominent playlist.)

Due to circumstances beyond our control the Daughter was going to have to go out of town before my client would be able to give her the gift. So we arranged it so my client could meet my place of employment so I could her the drawing. She ended up bringing her daughter with her and she gave her the gift right there.

In the six years I have been doing DSC this is the first time I got to watch a client give someone my drawings and I get to watch their eyes light up as they opened the envelope.

It was pretty awesome.

So far 2013 has been a pretty big year of change. If this is any indication of how it will go, I think it will be a pretty good year.

So please come back to the blog, I promise to do better this year...