A pinup for Steve Hamaker’s Fish N’ Chips comic. I’m a fan of Sixties power pop. Their outfits are straight out of an old Kinks publicity shot. The sketch:

October begins the day after tomorrow!

In less than a week’s time, my website and blog will be overtaken by the spirit of Halloween. The wind will howl. The leaves will crackle. Ghosts and goblins will practice their terror with ghoulish delight. My ghastly goal is to produce one petrifying post each day as we count down to All Hallows’ Even.

I’m participating in this countdown with a bunch of other bewitched bloggers. Countdown to Halloween will have a list. It will be…

… a tomb of dread, a virtual cornucopia of amazing stories, photos, comics, reviews, crafts, toys, songs, radio plays, jokes, and general commentary on a holiday that a lot of us hold dear.

Get involved, foolish mortals.

Children’s Hospital in Cincinnati is putting on the “Cincinnati Walks for Kids” event next month to raise money for the hospital. This is my shirt design for Jen’s team at work.

Visually inspiring is the game Aion. I played the open beta last week and this screencap is from a gameplay cutscene where your character gets wings and the ability to fly. Gorgeous character models, but the gameplay was nothing new. I’ll pass for now.

This is from the comic tryout. Sketches of teachers. I went with (C) for the man, whose likeness was based on Kevin Murphy.

This is a piece for the fine folks at Yog-Sothoth.com. The project has yet to be announced, but as you can tell from this illustration, it has something to do with Canada.

After dinner at the River Crab in St. Clair, we all stood around the river and made faces at each other.

Today, I moved my blog from the old address (blog.glimbit.com) to here (ericmsmith.com/blog). Just seemed to make sense for it to be here. Like before, it’s my place to post my work, specifically, my sketches and illustrations. I’m also going to continue to post things that inspire me, visually speaking.

The old posts are in storage. If there’s something you want to see from the old blog, just let me know.

Onward!

The “illustrations” category contains my completed (abandoned?) paintings and drawings. They’ll often end up in my portfolio, too. I try to keep that page fresh.

For example, I’m currently working on a project for Yog-Sothoth.com, a deck of cards with different insanities that players can draw at random. It’s for use with the “Call of Cthulhu” roleplaying game. I’ve tried to make the artwork somewhat realistic with different ink lines for each piece and lots of textures. The setting of the game is the 1920s, a fun period to draw.

‘Hmm…this scroll seems to…hnnh…erk….summon some sort of…fnk fnk …. bizarre… weerp…. creature. Hmm.’

This is the card art for “Uncontrollable Tics and Tremors.” Here, Lord Shaftesbury Fortesque peruses some unusual documents – a magic scroll – and develops some unfortunate twitching problems.

(Nick Marsh has helped out tremendously with quotes and scenarios for the different insanities.)

The Sketches category will hopefully be my biggest category. I’m trying to get into the habit of sketching everyday again, even if it’s just for 5 or 10 minutes. If the stats they quoted in art school are true, only about 1 in 1000 of these posts will have a sketch that’s any good.

To start things off, here’s a character design for a comic project submission that bore no fruit. I’ll post several pieces from the project over the next few weeks.