Here is one of the illustrations I am working on for a client. There are many more to follow. Greg did the ark background drawing; I drew Noah and animals. I love drawing animals...

A more definitive take on the archer. These style of drawings will be more in your face, inviting the viewer to feel more emotion. I really need practice on foreshortening and so this one really needs to be worked out more for a good solid clean up. Photoshop is amazing. I can draw peices and parts of the drawing and size everything to the right proportions, "frankensteining" all together. Photoshop makes me feel like cheating; it makes everything so much faster and easier, I actually feel guilty when I use it. Anyone out there remember the lazy Lucys we used to use in school and thought that made illustration so much easier?

Quick thumbnail of another character for another story. I like the energy and attitude of this pose. Will eventually flesh her out. She will travel maybe with a hawk and her companion will be a dragon.

Here is a cleaned up version of LeoPardine. Eventually this one will be digitally inked, then colored in Photoshop for practice.

I am working on a large freelance project for a toy company. This means I will not be able to work on LeoPardine for awhile. The images posted here are not new. I posted this loose sketch because I kind of liked it. It is Eve, from the biblical Adam and Eve story and I liked how fresh the drawing turned out...

Even tho facial features have not been established, this is how LeoPardine could look like in the front. I am amused at how nouvea she appears to be.

An attitude pose. In the future she will be accompanied by her big cat companions, cats that may look like saber tooths with snow leopard markings...

Drawings of some of the creatures that will live in her world, the Eohippus, or the Dawn Horse. The real thing lived at only 12 inches high and some web sites claim that they are not the relative of the early horse at all, so now I am confused. Can anyone shed light on this? They are forest dwellers (in my story), and perhaps the big cats do not eat them because they omit a foul smelling fluid--like the skunk.

This a visual development drawing of the character for LeoPardine. I am trying to get used to drawing the headdress on her correctly.

This is the male counterpart to LeoPardine, Spirit Brother or Zomin. When Greg, my husband, submitted a figure drawing portfolio to Disney Consumer Products, his handwriting on the drawings were sketchy at best. He would write the time down, 5 minutes, 10 minutes. The people reviewing his drawings said, "Hey, his name is Zomin!" Then Becky Wong, who is a good friend of ours, looked closer and said, "Wait a minunte...that doesn't say Zomin...it says 20 minutes!"

Spirit Brother will have a Cave Bear headdress.

Much research to do..I would love to get to the zoo, see the Cowboy Museum for references on Native Amercians for this story. The more I go along, the more Native American these characters get. I still need to do more research on the Ca. redwoods and do more sketches of trees and streams and big cats..all to create the world LeoPardine will exist in...

These are some studies I did in Spain back in October 2005. It was at the end of the famous Ramblas Street near the coast. There were about 6 of them radiating in a circle. The bottom lions are mine. One of my favorite exercises is to draw them in my own poses after drawing them from life.

Will be drawing lots of big cats for this story, so I am very interested in big cat anatomy. Before getting married and having a child, I would go to La Brea, and draw the bones of the big cats there. It is a sacred place, where I'm sure, many spirits rest from the multitude of life which died in the pits. Big cat bones are, in my opinion, some of the most beautiful bones there are; all curved and tapered.

Leopardine for now has no name. I have yet to establish her true facial features. I am still doing a lot of character exploration, who she is, where she lives. I am also designing her environment and her companions. In the future I will have her in many more action scenarios and attitude poses. My goal is to get her to the Comic Con in a few years but first I must generate many more images.
I will use this blog mostly for LeoPardine, but will post other stuff as well.