The geology student in her natural habitat. This is why there's not much from me as of late - I still draw, but mostly it's petrographic thin sections and stratigraphic columns these days. Taken in Anza Borrego Desert State Park, Borrego Springs, CA.
anza_jen.jpg - 2004-05-12
Spring has sprung! I'm not particularly good at gardening, but I like it anyway (although the plants involved may have another opinion).
octospring.jpg - 2004-04-22
Character sheet for Sarah Troutman of the character I designed for her. Since I was the one responsible for character design, I figured I was the one who should probably go nuts figuring out how she looks at various angles (and how those extra limbs attach and fold up) before anyone else went crazy trying. I also thought it might make up for the fact that it took me nearly a year to complete the request. Now, you too can draw little flame-faced tanamartens at home and all over everything! Have fun, Maui.
syzsheet.jpg - 2004-04-01
It's not particularly complex, but for some reason this image makes me very happy. It's either because it's the only one that didn't have to go in the 'incomplete' pile due to lack of time, or just because it's the best and cutest seal I think I've ever drawn. Oh well, back to work.
waterkin.jpg - 2004-03-06
A meeting of opposites - sea and sky, earth and fire, male and female, warmth and coolness. For Sarah Troutman, who requested a pine marten mix when I met her nearly a year ago (that's her hybrid with the wings); I used a songbird instead of the requested parrot or parakeet, since I felt it blended better. Pine marten and black-eared tanager, least weasel and spotted eagle ray mix.
tenchi.jpg - 2003-11-23
I swear he gets exponentially cuter every time I draw him.
sethsit.jpg - 2003-10-27
Creature design for a project that never went anywhere (I have a lot of those lying about). It's one of my better ones, though.
waterbeast.jpg - 2003-10-27
Ozy, Millie, and Danh (my own character, a brush-tailed porcupine of the Vietnamese persuasion), goofing around on someone's floor and drawing with crayons.
om_danh.jpg - 2003-07-08
I normally don't follow trends because I'm too slow, but this one I couldn't resist: Jhen holds up a startled-looking realistic octopine while a horribly chibified version of her fishes off the rock. I really need to learn how to draw decent waves and seascapes.
octoreal.jpg - 2003-03-07
I haven't drawn this pair since my style shifted two years ago, so it was well past due. Castor and Pollux revamped, carrying one of their cubs across a Grecian terra-cotta background. Based on a photo of Elsa the Lioness.
caspolcub.jpg - 2003-03-01
Fear the octopine with the scaled-down escrima sticks! Drop shadows are not my friend.
siniwali.jpg - 2003-03-01
A sketch of my multihybrid, Yellow Peter (human, leopard, jackrabbit and gazelle), who I just can't stop drawing like a Final Fantasy character - he's just too cute this way! My inked and finished drawings tend to lose a little vitality in the cleanup process, so I left this one as a sketch. 3H and HB pencils.
yelopeter.jpg - 2003-03-01
Kuthixo som:Sigidi was the second of the cockatrice necromancers I created; he acts as sort of a dark opposite to the extremely girly Thula. This was originally done so someone else could draw him in a Spellshocked spinoff (Guild of Monsters), but I think that's been put on hold. Incidentally, posing wings when you treat them like *real limbs* instead of stuck-on things is a pain.
kuthisheet.jpg - 2002-10-31
It has nothing to do with Halloween but it's too horribly cute to pass up. I give you the camel-sized litoptern _Macrauchenia patachonica_, drawn sometime this spring after watching too much 'Walking With Prehistoric Beasts' again. God, if anything I've drawn looks like it waltzed off a Disney set, this is probably it.
macrau.jpg - 2002-10-31
I drew this last spring, but apparently never got around to uploading. A black-and-white image of Thula somli:Ixesha, redesigned to look a little more like she does when drawn by Mark Freid for Spellshocked, playing with a cluster of will-o'-wisps.
thulamk.jpg - 2002-10-31
This world - is made - of love and - aw, to heck with it. Anyway, I found a tutorial for that horribly cute 'chibi' style a while ago, and after some fiddling figured out how to make it work. (I suspect I don't stylize as much as I'm supposed to, though). Be afraid.
chibipine.jpg - 2002-08-23
One of these days I'll stop revising this character, I'm sure. This isn't one of these days. She looks a lot cuter this way, anyway. That thing around her neck is a Chinese-type coin purse - spiritual feathers and amulets are nice and all, but aren't really useful when you have to carry housekeys and student I.D.
yellonew.jpg - 2002-05-04
Love meeeeeee.
