SketchBlog!

Picnic

2009-07-03T08:36:00.000-07:00

I squeezed in a bit of time for a new illustration amidst my European travels, and it happens to have a perfect theme for the US 4th of July weekend:

Click to enlarge!

This is available as a hi-res wallpaper. If you're interested in a print, drop me a line at prints@rob-sheridan.com.

Here is the original sketch, and here is the pre-colored outline. While I was working on this I thought I'd lost all my coloring due to a corrupt file and would have to redo hours of work, but Steve from Corel came to the rescue and was able to recover the corrupted Painter file. Huge thanks to him for helping me out there - I've now upgraded to Painter 11 to avoid any file corruption issues in the future. It was long overdue, anyway.

My next task is to finish work on Broken Robot Girls number two and three, so hopefully you'll be seeing those before too long.

I've also been taking a lot of photos while traveling, like this one (click to enlarge):

You can find a lot more in my tourist galleries and on my Flickr.

Scare Tactics

2009-06-11T10:38:00.000-07:00

As many of you know, I've been pretty busy with my day job, so Sketchblog has yet again fallen to the wayside. However, during my travels I've been slowly forcing myself to do at least a little bit of drawing here and there to break up the monotony. I'm slowly chipping away at the post-production work on Broken Robot Girl #2 and #3, which Tamar and I shot a couple months ago, and last night I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning to finally finish an illustration I started last year at the same time I did Ice World (hence the snow):

(Please, click to enlarge - or better yet, get the wallpaper)

This makes a lovely Wallpaper, and is available as a limited edition print. Here is the original sketch.

In other news, the first Broken Robot Girl got a really surprising/exciting amount of coverage, including a page in Popular Photography (wow!) with an interview with Tamar included. LA Weekly also featured it, and asked me some questions. As soon as I have time to finish them, the next photos in the series will be posted here. Oh, and I believe this is the very first Sketchblog-inspired tattoo (based on Troublemaker). I'm immensely flattered.

Lord only knows when the next update will be (hopefully soon?), but please follow me on Twitter to stay in touch in the meantime.

Broken Robot Girl #1

2009-01-27T22:24:00.000-08:00

I'm working on a series of photos of broken robot girls, in collaboration with Tamar Levine. We're hoping to do four or five photos altogether. This is the first one - Tamar took the photo and I did the special effects in Photoshop. We're pretty happy with the way it turned out:

(click to enlarge)

Here's a close-up so you can see some of the details:

(click to enlarge)

For some of the other images in the series, we want the robots to be in much further states of disrepair - missing limbs and things like that. We're looking for someone with some skills in prop-making or fashioning mechanical parts who could help us create some cool-looking bits and pieces of robot joints and insides and other mechanical parts that would be coming out of broken-off limbs and cracked-open joints. If you or someone you know has any crazy sculpting/mechanical skills and might want to help out, drop me a line: rob (at) rob-sheridan (dot) com.

Ice World

2009-01-20T14:50:00.000-08:00

So, it's been a while. I've spent the last seven months doing a rather excessive amount of traveling, working on a number of exciting projects with Nine Inch Nails, and generally just never getting a chance to sit down and draw - much to my dismay. But over the Christmas break I was up in Seattle during a big snowstorm, and like last year I was inspired by the snowy landscape. This time it was the atmosphere of the wintry Northwest and the layers of trees. So I started on this drawing, but didn't quite finish it up there, and found it quite a bit less inspiring to work on once I returned to the very un-wintry 86 degree weather in Los Angeles. I finally sat down and finished it up last night though, and I'm hoping it will be the first of many more Sketchblog entries in 2009. Drawing more is one of my New Year's resolutions, after all.

(click to enlarge)

Here's a detail and the original sketch.

I made a wallpaper version, which required some sliding around and cloning of elements so I wouldn't have to crop the image, but it worked out alright.

