Three panels down; five to go!

The second panel of the Moles 8-panel comic. These aren’t in order. Used some placeholder text this time so that you wouldn’t be thinking, “Andrea left a gaping blank space on the left side.” Also, I like that the mole is speaking nonsense Latin.

Check back next Sunday for more moletastic fun.

Gab Danon and I hatched a plan. We’ll create an 8-panel comic that you can print out on an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper at your very own home, then fold and cut into a mini book. Gab wrote an awesome story about moles and now I’ll illustrate it. I’ll post a new panel every Sunday. They may not be in order, and I won’t show the copy on the illustrations, so that it can be a surprise when it’s all finished. According to my calculations, that means this should be finished by December 20. Therefore, you could print it out and give it to someone for Christmas or What-Have-You. Here’s the first panel I got done. Definitely click to make larger if you got the time.

Get ready for more!

 These are some doodles that I did while taking breaks at work this week.

Pencil on paper. Cardboard and color added in Photoshop.

Here is a thank you card I made on Sunday for people who were kind enough to remember me on my birthday. Thanks, guys!

The typeface is Futura, set in different weights. Everything was done in Illustrator and printed on white, heavy paper and then rubber-cemented to white cardstock, which I folded in half to make a folded card.

As a fun experiment on my day off from work, I video-screen-captured myself making today’s drawing in Illustrator using QuickTime Player’s screen recording feature. Unfortunately, QuickTime conked out for the coloring portion of the drawing in Photoshop.

But I got everything that I did in Illustrator – all the scintillating Bezier-ing with the pen tool. The Illustrator work took me an hour or so. I compressed it into a more watchable two minutes plus. Here she is, for those who like to watch other people use Illustrator, at a really fast pace.

This is a frog-type alien guy. There are some things in his life he wishes he didn’t have to do. They are:

5. Exterminating shneekphors. Although they eat his flowers and spread disease, he thinks they’re kind of cute.

4. Going without eating for more than 15 minutes.

3. Fangmorgering.

2. Taking his vitamins.

1. Flossing.

I sketched this out with pencil on paper, then traced outlines in Illustrator, then brought everything into Photoshop to color.

I designed a website for a friend from work, Raquel, who is involved with a great non profit: Not Without My Pet. The organization helps victims of domestic violence who own animals. Often, people will delay leaving abusive situations because of not knowing how to take their pets with them, and being worried about their pet’s well-being if they leave the animal behind.

Not Without My Pet aims to help those people by “partnering with domestic abuse shelters to establish pet care facilities.” It’s a wonderful cause, and it was fun to design their site for them. Many thanks to programmer Russ for doing the great programming work on it.

I wanted to include some great pet photos on the site and Raquel was awesome at enlisting her friends’ help – she and her friends amassed a bunch of cute and charming snapshots of their pets. I threw in some of my own too. Check out the screenshots below.

And go look at the new website: www.nwomp.org

Diva’s my parents’ amazing mutt. She is intelligent and soulful and likes contemplating stuff.

Huey’s my parents’ other good dog. He is goofy and funny and is a sparkplug of a tank. He is not named after Huey Lewis and his news.

There’s Bonzai, Gab’s parents’ dog, who is very smart and clever and likes going on hikes.

This is a goat that I met in person. I took his picture. The hot dog type people at the bottom are on their first date. They’re off to an ice cream parlor for a root beer float. The creature in the middle is a kind of lion type thing, but with very slick skin, I would guess.