I am a major sucker for the Flight anthologies, and really all illustrated anthologies. Where I typically have the attention span of a particularly flighty goldfish for longer stories, I prefer the style and compact narrative in short stories. That being said, I typically don’t much have the patience and attention span to even get to the stage where I’m illustrating the story and for most people the phrase “book I’ll never finish” refers to something they’re reading. In my case, it means all the stories I write and never get around to drawing. For me, all it takes to start building a story in my mind is the cover, which is often my favorite part of any visual story. I love the art of the book cover, but in many ways, it’s become a bit of a lost art, with many, if not most book covers being nothing much more interesting than a hastily photoshopped together collection of images that might have something to do with the story or at best a simple illustration developed by the designer themselves. Some day in the future I can only hope that will change, but until then, we’re all going to have to settle for what individual and underground artists can create.

Hopefully, my own contributions can be completed before I find myself distracted by and dropping it in favor of other projects. I’ve got a lot of them. I’ll be posting actual artwork from the stories as soon as I finish them far enough to feel like it’s worth sharing.

I’ll post the close-up at the end of this post for your viewing pleasure.

This one is the direct result of my own juvenile sense of humor being mixed with one of my best friend’s even more juvenile sense of humor. The titmouse joke isn’t exactly new or unusual to the world, but it’s a favorite all the same. She jokingly suggested I make it into a t-shirt and me being me, I took it upon myself to actually do it. It’s been a few weeks since I did a t-shirt design, especially one this involved, so it took me longer than the single day I set for myself to finish it in, but I like it even more for it. That being said, I think the joke is pretty self-explanatory even if you’re not familiar with what a tufted titmouse is, so I don’t have much to add, other than I’d wear it if I had boobs I was wanting to show off.

Edit: It’s been brought to my attention that this illustration has gotten a lot of interest from Stumbleupon in even just the last couple hours, so I’d just like to say thanks for the support of all the stumblers who have come by and given it a thumbs up. It means a lot.

Chances are pretty good that given my refusal to give up on it, that this little sketchbook is eventually going to somehow find its way on a combat deployment or two with me and have a few other adventures before I one day finally manage to finish it and return it to the sketchbook project people. But that being said, I have a feeling they’ll be the sort to appreciate the story behind it when it finally makes it’s way home.

… Right?

Two and a half weeks is entirely too long a time for me to go without actually posting anything up here, so rather than waiting until I’m done with some of my longer projects, I instead elected to take a sketch from my giant pile of them and turn it into a quick finished sketch. Lo and behold, I give you my sentiments on what it is to be an illustrator and designer via partially nude garden gnome. I personally find garden gnomes to be the perfect answer to all life’s problems. Girlfriend broke up with you? Chuck a garden gnome and threatening note through the window. People always stealing your spare house key? Hide it under a gnome. Aggressive mole infestation? Garden gnomes can plug up those tunnels. A garden gnome can solve almost anything with a little creativity. You can even use them as a stand-in for taking the time to draw a realistic representation of yourself.

In other news, I also recently started a Society6 shop where I’ll be posting all of the things I do to make them available as art prints. Nobody asked me, but hey, why not? It’s nice to have the option to spend all your well-earned money on awesomely frivolous things. You can find that spot here: http://society6.com/AlexGroh

New art time. I’d expected to finish this a week ago, but that was before I poured Coca Cola all over $3500 worth of computer equipment and spent a week and a half taking apart my computer and tablet to clean them out. ( Aside, tablets really don’t have a lot inside of them. ) All that’s fixed though, no major damage other than a couple bucks on q-tips and rubbing alcohol, so this is the first new image of my latest personal project completed, Little Warriors, illustrating the type of warrior each bird reminds me of. It’s a nice “for fun” project that just lets me do something interesting without blowing my brain out on heavy thinking like most of my commission projects usually do. Eventually I’m hoping to find myself a good place to present them as a gallery set, but for now this project is purely for my own interest.

While I don’t want to post the images here, primarily because I have a personal issue with just taking images from another site or person without permission to do so and I haven’t yet been able to get permission, I am going to post the link to the set below. It’s more than worth your time to click through and check it out. Unfortunately, most of the posters don’t seem to have any artists or other info identified, but that’s not exactly unusual for poster art.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigdaddyhame/sets/72157603566651280/

New artwork time. In my spare time, when I’m not doing business-related things, I’ve been doing a lot of drawing related to my secondary job as a national guardsman. This is the first full piece resulting from that. What I’m posting is a digitally produced version, but in the end I’m hoping to eventually turn this into an 18″x24″ hand-pulled poster. I’d like to pull together an entire series of these posters and artworks based on the theme in the near future.

And for those in the know, yes that specialist’s insignia is upside-down and yes that was intentional. One of the more embarrassing things I did right after I enlisted was to accidentally put my own insignia on my patrol cap upside-down because I wasn’t paying attention. Thankfully, someone caught it before I could go walking around looking like an idiot, but I still ended up feeling like a dope. I was tempted to toss a nice powdered doughnut in there too, but I’m not quite that out of shape any more and I was focusing on the current aspect of these two worlds of what I do colliding for this print.