Wedding Collateral

In case you haven’t heard, I’m getting married this September! I designed my own save-the-date cards and invitations.

The invitation features watercolor cartoons of some plants, animals, and fungi that hold significance in our relationship. I’m blurring the address here so nobody tries to crash. 😉

The save-the-date card features a stylized portrait of myself and my fiancée.

On the back of the save-the-date, I snuck in a drawing of our dog, Marlowe, inspired by midcentury illustrators like Robert McCloskey and Louis Darling.

"Magic: The Gathering" Box Wizards

A few months ago I started a Magic: The Gathering league with my friends. To kick things off right, I bought everyone league-specific card boxes and illustrated them with each player’s wizard avatar, inspired by prompts from the league members. Check the image captions to see what everyone requested.

P.S. the league format is really fun and accessible to every level of players. Each person opens four booster packs on the first day and plays only with those cards. At each subsequent session everyone opens one more pack, and you continue that way, simulating the experience of a bunch of kids who can only afford one booster pack a week.Trading between league players is allowed, but non-league cards are strictly prohibited to limit competitiveness and cost.

Has anyone else tried this?

Zipper the Cat: My team's entry for Indie Speed Run 3.0

If you've only been following me through this site, you might not know that I've recently been teaming up with Benjamin Hanken to make our own video games under the banner of Team Tugboat. Ben writes the code, I do the art, and we put our heads together for the overall design and gameplay. It's a great partnership!

Our latest project came out of the Indie Speed Run even, where we were randomly assigned a theme (Arrogance) and an element (Zipper) and then challenged to make a game out of them in under 48 hours.

The 48-hour version of the game was missing a couple of key features, so put in a couple extra hours later on, and you can play the resulting "director's cut" in any desktop web browser (keyboard required) at http://teamtugboat.com.

Here's what it looks like...



...and here are the controls:

Left/Right: Move
Up: Jump/Grab Curtain
Down: Drop from Furniture
Spacebar: Kick Objects

Escape: Pause
Mouse Click: Start/Restart Game

Bug Wizard

Character portrait for a wizard I made up the other day for a role-playing game.

His name is Mike, and the colony of bees he carries on his back is possessed by his familiar daemon, T'odd. What are they building in there??

I understand the rules will be pretty loose for this game, so in advance of a proper character sheet I wrote this list of his possible abilities.

  • Lift objects up to forty times his weight, put them in a pile, and live in it. 
  • Build sophisticated tools and structures out of mud and his own saliva. 
  • Produce hauntingly beautiful music from his armpits. 
  • Eat, and live off, practically any organic substance—including poisons designed specifically to kill him. 
  • Generally SUPER hard to kill. The trick is to maneuver him between two fingernails and then squeeze like the dickens. Or, put him in a trash bag for two weeks so he suffocates. 
  • Enchanted fly-wing robe makes the most annoying sound imaginable, right in your goddamn ear. Also it lets him fly. 
  • Walk on water, walk up walls, squeeze through cracks. Gets into your food somehow, even if it's in a sealed jar. 
  • Emit a pheromone cloud that, when inhaled, perfectly communicates a specific message, thought, or feeling. 
  • Mind control, but only if he can trick you into swallowing the pungent "royal jelly" that he horks up from a gland in his throat. 
  • Other excretions include a nutritious honey, silk, slime, venom, and an overwhelmingly rank substance known to grasshopper enthusiasts as "tobacco juice". He also smokes real tobacco, so his breath is generally pretty bad. 
  • Shrink down every night and sleep in a cozy matchbox full of fluff.

Mike was born human but he's metamorphosized many times since then, both for fun and for profit. The first time was the hardest; he didn't have any spinnerets back then, so he had to get his friends to help out with the cocoon. He's much better at it now, but his skeleton is always pretty floppy for a day or so afterwards.

Mike's favorite food is potato chips — and yes, he can make his butt glow.

Evil Apples promo images

I've been meaning to update this website now that I'm a full-time freelancer, but I've been kept busy by, among other things, my fantastic working relationship with Evil Studios, creators of the mobile game Evil Apples.