This proved a nice warm-up and I have a lot of ideas for new prints and sketches, so with any luck there will be some activity around here. Thanks to everyone who's been keeping an eye on this page while it's been dormant - I'm always amazed at how many emails and print orders I get even when I'm neglecting Sketchblog. Remember to subscribe to the RSS feed or the email list (use the form at the bottom of the right-hand column of this page) to get alerts when new things turn up here.

The holiday rush has sold out a couple more prints, and Leaving Town and Cereal Mascot Reunion are getting close to being gone. I'm also, after numerous requests, taking custom orders for prints of other Sketchblog images not specifically listed on the prints page - email prints (at) rob-sheridan.com if there's a specific image you're looking for a print of.

Oh, and if you haven't seen them yet, I put up some new travel photos from Peru and Panama on my tourist page a little while back, and also some fun macro photos of one of my favorite old childhood games over at my Flickr.

Step-By-Step Cereal Mascots

2008-05-29T01:44:00.000-07:00

As promised, I've put together a step-by-step overview of how Cereal Mascot Reunion was made, for those of you who are interested in digital art, or just curious about the process. That print was particularly complicated to put together, more so than I think even this step-by-step could portray, so it's a good candidate for this type of breakdown. Hopefully some of you will find it useful:

Anatomy of a Digital Painting: Cereal Mascot Reunion

One obvious question everyone has that isn't addressed on that page is: "How long did it take?" I really have no idea, to be honest. Many, many hours!

Miscellany

2008-05-16T14:51:00.000-07:00

One of these days I'm going to have some new art to post here, I really am. As soon as I get a million other things done. In the meantime, here are some miscellaneous things:

1. The Downtown Art Walk last week was a lot of fun once again. This time I walked around a bit more and spent some time perusing some of the galleries, and I realized just how absurdly out of place my illustrations are amidst most of the other work. Of course, that actually makes it more fun. After seeing dozens of oil paintings of horses or art school caliber "abstract installations" of painted bicycle parts hanging from ceilings, no one's expecting to see cereal mascots and dead children, so the reactions are often priceless. Anyway, Jennie posted some pics from the Possum Saloon show here.

2. Last month I helped Tamar with a Reebok ad she was shooting for Metro.pop magazine. She was inspired by my Robot Block Party image and felt the aesthetic would fit perfectly with the, er, colorful shoes. The end result is the second page spread in this month's issue, and it looks really great, especially considering how hideous those shoes are. Click the thumbnail below to see the full sized image over on Tamar's site:

3. Since I've been playing with Facebook a bit recently, I broke down and made a Facebook page. Aside from being a lot easier to update than my in-need-of-renovation portfolio, it will quell the anxiety of those who keep asking me why I don't have a Facebook page. Please add me if you use Facebook, my newborn page is sad and lonely at the moment.

4. I felt guilty making another post without any artwork, so I did this little one-minute doodle:

I like drawing things without thinking much about them, then trying to piece together all the subconscious influences that went into them. In this one I'm reminded of the wonderful Isz from Sam Keith's The Maxx, which I used to love once upon a time. There's also some Piranha Plant in there, and some of the creatures from the great first Oddworld game on Playstation, and some Ankylosaurus from this old dinosaur book that I had when I was a kid, pre-Jurassic Park when bipedal dinosaurs were still depicted standing upright with their tails dragging on the ground. Ah, those were the days.

Possum Saloon Art Show, Again.

2008-05-06T19:27:00.000-07:00

So once again I've been extremely busy, as some of you know, but I have some new sketches in the works so there should be some activity around here in the near future.

In the meantime, my friends at the Possum Saloon gallery have turned last month's show into a regular event, which will happen every month starting this Thursday in conjunction with the Downtown LA Artwalk. As before, it'll be an eclectic group of artists displaying work, and some bands and DJs performing as well. It's completely free, and there will even be free wine until it runs out. They asked me once again to include some work, but it was kind of last-minute so I'll only have a few prints up this time. I'm actually not familiar with any of the other artists except Tamar, so it should be interesting. Either way, if you're in the LA area you should definitely come down, the Artwalk is a lot of fun.

