Captain Lot's Space-o-Nautical Alphabet of Alien Life was a project to make a children's book dummy. I'm always a fan of making up weird alien designs, so that felt a good path to take. Captain Lot himself was designed for simplicity, so I wouldn't have to focus as much on him while I drew the wackier scenes of aliens boppin' around.

These are arranged roughly in reverse chronological order, dating back to around 2021 or so.

I've been experimenting with using 3D modeling in Blender as a method of obtaining a more accurately lit tonal layer. Additionally, I plan to use this to create proportionally consistent creature art, with an increased sense of realism. I had luckily already been taught basic 3D modeling in college, so I was able to pick it back with fairly little trouble.

If you don't, he'll keep leaving crumbs on everything.

In 2023, in preparation for senior thesis, my professor had us create a self-guided project based on an approved pitch. My idea was a record jacket for the band Electric Wizard's album Come My Fanatics with a gimmick implicit to the design: when you open the jacket up, there'd be a hole in the middle of the right side through which you could see one of three images. The pictures would be printed on either side of the record, with an additional pic that'd show through when the record was removed.

I was commissioned to draw a person's dog as a monster, with the very open notes of making him lanky and with sharp teeth. After editing together some supplied reference photos to make a vague tonal reference to work over, I decided to mess around with the idea of it being a mimic dog of some sort. Initially going more crablike in the sketch work, I slowly decided more and more on trying to fit mantis shrimp anatomy into the form of a dog. I decided its arms and mandibles would form the face as a method of protective mimicry to allow them to enter homes at night to eat from people's cabinets and small animals. I reconsidered how the back legs would connect a few times, before settling on something that'd be more biologically consistent with shrimp anatomy. I've noticed that personally, the disguise works oddly better when its very close up; pretty spooky!