jingles.jpg - 2002-03-07
Gong he xin xi and welcome to the Year of the Horse. I'm not Chinese myself, but San Francisco has one of the biggest Chinese new years around, and hereabouts it's reaaallly hard not to notice. It's more fun than Valentine's day, anyway. . . no lion dancers in the latter. Krishva courtesy of Kristin Jacques.
cnewyear.jpg - 2002-02-10
Calypso redux. Drawn in the new style with a body build that further accentuates the slender, drawn-out form of the natural fish, which you can see in the stylized female next to her (only females get so large, and so toothy). I don't know if I should be amused or frightened that I can make even deep-sea fish look sexy.
calynew.jpg - 2002-01-24
Decided I needed an avatar - or, as I prefer to think of it, a visual shorthand for myself. An honest one. So no cute nickname for this one, no tall slender body build or happy-peppy expression. Just my hat, my medical-alert necklace, the long distinctive hair and my usual facial expression. Apparently, the animals I make people think of most are porcupines and anything with multiple sucker-studded arms. . .
octopine.jpg - 2002-01-20
Hooray for mutts! Yellow Peter (human, gazelle, leopard, blacktail jackrabbit, domestic cat) is an older one of mine that recently got a redesign he's not too sure about. All he needs now is a female cohort that will invariably fall in love with him and a ridiculous-looking sword bigger than he is. Perhaps attached to a gun for double the overcompensation.
yelopetr.jpg - 2002-01-16
I'd intended to put this up earlier. These are two panels from a special page I did as a favor for "Spellshocked" featuring Thula, the character I created and gave them permission to use. . . I swear I actually managed to give myself cavities with these drawings. The whole page can be found in the archives (www.spellshocked.com/archive.html) under "Thula Special."
ssthula.jpg - 2001-09-26
No flags, no eagles, no blood. Only what I remember. A city standing half-empty at midday, emptier than I'd ever seen it at night; talk of death on the buses; schools, colleges, and all government buildings ordered evacuated; and above all else, a pall of fear - how could this have happened? Were there others? Could we be next? Familiar places seemed alien in the shadow of the destruction, and nowhere felt safe, even this far away.
yelowrun.jpg - 2001-09-18
More dragon biogeekage. Where Seth's species is basic, primitive dragon stock, Mkiluwa's represents a high degree of specialization. She represents an attempt to create a dragon that could exist under real-world conditions (which is why she can't fly, has no fire, and isn't the size of a flipping building).
mkinew.jpg - 2001-09-08
This is what I spend my free time thinking about - behold, one big page full o' biogeekage! Seth's still not physically possible (there are few good ways to make dragons that are), but at least he's logically consistent. He has two tongues because it looked cool on paper, by the way.
bioseth.jpg - 2001-08-18
My response to all the empathic, bonded-with-humans, aliens in bad sci-fi books that SOMEHOW MIRACULOUSLY look exactly like dragons, horses, or cats. A migrant between the summer steppe and the winter taiga, the granther is a powerful empath; it can sense predators and projects powerful waves of fear to drive them away. However, like all real-world large herbivores, it's also skittish, capricious, and dumb as a brick. To be colored later.
granther.jpg - 2001-07-18
Take one part dicynodont, one part sailbacked pelycosaur, and one part muskrat; mix well. The end result is the mudgrubber, a beaver-sized and turkey-brained swamp herbivore that uses its tusks and beak to dig for corms and tubers or to defend itself. To be replaced with the color version when I actually figure out how to color a background, so bear with me here.
mudgrub.jpg - 2001-06-13
Quick sketch/ink done for a friend. The mazeworm is a large, subterranean scavenger that dwells under the surface of Delyria (the SpellShocked world setting), and is known for swallowing explorers whole to spit them out elsewhere at random. Drawn using the Cambrian onychophoran _Aysheaia pedunculata_ as a primary base, with the shields of it's Chinese cousin _Microdictyon sinicum_ thrown in. I'm mostly proud of the soft, hydrostatic-skeletal look of the animal - like a titanic caterpillar.
mazeworm.jpg - 2001-06-07
Someone showed me a couple of NPCs they're making for a MUSH I play on, and I couldn't resist a crack once I saw the descriptions. Garrick (huge, rather stupid horse/cape buffalo fighter in plate mail and army fatigues) and Shria (psychotic troodon monk in a Chinese jacket) belong to Ian's player. Hopefully she doesn't mind me giving Shria a pair of ox-ear swords, but she was too short for anything else I could think of. . .
npc.jpg - 2001-06-04