Here's the flyer (click to enlarge):

Cereal Mascot Reunion

2008-04-16T02:07:00.000-07:00

For some reason this image has been swimming around in my head for a few years now, and finally - after chipping away at it bit by bit over the last couple months - I've brought it to life as a large, absurdly detailed print. It's kind of about the strange, uncomfortable feeling of reuniting with old friends only to find that the magic just isn't there anymore - and in turn, about the melancholy "nothing will ever be as good as it used to be" type of nostalgia, of which I am increasingly fond. And of course, a tribute to the late, great, wood-paneled, shag-carpeted 1970's rec room.

Click to enlarge:

Download the hi-res wallpaper: Standard (4x3) or Widescreen (16x9)

Order the 22" x 17" limited run fine art print

Details: Trix Rabbit, Frankenberry, Count Chocula, Cap'n Crunch, Tony The Tiger

UPDATE:I've posted a detailed step-by-step of how this was put together, for those interested.

In other news, I polished up a couple images to get them print-ready for the Possum Saloon show last week, so now Headache and Miscarriage are available as prints. I'm also now offering smaller 11" x 17" sizes on some of the prints, for those who don't want the full size.

Possum Saloon Art Show

2008-04-04T13:47:00.000-07:00

If you're in LA, you should check out the Downtown Art Walk on Thursday (the 10th). An "art walk" sounds lame, I know, but supposedly it's pretty cool, and some friends of mine have asked me to contribute art to a show they're organizing as part of the art walk. Here's the flyer:

There will be art and music and free wine, it should be a good time. I'll be showing a handful of prints from Sketchblog (which will be for sale all nice and framed), and if I can get my new print done in time, I might debut it there.

And just for the sake of including some art in this post, here's an illustration I'd all but forgotten about, that I did five years ago for an article in a New York humor magazine. I don't remember what the article was about - something about a professor losing his mind - but the image turned out pretty good:

(click to enlarge)

We Could Build A Better Robot, If We Only Had Arms

2008-03-30T02:37:00.000-07:00

(click to enlarge)

Here's the original sketch, and the outline, and the pre-Photoshop coloring.

Crabwalk

2008-03-25T02:22:00.000-07:00

SketchBlog returns! I can't believe it's been over a month since the last post. As some of you know, I've been extremely busy with other projects, but I finally had time for some drawing tonight, and I think I'll be posting on a regular basis again now. So here's a new wallpaper for you:

(click to enlarge)

Right-click to save:
Wallpaper for standard (4x3) monitors
Wallpaper for widescreen (16x9) monitors

Oh, and if you hadn't noticed, there's now a pack of iPhone wallpapers on the wallpaper page (they're sized for the iPhone, but they'll work in other phones).

I'll post new artwork soon! In the meantime, if you're bored, you can enjoy some pictures I took of cheap/awesome alien tourist attractions during a recent stop in Roswell, New Mexico - click the photo for the full gallery:

With Apologies To Cesar Romero

2008-02-15T14:04:00.000-08:00

I've been pretty busy lately, but I've been slowly chipping away at a couple different illustrations, which should be showing up here soon. In the meantime though, my friend Ollie once again asked me to draw something for her band, The Oohlas (I did this image for them last year), for a poster/flier for their upcoming LA show with Stellastarr*. And since Ollie encourages me to be as weird as I want, I just couldn't turn her down.

