Tobywan

About Tobywan

My brain makes me draw stuff that isn't there, and this is where I put it.

Happy Mother’s Day, 2020!

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there. It is a very weird situation to try to celebrate the people in our lives that have played such vital roles during a pandemic when we can’t, or shouldn’t, be physically close. Whether it’s my own mother, my grandmother, my wife, my sister, my aunts…all the mothers in my life and my family have had a positive impact on my life, and it’s very fair to say I wouldn’t be here in one way or another without their love and support over the years. I love you all, and thank you.

Being

So, Uh, How’s Everybody Doing?

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. I’ve been mostly keeping up with the shorter posts on FB and Instagram, but I thought I might get a little rambly, so I figured a blog post might be better.

First up, we are all healthy and fine in our household, and so far I can say the same for my extended family. Having the kids home to do virtual learning is going okay, but it has plenty of challenges. It’s about as disruptive to my studio plans as summer vacation, but the important thing is is that everyone is safe.

Right around

New Shirt Update: It’s Plunger Monkey Dynamo Time 2.0!

Hey, look at that! Another new shirt already! We are 3 months in to 2020 and I’m still on pace for my goal of 6 new shirts this year, so that’s good. I turned this one around relatively quickly (for me), but then again, it’s not a super complex image. Then again this is me we’re talking about, and I could very easily have spent another several weeks spinning my wheels, noodling around on details and variations and second guessing myself and never being ready to call this one “done”. I have found that generally I need to force myself

New Shirt Update: Samurai Helmet

A bit longer in the making than I intended, but my first shirt offering of 2020 is finally done and available over at my Etsy store, Plunger Monkey Designs!

This started as a potential embroidered patch design for a karate friend’s bike club, but we went with a different image. I liked the sketch enough, and I had thought about a samurai helmet design before, that I turned it into a shirt (and potential sticker). This is another “theme” image, I have several other ideas to turn this into a

Year End Review

As I currently type, we are being smacked with a snow/ice/sleet/thunderstorm. Hopefully the power stays on long enough for me to finish this and get it posted.

2019 has simultaneously felt incredibly long and stupidly short (like, really? There’s only one more day left of 2019?). Before I get into everything that did (and didn’t) happen this year, who wants to check out the annual xmas card envelope art? Anyone?

Your opinion is irrelevant, because I’m going to show them anyway.

This was the first envelope I drew in 2019, and it went

Inktober 2019: Now With 100% More Plungers!

I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to do Inktober at all this year. I’ve had too many other things on my mind, too many other projects and outside “real life” stuff vying for my attention. I figured I had to at least give it a shot, though, and if I was going to bother, I needed to come up with something to make it even more interesting for myself. That’s when I decided to incorporate PMD. I fell way behind right out of the gate, but the first several prompts inspired some pretty clear images for

Enter the (Forest) Dragon

I’m pretty proud of that title…cuz, like Bruce Lee…Enter the Dragon was a Bruce Lee movie…my wife’s name is Lee…I’m a big Bruce Lee fan…I’m a big fan of my wife…it’s allllll connected.

Anyway, it’s September, so that means it’s time once again for another annual tradition I started (this being the fourth year): drawing a dragon for my dragon-loving wife for her birthday. I do these in Procreate on my iPad Pro to take advantage of the time lapse feature, but the fact that I use it so infrequently leads to problems for me. I have to relearn how to

STOP! Moleskin Time.

Hey, look at that. I posted last week and said I would post this week, and here I am doing what I said I was going to do. Time to post the annual summer camp moleskin sketches.

As I mentioned last week, summer camp this year was an emotionally challenging one for me. It is the first year since I became a leader and started attending summer camp that my middle son did not camp. My oldest son has always been more on the extroverted side with plenty of self-confidence when it’s needed. He was the one who wanted to join

Obsession, Compulsion, and a Hobby.

So. This is my first post in how long? I have no idea where the summer has gone.

That’s a lie. Time passes as it always does, and I continue to be oblivious to it’s passage until a big enough chunk of it to be noticed has slipped away. I also am aware of the things I’ve been doing or otherwise occupied by that have used up that time.

Today is another day in a long line of days like today: too many things I want to do, too many things I need to

An Age-Old Question: Chicken-Squid or Squid-Chicken

Well, which is it?
This began as a sketch in Affinity Designer on my iPad so I could experiment with some of it’s features I downloaded it for (like mesh transform and texture maps). I never got around to that as this sketch took on a life of it’s own. I switched over to Affinity Designer to turn this into a complete vector image. It was incredibly time consuming, but I love the crisp edges and lines that come with vectors. And as is normal for me, I put a

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