Have A Doctor Who Year!

With the year drawing to a close, a lot of people are thinking about time. Thinking about time inevitably leads me to thinking about the Doctor. Doctor Who, you ask? Exactly! Ha-ha-ha!  One of the great things about being a freelance artist and crafter, is that sometimes people ask you to make really cool things. Towards the end of this year, I had the opportunity to make several cool Doctor Who Items, and now that Christmas is over I can finally share them with you!

My friend Carter was looking for something to give to his wife for Christmas other than the usual Jewelry, so he asked for the Tenth Doctor (Played by David Tennant) in an illustration acting as Hamlet giving the speech to the skull of Yorick.  I was familiar with the fact that Tennant had performed Hamlet before, but hadn't actually seen it before. So I looked it up on YouTube. I'm not sure whether the whole thing is available there or not, but I was able to watch several scenes, and it was a very good update on the classic play. This illustration was a lot of fun to do, and I look forward to doing some more like it in the new year.

I think, looking at my work, that it must be obvious that I'm a child of the eighties. The Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) will always be my doctor, when I think about the series. He's the one that I watched with my brother on Sunday afternoons, hanging over the side of my mom's bed. Over the summer, I'd made a few Doctor Who Peg People as I was trying out some new things for new products. In the fall, one of my friends bought the four that I'd made (Ten, a Cyberman, the Empty Child, and Rose Tyler) and asked me to make 9 more and three play houses to go with them. Her only stipulation was that they all had to be Doctor Who characters and buildings. WOW! It was a lot of fun picking the characters that I wanted to make into peg people, and an interesting challenge translating them and the buildings to this simplified play format. It also allowed me to come up with certain "rules" for the construction of the houses and the details of them, which I may not have ever done with just working from my head.

  

Amy's House

  

Martha Jones, Amy Pond, Eleven, and Rory Williams

 

The Tardis

 

 The Silence, Vashta Nerada, and a Weeping Angel

 

Dalek

We hope you all had a wonderful 2012, and that the worst day of the New Year is better than the best day of the last one. Until next time, take care and be good.

Your friend,

Jeffrey

I Say It Every Year...

Every year, I say I'm going to start my big personal projects earlier...I'm going to finish them earlier...Every. Year. Then, I spend most of September through November apologizing for having too much other work to get it done, and I feel like I look like a flake here on the blog. Enough of the apologizing for now, though. I want to show you all some of what I've been working on, and I also have a couple of progress shots (in varying stages of doneness) from the calendar to show you.

 

We do a lot of shows, and I spend part of the time there working on small commissions like these drawings and coloring in marker. They're quick(ish), fun, and something that I can do on the go. Most of these were done a couple of weeks ago at the Archon St Louis Sci-fi/Fantasy and gaming convention in Collinsville, IL.

 

One of my recent larger commissions was for a gift from a bride to her groom. Apparently, he'd proposed to her in a haunted house, so it was only fitting that they be chased by zombies on their wedding day. Ha-ha-ha!

The inked crow from the Fox and the Crow story.

 

And the fox, in ink and color. 

And the color "flats" for the calendar illustration. I thought this story would work really well as a shadow puppet style illustration.

And finally, the inked characters for the "Emperors New Clothes" illustration. Ha-ha-ha!

Well, it's been great stopping for a minute to chat, but I have a ton of work on my desk, and it's not going to do itself. Until next time, take care and be good!
Your friend,
Jeffrey