(click to enlarge)

The genesis of this image was a series of text messages which went something like this:

Me: Any particular theme I should run with?
Ollie: Idunno dude, just go crazy, but maybe something Ronettesish.
Me: Ronettesish? Is that defined as "related to or involving the 1960's trio The Ronettes?"
Ollie: Yes. I'm really into them lately.
Me: Okay. So, hypothetically, if aliens with paper Ronettes masks were feeding a sea monkey, which celebrity or historical figure's head would the sea monkey have?
Ollie: Jack Nicholson or Heath Ledger.
Me: How about a two-headed sea monkey, with both heads? The two jokers. Sea monkeys have built-in joker hats, it was almost meant to be.
Ollie: Perfect! This is going to be amazing.
Me: I feel kind of guilty for excluding Cesar Romero, but at least now I can call the image "With Apologies To Cesar Romero." It has a great ring to it.
Ollie: You're insane.

Headache

2008-02-01T09:32:00.000-08:00

I took a few minutes to clean up my horrendously messy desktop yesterday, and decided I wanted some new wallpapers to decorate it with. Here's the first one, which is probably the result of me playing too much Q-Bert lately:

Right-click to save:
Wallpaper for standard (4x3) monitors
Wallpaper for widescreen (16x9) monitors

Also, FYI - the Presents Opening Children print has sold out (thanks, Digg), and Troublemaker is getting very close, with the Mario print not far behind - in case anyone had been eyeing either of those.

Miscarriage

2008-01-27T01:10:00.000-08:00

One thing I've learned about myself from doing Sketchblog is that I actually don't like to just sketch. When I see things in my head they're colorful and very detailed, so sketching them - quickly, without color or detail - just doesn't feel right. When I did this sketch a few months ago, it didn't satisfy me because it was so quick and dirty, while the image in my head was much more elaborate. So, I decided to revisit it, and bring it up to its full creepiness potential:

(click to enlarge)

Here's the process for those interested:

Step 1 (sketch)
Step 2 (base color)
Step 3 (skin texture and lighting)
Step 4 (details)
Step 5 (final)

Leaving Town

2008-01-23T03:25:00.000-08:00

Usually when I draw something I have a very specific idea in mind from the beginning. Sometimes, though, I just start doodling and see what happens, and that's where, many hours later, this came from.

There's quite a bit of detail in it, so please, click to enlarge:

This is available as a print.

Detail

Initial sketch

Oh, and here are a couple pretty cool robots that came out while I was sketching.

My Office + Artifacts From My Youth

2008-01-15T22:51:00.001-08:00

It's a busy week for me, so I don't have anything new to post. However, last week someone had asked if I could post some pictures of my setup, so I snapped a few while my desk was uncharacteristically clean. This is my humble, temporary office in my LA apartment. I hang out in here pretty much all day, every day, doing work and drawing pictures and dicking around:

(click to enlarge)

From left to right: A TV for video editing (with a spider skeleton above it, and prints drying below it), an extremely geek-chic USB drink chiller, a Mac Pro with two Apple cinema displays, a Final Cut Pro keyboard, the lovely Cintiq 12wx tablet, a Kaiju Eyezon figure, a vintage 1982 Vectrex game system (more on that in the near future - and yes that's A.W.E.S.O.M.-O sitting on top of it), a vintage Metropolis poster on the wall, a buttload of hard drives barely visible on the floor, a big-ass two-headed dragon thing, an incredibly rad Japanese clock, one of my many metal robots (this one I got at the wonderful Wound and Would Toy Company, which has a fantastic selection of vintage robots), a MacBook Pro, a framed lithograph on the wall from a series I designed for Nine Inch Nails (although you can't see it because of the glare), and, most important of all, the Bib Fortuna ceramic mug, currently in use as a pen holder. On the sides of the room you can't see here are a couch, a big filing cabinet full of cables and equipment, a giant sexy printer, a bathroom, and a walk-in closet that you can't walk in because it's filled with all kinds of crap.

