#penandink

Gallery Update: Moleskin Madness! Part C-Bell Unleashed

Yeah, I’m loving having this tablet to sneak in some extra work on. Not as much drawing on it at night as I would like yet, a lot of learning curve stuff for file management and customization and such, but it’s great for updating this place.

Speaking of updating, I’ll give a quick rundown of what I’ve been working on before tackling the subject of this post. I didn’t get anything done on IPMDT! today. I made a requested tweak to my latest cover for one of L.S. Gagnon’s witch books, then I started working on the next one. It should

Gallery Update: Moleskin Madness! Part 2-The Camping Strikes Back

Yes, kiddos, this is indeed my THIRD post this week. Having this tablet allows me to putter away at things during times when I’d normally not be able to be very productive (though right now, given the time of day, I could be in my studio, but I’m still recovering from being sick, my foot hurts, and lounging on the couch with my leg up is much more appealing than being in my studio chair right now).

Alright, time for round two of the recent moleskin sketching bonanza. These sketches were done while I was at Camp Carpenter with my youngest (still

Gallery Update: Moleskin Madness! Part One-Enter the Random

Phew! I’m back! I managed to get quite a bit of drawing in during my two weeks at camp, thanks to my trusty moleskin sketchbook. However, I’m so behind on updating this site, that I still have some moleskin sketches from before I left to share. I don’t want to overload anyone with a super image intense post, so I’ll do this in three parts (all with snazzy titles). This particular post will contain the stuff from before camp, the second post will be from my first week of camp, and the third post will encompass my sketches from the

Life and Stuff…

Wow, it’s been quite a while, hasn’t it? There are lots of reasons for that. Summer vacation started, which means my studio hours get seriously truncated and interrupted. Two of my sons decided to have medical problems that required some surgery (one of them an emergency case, but both are fine and back to driving each other nuts). I finally got the help I needed to do some serious repairs to my barn. Basically: life. It’s a struggle not to get swept up in the frustration of not having enough studio time, let alone time to keep this website up

Gallery Update: Happy Day After Mother’s Day!

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there, particularly my own mother and my wife. You may recall the lengthy retrospective-type post I did last year of all my hand-drawn Mother’s Day cards that I’ve been making for my wife since our first child was born. Well, this is 2016’s:

Toby-Gray-MD-2016 Those are supposed to be stars spelling out “Happy Mother’s Day”, but I don’t think I went dark enough with the sky for it to “pop”.

All this drawing I’ve been doing since the Inktober challenge has really

Gallery Update: It’s Tick Season…Yay.

It’s been a little while since an update. I’ve been plenty busy both in the studio and out. I’m wrapping up the camp shirt design, I think I’m done with another project for my cousin (still waiting for final word), finally finished up a gift/project for my nephew that became more involved than I originally thought (I got carried away), as well as finished up yet another project (that I can’t post about until next week…you’ll know why when you see it), all while churning away on the comic strip. Outside of the studio, there’s been a few camping trips

Gallery Update: Milk, A Body Good, It Does

Firstly, be sure to check out the latest installment of It’s Plunger Monkey Dynamo Time! if you didn’t already. I think I’m going to try to post new installments on Tuesdays and Fridays, we’ll see how long that keeps up, though. If I can’t stay far enough ahead, I may drop back to once a week.

Secondly, I didn’t spend time in the studio yesterday because I was volunteering at my youngest’s elementary school for Art Day. I helped run a few different stations that saw the kids producing different types of art, filling in where ever the staff needed me.

It’s Plunger Monkey Dynamo Time!

I’ve been hinting at it for weeks now, but it’s finally up and running! The official It’s Plunger Monkey Dynamo Time! comic strip! I had no idea when I embarked on the Inktober challenge last year that it would eventually lead me to something that’s been a pipe dream clattering around my brain for years. One of the many reasons I had never featured PMD in his own comic of any type was that I was having a hard time nailing down his personality and how I wanted to “use” him. I had this vague sense of who he was,

Gallery Update: Animal Totem Cards

If you’ve been following me on The Facebooks, you know that a big event in the real world happened last week: namely my middle son and his den crossed over from Cub Scouts into Boy Scouts. I have very strong and fond memories of my own crossover, so as their den leader, I felt compelled to somehow connect my experience to theirs. One of the memorable parts of our Arrow of Light ceremony was that our Cub Master, dressed in full Native American regalia (which isn’t kosher these days for good reason), gave each of us an animal

Gallery Update: Plunger Monkey in the Mail

The end of February isn’t too late to talk about last xmas, is it? Or the last five xmases? I’m still catching up on blog post ideas I had but didn’t have the studio time to put together. Anyway, at some point over the last several years, I started trying to personalize a few of the annual xmas card envelopes with some PMD themed randomness. I think I started out with just 3 recipients, but now I’m up to 6 or so. If I had the time (and the ideas), I would do it for everyone I send a card

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