Above is a piece of art created for the Beautiful Grim Art Auction, an auction put together by fellow illustrator, Daarken, and animator, Lief Jeffers, with the purpose of raising money for Daarken’s girlfriend, who has a lot of medical bills due to her fight against breast cancer. Please visit the Beautiful Grim website to learn more about Cat, as well as the auction. And please consider either donating some money or purchasing a piece of art from the auction once it goes live next year. There are close to 200 artists contributing to the auction, a testament to the love and good hearts of so many talented individuals in our industry. I’m sure you’ll be able to find a piece of art you’d love to buy.

The piece I created, entitled “Blood Flower”, will be an 18″x18″ print, signed and remarked with an original drawing. The print will be custom framed. Daarken plans to put together a gallery showing of all the art as well, so please check the Beautiful Grim website for details and updates.

I just finished another personal piece of art. I am creating a series of monster illustrations styled in a similar way. This illustration is inspired by Mayan aesthetics, albeit loosely. You can see a larger version here. The first monster in the series is seen below, which is inspired by East Indian aesthetics. Enjoy!

Appearances aren’t always what they seem. Some of us have learned to put on a tough exterior in order to survive in our surroundings. How some of us manage to escape the “hood” is a mystery. At times, it’s like you have someone watching over you. Someone protecting you. View a larger version of this piece here.

I am happy to announce that “Welcome to Monster Isle” is now online in digital form through a very innovative and exciting website, astorybeforebed.com, which has partnered with my publisher, Immedium, Inc.

astorybeforebed.com allows anyone with a webcam to record themselves reading a book from their online library, page by page. The user can then purchase their reading of the book and share the link with friends, family, or whoever. Like a picture-in-picture feature on television, the recipient can then see the video of you reading the book, along with the actual book on screen. Check out the site and view the demo. It is pretty cool!

The website also offers discounts to men and women serving in the United States Armed Forces.

For a direct link to the Monster Isle book, click here.

For the past few months, in between various other jobs, I’ve been working on a series of 12 animal illustrations for Ferdy Christant , a developer that is creating a very unique social networking site for animal enthusiasts (I know I’m over-simplifying it) called Jungle Dragon. A while back, I created the lizard icon/mascot for the site. The illustrations will be used in various ways throughout the site, as well as marketing materials in the lead up to the site launch date. Well, I finally completed the final illustration and wanted to share all of them with you.

Each of the illustrations was completed entirely in Adobe Photoshop CS4 without any preliminary sketches thanks to Ferdy giving me free reign. I used various reference images for the creatures and started with a blank canvas using Photoshop’s pen, marque, shape and brush tools. Each image took from 4 to 6 hours to complete.

Advanced Photoshop magazine 63 is now available. Visit the official website to learn more about what’s in this issue. I have a five page tutorial that walks through some of the steps needed to create the above Yeti image. I talk about my technique and which Photoshop tools I use to create my artwork.

The idea for the Yeti artwork came straight from Editor, Julie Easton and Senior Staff Writer, Adam Smith. It was a very tight deadline so I just rolled with their original concept of a Yeti (Abominable Snowman) in a wintery scene, Northern Lights in the sky and some other element/s in the background. Julie had suggested possibly a cabin or another creature looming in the distance, but given the time frame, I had to keep it simple. So I added a snowman! Go buy a copy of the magazine and see how the image was made.

I’ve done two previous tutorials, issue 36 and issue 41, for Advanced Photoshop magazine that also go into my Photoshop technique.