I snapped these while I was playing around with an early version of the tree people drawing. Here's a close-up of my main work area, since someone had asked about how the Cintiq tablet fits in with my monitors and keyboard:

(click to enlarge)

Just so this post isn't all boring pictures of my office, I'll throw in a little gem I happened upon while cleaning out some old hard drives: When I was young, I never had a video camera. I begged and begged my mother, but she said they were too expensive. It wasn't until I was around thirteen that my Uncle got a HI-8 camera, and he let me borrow it a couple times. For some reason, the first thing I wanted to do with it was make Claymation movies. So, at age thirteen, here is one of my first experiments with a video camera:

I filmed that on HI-8 with the camera's fancy frame-by-frame recording option, then I recorded it onto VHS while dubbing in the audio live through a Radio Shack microphone hooked up to a cassette recorder running out to the VCR. It's pretty amazing how much easier things have gotten even since my childhood for kids who want to play around with video. I borrowed my Uncle's video camera again a couple weeks later and began work on an epic sequel, which involved a mad scientist kidnapping Mr. Clay's newborn baby and enlarging him into an angry giant monster who wrought unspeakable carnage upon a Micro Machine city. I never was able to finish it though, and sadly, I think the footage is now lost. Anyway, more fun samplings of my absurdly violent teenage artwork can be found here.

Watching You Watching Me

2008-01-14T20:53:00.000-08:00

The other day I was walking to the grocery store around the corner from my apartment, and I noticed that one of the trees was watching me. I've walked past this tree probably two hundred times, and somehow I never noticed that it had all these creepy eyes all over it. It's a pretty fantastic tree:

It even has a creepy face.

Anyway, the tree inspired me, so I decided to draw it, with lots of outlines so I could really put my new Cintiq tablet to the test. The large, expensive Cintiqs are gorgeous (like an Apple Cinema Display that you can draw on), but the advantage of the smaller one is that you can put it in your lap and relax and draw on it like a sketchbook, turning it and tilting it as desired. So I drew a lot of lines, here and there over the past few days, and I ended up with this:

(click to enlarge)

By the time I was done with all those lines I didn't particularly feel like coloring the thing in, and I kind of liked it black and white anyway. But it does sort of feel like a page from a coloring book, so I thought maybe someone else might want to color it in. If you happen to feel like coloring, here is a large version you can play with - and do please email me the results, or post them in the comments.

When I was a little kid the local grocery store used to have occasional coloring contests on their brown paper grocery bags. A picture of a turkey at Thanksgiving, or pumpkins at Halloween, that sort of thing. It always annoyed me because with brown as a base color, none of my brilliant Crayolas came out the way they were intended. But I did it anyway, and one time I won five dollars, and it was immensely exciting. This will sort of be like that, except you'll have a nice white base color, and no one is going to win five dollars.

P.S. In case you don't know, a nice way to color a flat image like this is to set it as a multiply layer in Photoshop and then do the color on a layer underneath it.

New Toys, Monsters

2008-01-04T18:22:00.000-08:00

Among other things, I got a really nice set of Letraset markers for Christmas from Tam, a noble effort to get me off of my computer occasionally and maybe draw things on real paper. Go figure, my first instinct was to make some textures with the markers and scan them into the computer.

Then I got myself a Christmas present, the drool-worthy Cintiq pen tablet with LCD display. If you're serious about digital art or photography, you need a Wacom pen tablet - you just can't get any kind of results using a mouse. My lovely Intuos3 served me well for quite a while, but I'd always been eyeing the deluxe Cintiq line, which adds an LCD display into the tablet, so you actually draw directly onto your image! With the new 12wx making Cintiq tablets more portable and affordable, I finally had an excuse to dive in. To break in my new toy, I did a quick sketch today, drawing the outlines on my tablet and then coloring them in with some texture I made with the Letraset markers:

(click to enlarge)

This was a spiritual successor to a little doodle I did on the airplane the other day with the markers:

(click to enlarge)

I'm looking forward to spending some serious quality time with my new toys - the results, of course, will be showing up here.

Idol Worship

2007-12-28T01:23:00.000-08:00

Inspired by the small bit of snow that fell today up in the Seattle area. Even a tiny bit is fun when you've grown accustomed to seasonless Los Angeles.

