It’s another Monday which means more new art. Today’s New Art Monday drawing is of Vanellope von Schweetz of Wreck It Ralph fame. I saw this movie for the first time a couple of weeks ago and it instantly became my 2nd favorite Pixar/Disney movie of all time (really neck-n-neck with my favorite of all time, The Incredibles). Normally not a Sarah Silverman fan, I thought she did a fantastic job with the voice acting.

As I have been needing to refine my female figure forms I decided to take a crack at drawing Vanellope and I feel like it came out pretty well. I really like the coloring too since I did a couple of different little things to sort of punch up my coloring ability a bit. I’m still not completely happy with my female figures, but I’m on the right track. Pun intended!

Saturday my wife and I traveled to New Mexico to spend the day and evening with her family. My wife’s parents are pretty much exactly like us, geek loving fun people, so it’s pretty much always a given that we’ll be watching some Dr. Who whenever we are at there house. This time was no different except for the fact that this time the comic below piped in my head and wouldn’t leave until I’d gotten it out.

Since I was mobile all I had at my disposal was my Kindle Fire, Wacom stylus and the Sketchbook Mobile app. So I want to work and in the course of the exercise I learned a little bit more about the app than I knew. I also toyed with the Copic markers features in the app as well as worked with other apps to do some color correction. Obviously I’m still a very long way from ditching my traditional desktop and laptop computers for tablets, but I’ve taken the first step toward that path, maybe. At any rate I had a lot of fun making this comic, so enjoy and spread the word

Today is Monday so that means a New Art Monday. This week I’ve posted up the redesign for the title character of the comic, Robot Friday. Actually, this redesign came about because I was interviewed over at www.drawmearobot.com so I took the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone on this one and I gotta say this redesign came out pretty darn well.

When I first created the comic I sort of rushed designs on both Robot Friday and Thomas, mainly because I wasn’t even sure how to design characters very well at that point. But over time I’ve sort of refined both their looks, but I’ve stayed away from doing very many strips with Robot Friday just because I’ve never really been that satisfied with his overall look. So, when the opportunity came along for me to sit down and draw a robot I knew I needed to do the redesign as well.

I’d been toying with his redesign for a few months anyway, so I kind of had an idea of what I wanted, but it wasn’t until I saw the short movie Paraphernalia that I finally hit on the design you see now. So, rest assured that there will be new strips coming with Robot Friday in them shortly and enjoy today’s new art

If you follow my Twitter or Facebook feeds you will know that about three weeks ago or so I drew all four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on a lark and they have been met with amazing positive response. So much response that I have now decided to draw the Thundercats and a whole list of other stuff that I have always wanted to draw but just never got around to it.

At the same time, as I’ve been doing more drawing, I have really settled into this style of drawing and am having a lot more fun with it. I am having to fight myself to keep my drawings simple and to the point rather than add in a bunch of fluff that isn’t needed, but I am feeling real satisfaction for the first time in a long while about my illustration now.

As I neared the end of the turtle run I had a lot of demand for Casey Jones as well as the other turtle’s cast (who I will draw as well, I promise) so Friday I had to knock this drawing out too. In the process of this drawing I really started to understand how well designed the whole TMNT cast is, they are just pure joy to draw!

One final thing before I wrap this post up. I’ve been thinking a lot about the comic update schedule and how my offline, real life schedule have been playing out this year and I am nearing the conclusion that I may begin updating on Wednesday’s and Friday’s instead of MWF and rename Monday as New Art Monday! This isn’t set into stone just yet, but I am really considering it. New Art Monday would basically consist of exactly what this post has been; a new piece of art that I have never posted on the site before, but post it in the blog. I’m thinking it might get me more into the habit of blogging and keeping the blog fresh as well as the comic. What do you guys think? Would you be cool with a two day a week update schedule on the comic and once a week new art post in the blog? Of course I’ll be posting art and other stuff in my Twitter and Facebook feeds as well as to here. So let me know what you think in the comments section and keep spreading that comic word

A couple of weeks ago, on a Saturday, I lay awake in bed, in the dark and frustrated. I hadn’t had the best of days drawing or doing anything creative really and it had pissed me off. At this time I’d been struggling for a while with what felt like creative burnout and I was trying to figure out how to push through it without just shutting down for a while (which I won’t do because I lose momentum when I do that and then it’s just that much harder to start back up again than it is for me to just suck it up and push through it, but I digress).

Anyway, I decided to just unwind a bit with my Kindle Fire and just sketch digitally in Sketchbook Mobile with my Wacom stylus. Just mindlessly draw. I had never really tried to draw the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles before so I thought I’d give one of them a shot, but just have fun doing it and not over think it. So I drew Donatello, liked it, posted it to Twitter and felt good about myself and went to sleep.

The next morning I awoke to a ton of positive response about the sketch so I inked and colored it that night and posted it to a sketch group I’m a part of on Facebook this time as well as Twitter. I got even more positive response (more than anything else I’d ever done) so I started to think I might be on to something here. I started to think I might should let this style (a style I had sort of adopted about 4 years ago in the early days of Robot Friday) dominate for a while as well as fight myself on getting too knit-picky and additive with my work.

So over the course of two weeks I kept drawing and posting and people kept loving them. I became happier and less frustrated and I’m even having fun drawing again. I’m really excited for the future of my work now. I’m going to draw the Thundercats next and morph the Robot Friday comic into this style as well. So if you dig these turtles let everyone know and share them about and keep reading and spread the comic word about Robot Friday too. It just gets better from here