Every time they release a new deck for the game, I make an image card which they use to promote it. Here's all ten of the promo images that I've made so far, as they appeared in the Evil Apples mobile app. It's free, so make sure to grab it and invite me for a game!











Now available for contracts and commissions!

Hire me!
For the first time in about ten years, I'm now working full-time as an illustrator/designer!

Please contact me with all kinds of projects, including watercolor/ink and digital illustrations, comics, storyboards, animation, interactive design, and anything else you think I might be able to help with! 

Flat and hourly rates available by request.

pete@doesstuff.com

NWS: Romantic watercolor paintings (and one digital print) of dongs

These are my contributions to the Big 500 Art Show, organized by Peoples Art of Portland. Watercolor on wood panels (and one digital print).





There was a fifth piece, inspired by Disney's Lady and the Tramp, but I didn't get a photo of it before it sold. 

Hourly Comic Day, 2014

My first time participating in Hourly Comic Day, which is a sort of cartoonist holiday that's observed by drawing an autobiographical comic about each waking hour of February 1st.

Epilogue to that one: I finished the Back to Bed, Emily ordered something else, and we both loved our breakfast. I recommend Equinox to anyone reading this. 

Next, we shopped some vintage clothes at Animal Traffic, another lovely establishment, and I took a side trip to The Modern Man Barber Shop for some beard balm from Man's Face Stuff–a company run by local cartoonist/renaissance man BT Livermore.
Guardian Games is a really cool place.

Show Off will be a casual-type interview show where my girlfriend Emily highlights local talent in all its forms. I'll try and remember to add a link here once the first episode is edited and online!

Fenrir will be opening in March



Face-In-Hole

Earlier this week I got a last-minute commission from the Portland office of Yelp.com to paint them a portable face-in-hole board (no, there doesn't seem to be a better term for that) that they could carry around Portland's Holiday Ale Fest. They're posting all the results on Facebook, and here's one of my favorites so far:



I'll be at the fest myself this evening, so come get your picture taken with me! Just make sure you put your whole face through the hole, or won't come out very good.

(acrylic on foam core, 37.5"x28")

Birthday Card for Maria Montoya

Our friend Maria has a very strong and specific pet peeve... so Kari had the idea of an interactive present to bring her the kind of satisfaction she'd otherwise never get. She handed me the concept and let me handle the execution, so here's what we got:

Front cover:


Pull on the tab at top:

(you can pull on the bottom tab to reset)

Open the card:


Open the small envelope tucked into the left flap, to find closed-mouth stickers:


Position the stickers over the corresponding faces:


Here's Maria working on the stickers:


Here's the finished card:

...and, I'm back.


Wordpress is real great and all, except nobody told me about the security holes by which someone can apparently hijack your admin account and pump your whole site full of malware. I managed to export all the posts and comments that went on there, so the archive you see here is an unbroken run.

Here are a few chalk drawings I did on construction paper at other people's houses, while I could have been wasting my time being social:

Yourchild.png
Yellthing.png
Aouuhhhgh.png

SIX: finished

Did this months ago, but my blog was down so I never posted it here. Inking was very rushed, but at least you can almost tell what's going on now.














Full disclosure: I stole all the dialog for the above comic directly from NBC (it is the first few minutes of the first episode of Friends) and combined it with characters which I stole from Marvel Comics (the original Sinister Six from The Amazing Spider-Man.) I believe this is fair use of both properties, but let me know if you feel otherwise.

SIX: a work in progress.

I went to the third annual 24-hour drawocalypse at Cosmic Monkey Comics this past weekend, and I didn't draw 24 pages in 24 hours per Scott McCloud's challenge but I did draw and start to ink the first 12 pages of a new comic starring the original Sinister Six -- which is a super-villain team from Spider-Man comics.

I scanned it and threw in some very temporary lettering so you can read what I've done so far — but it's still a work in progress, so I've left the blues in to let you know that the art's exactly as I left it at the end of the 24-hour time limit.