(please, click to enlarge)

This also makes a fun wallpaper.

Happy Holidays!

2007-12-23T10:31:00.000-08:00

This is my Christmas card this year. Hope everyone is having a great holiday!

(click to enlarge)

This is also available without text as a wallpaper and a print.

I'll leave it up to some intrepid Jewish artist to draw a family of menorahs lighting people on fire.

P.S. Here's the original pencil sketch and the more detailed digital sketch.

Helicopt-O-Bot

2007-12-12T04:47:00.001-08:00

I haven't had time to do any sketches lately, mostly because I've been busy trying to fulfill all the print orders. Is that irony? I'm not sure. Anyway, here's one I did tonight - I ended up with two versions, and I can't decide which one I like better, so I'm posting both. I also made a wallpaper version.

Version 1 - click to enlarge:

Version 2 - click to enlarge:

Here is the original sketch, which has Helicopt-O-Bot looking a bit too robotic. I changed him to look more like something an inventive child could put together out of items from around the house and believe it really works.

New Look, Prints, Wallpapers

2007-12-03T03:02:00.000-08:00

Today's sketch is the SketchBlog itself, as you can probably see. The quick-and-dirty layout I made when I set this thing up was starting to bum me out, so I decided to redesign it. I put together a nice, slickly-designed layout. Modern and hip, with lots of rounded edges. Very "web 2.0." But then a giant tentacled insectoreptilian sea monster thing came and destroyed it. Oh well. That's what I get for watching Naked Lunch while looking for design inspiration.

Anyway, a bunch of people have emailed me asking about prints, so I finally got around to setting up a print store. For now, I'm doing really nice fine art prints of a few images from the site, with each one limited to 100 prints. I'll add other images in the future.

I've also gotten some requests for wallpapers, so I set aside a place to put those, and I'll probably get them up tomorrow the first selection is up now - more will be added to that page in the future.

Hyperion Holiday

2007-11-30T04:51:00.000-08:00

(click to enlarge)

This one was definitely the result of seeing this classic poster, which I have in my kitchen, and then somewhat subconsciously thinking about the cool look of Disneyland's great retro Tomorrowland travel posters, and probably also this scene from Forbidden Planet, and very possibly the desert-like alien terrain often depicted in Spaceman Spiff Calvin & Hobbes strips.

A Plumber In The Third Dimension V2 - Now With Goomba, and Wallpapers

2007-11-25T20:00:00.000-08:00

I never felt like I'd quite finished the Mario portrait I did a couple weeks ago. The background was rushed and I didn't have time to make the bricks change over as they should have. So since it proved to be so popular, I figured it was worth expanding upon a little bit. Here's version two, now with a Goomba:

(click to enlarge)

Update: You can now order a limited run print of this image here.

WALLPAPER VERSIONS (RIGHT CLICK AND CHOOSE "SAVE AS" TO DOWNLOAD):

Standard Monitors (2400 x 1800)
Widescreen Monitors (2560 x 1600)

P.S. Someone asked me for an update on George Bush Super Ultimate Adventure. It's going well, just very slowly. There are a lot of graphics left to build and I have to find spare time to chip away at them. I'm going to keep at it though, there's been a ton of interest in the game so I'm hoping to get something playable out ASAP.

Perhaps Something Darkly Floral Devastating Sealike?

2007-11-19T12:21:00.000-08:00

This is a strange little piece I did yesterday for my good friend Ollie's band The Oohlas, for their submission to Playboy Magazine's "Rock The Rabbit" project. Basically a variety of bands submit designs meant to combine their personality with the Playboy bunny logo. The designs will then be put onto t-shirts sometime next year, and the prototype shirts are auctioned off with proceeds going to the AIDS charity LifeBeat. A good cause, a good band, and a good excuse for me to make seaweed turn into fish turn into bunnies turn into seaweed turn into a creepy deep sea diver.

(click to enlarge)