Here is he, with a side-by-side comparison of the original sketch. I’m glad I tried it, but I still like my original sketch better.

I like that one. Maybe I should put it on a T-shirt.

Here’s how it works:

1. You e-mail me a great idea of something for me to draw.
2. I’ll read your great idea, and check if it fits the following rules:
• No Disney stuff. (I’m not sure if it’s a conflict of interest, but just to be safe.)
• No obscene stuff. Basically, if you visit my site often, you should have an idea of the types of things I would and would not draw.
• No boring stuff. I’d rather fill screenhog.com with interesting things.
3. I draw it.
4. If I choose your idea, I’ll e-mail you back, telling you when you can expect to see it on the site.

That’s basically it. Of course, I have no idea how big of a response there will be to this little contest, and if I’m flooded with ideas, I certainly won’t draw everything that comes my way. At the very least, though, this should be a fun little experiment.

Ready to send me your most brilliant idea ever? E-mail away!

As it so happens, the art challenge this week at work was to use a color palette full of blues and purples to create something, and since Peanut and Jay are two different shades of blue, I figured I’d kill two birds with… hmm, that might not be the best way to put that.

Have you ever seen “For The Birds”? It’s a hilarious Pixar short film that you owe yourself to see if you’ve never done so. Well, today, I had the grand idea of making fan art of this short.

So, I first make myself a sketch:

So far, so good. I then begin to color in the big bird and one of the small birds:

It’s at this point when I start asking myself “How am I going to do these feathers”? And do I have an answer for myself? No. I do not. The only way I can think of to do the feathers in Photoshop would be to actually draw every feather on every little bird, and I’m going to be honest with you… that would take a very long time. Hair and feathers are difficult and time consuming to create in any art form, and I didn’t have that kind of time on my hands tonight.

So, you’re stuck with unfinished art to look at. For some, this may be a fascinating insight into the behind-the-scenes of my art creation process. For others, you’ll look at it for 5 seconds and say “Screenhog’s lazy!”.

Yes. Yes I am.

As opposed to spending a lot of time crafting mine, I decided to do it really quick and rough this time:

That color scheme is called Zen And Tea. It’s from an Adobe website called Kuler, which I’d recommend checking out if you’re interested in color schemes. Zen and Tea was a random color scheme that we found. It immediately made me think of watercolor painting, so I decided to give that a shot:

I don’t particularly like watercolor painting… I find that it’s more unforgiving and less accurate than dry media like pencils and pastels, and even when I’m simulating watercolor with Photoshop, that still seems to be the case for me. Oh well… stretching yourself artistically is what these art challenges are all about.

If you click on the image, you can see the full size version that I worked on (Warning: dimensions of image are most likely bigger than your screen size).

This image took approx. 6-7 hours to make, I think. I worked on it sporadically over the last few nights. I’m happy with how most of it turned out, although the rock certainly could use some work. It probably wouldn’t have taken so long if I hadn’t worked at such a large scale, but I kind of liked working at the size that I did… it made it much easier to work on details.

Estimated time spent: 4-4.5 hours.
Medium: Rough pencil sketch first, then a vector drawing in Flash, and finally the shading and background done in Photoshop. Photoshop’s great for shading, but I can never get the clean lines with it that Flash is so good at creating. I just wish there was an easy way to export a Flash file with layers as a Photoshop file with those same layers, I’d love to know it… the only way I’ve figured out how to do it is pretty tedious.

Anyway, this week’s challenge was “Sick House”. Yep, basically, to make a dwelling of some kind that was suffering an ailment. I had two pretty good ideas, and here’s one of them:

It’s a barn with chicken pox.

If I feel so inclined, I’ll draw up my other idea soon. I warn you, though… that one’s pun is just as bad as this one’s.