HAY GUSY!
I was so inspired by Alamo's guide to playing the druid class in World of Warcraft, that I decided to make a painting to memorialize his hysterical post, especially after he returned to teach us all about Burnin Croosaid.

Here's a color study I made after a few initial sketches.

Here's a more detailed drawing that I transfered to the canvas with a projector.

Launchy

On the topics of applications, one of my new favorites is Launchy, a keystroke launcher. Sometimes typing is faster than pointing and clicking. That's the idea here - press ALT+SPACE or whatever combination you set in the preferences and a little window pops up. As soon as you begin typing it begins guessing what you're looking for based on the items in your Start Menu or whatever watched folder you've assigned.

It's especially handy if your Start Menu is a mess, like mine used to be.

LAUNCHY

ColorPic

ColorPic is a handy color grabber. It'll pick colors from any window, wherever your mouse pointer is pointing. Not perfect, but handy and free. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to save the palettes in any conventional palette format, but in the app's directory there's an XML file if you need some portability for the palettes you create in ColorPic.

Get it here.

On the topic of palettes though, Adobe's Kuler Flash app is great.

KULER

Snowmen Rest Their Frosty Feet

Here's a drawing I started on paper with a prismacolor pencil, and finished in Photoshop. I wanted to make a Christmas card, and when I started thinking about snowmen coming in from the cold to warm up by a fire, the irony of the situation was too compelling to let the idea wither on the vine.

A full res version is on my flickr site.

Out of Place

While at the beach last summer I saw a man on TV with an unforgettable face. I paused the show for a few moments to sketch him. I tried to paint him at the beach, but it didn't work. It wasn't until I revisited the sketch on a 16x20 canvas that he started to come back. Here's an early look at the painting.

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And here's a little more progress. The face is coming along, but I'm not sure what I'm doing with the shirt.

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And here's the final version. For the text, I used Clarendon as a reference, because it matched the TV show. There's some glare on the canvas though from the lights. I need to fix that. The small version kind of clips out the darks.