#galleryupdate

Gallery Update: My Face x100!!!!

With all the ups and downs in studio time I experience, I’m pretty happy to have pumped out the 100th cartoon self portrait. I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable drawing myself without picture reference and I’m much more willing to push expressions to their extremes without crossing that undefined “realism” line. Now that I have 100 under my belt, I’ll be looking to change things up a little. I haven’t figured out how, yet, but I think this milestone is a good point for it, whatever it will be. I’ll still continue doing the daily self-portraits, they have become a

Gallery Update: 80 Shades of (Toby) Gray…

If you’ve been following me on the Book of Faces, then you know I’m still chugging away on the whole manga self-portrait thing. My style has been developing, and I’m quite pleased with several of the drawings, but I don’t think I’m producing consistent enough images yet. I’m getting a little too caught up in the abstraction of the linemaking (something I’ve always loved) and often forgetting to pay attention to the underlying anatomy. I’ll get there, though. Here are the next 32 portraits, collage-style.

Manga-style self-portrait practice #56 is NOT supposed to

Gallery Update: Pet Portraits

Hey, another week, another update! Consistency!

I’m still trying to catch up on some of those blog post ideas I’ve mentioned several times now. I have a few more to go. I finished up a page in 10 Things and I was slowly trying to wrap my head around the next, very complex page when I got the go ahead to rework another project, which will tie me up for most of the week, I think. I’ve continued with the daily manga self-portraits. It’s getting tougher to come up with interesting expressions, but I’m still finding ways to have fun with

Gallery Update: A Recent Exploit of Plunger Monkey

Alright, time to do a little posting catch up from December-ish 2015…

As a select, special few of you know first hand, when something positive and worth celebrating happens to someone I care about, I tend to take the opportunity to craft them a custom Plunger Monkey card to commemorate the event and express my congratulations and shared joy. Graduations, weddings, births, those kinds of things just scream for Plunger Monkey’s perspective or reaction.

Back in December, my childhood friend, Aaron, tied the knot with the love of his life, Junko. They are two wonderful people and I’m very happy that they

Gallery Update: A Jedi’s Strength Flows From the Force…

I think I’m finally calling this piece done. I’ve had this idea kicking around in my head to do a series of drawings depicting myself and Plunger Monkey doing various things. In many ways, he’s kind of like my Hobbes, I guess. But I could also argue he’s kind of like Yoda to my Luke…hence the idea for this drawing. That, and, I’ve had a lot of Star Wars on my brain lately. Actually, that’s not unusual, but more on that in a minute.

At first I was thinking I’d just do a line drawing…

A digital painting of
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50 Shades of (Toby) Gray

Alright, just to clear the air: I have not seen the movie nor read the book, and I have ZERO intention to, but I couldn’t resist the play on words as a title for this entry. Forgive me.

Anywhat, *gasp*, right? A second post this week? I told you, I have a bunch of plans and ideas, I’m just struggling to make the time to get around to them. But, since I did pass a small milestone this week with drawing my 50th manga self portrait, I didn’t want to wait too long without doing something fun to mark the occasion.

Inktober 2015 Recap

Now that we’re half way through November, I’m finally getting around to doing a recap of my first Inktober. In case you missed it, Inktober is an annual challenge started by artist Jake Parker. The goal is to do one ink drawing every day for the month of October (or as many as you can manage) in order to improve your skills with ink as well as foster the good art habit of daily practice. When I decided to take up the challenge, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to do a drawing every few days, much less every

A Recent Read: The Metabarons

Inktober is all wrapped up for this year. I managed 31 self portraits in 31 days. I’ll put together a big post showcasing and comparing all of the images later, but if you want to check some of them out now, go to the TOBY’SBRAIN FB page (if you love me, you’re already following it. If you’re not following it, you don’t know you love me yet.).

Anywho, in the meantime, I thought I’d share an epic graphic novel I recently read: The Metabarons.

The-Metabarons-cover Bonjour! I come from France!

This 536 page,

WIP: A Bunch of Stuff

Still crazy busy around here, but I’ve actually been somewhat productive in the studio. I’m still plugging away at the 10 Things project, currently working on this page:

Yes, I am “cheating” a bit by continuing to copy and paste that army, but I do want to finish this project in my lifetime. The real trick, and what I hope will bring some added entertainment, is on these combined pages I’m trying to show increasing levels of interaction between the various “things”. Every time something new is introduced, the previous “things” react to

WIP: 10 Things

Some time last week I finally dusted off the 10 Things file and got working on it again. I’m currently working on page…well, I don’t know which number it will be, I haven’t been keeping track. But, it has 1 hen, 2 ducks, 3 squawking geese, 4 limerick oysters, 5 corpulent porpoises, 6 pairs of Don Alverso’s Tweezers, and 7 THOUSAND Macedonians dressed in full battle array on it:

Toby-Gray-10-things-1-7-WIP These last pages are getting complicated…

I have corner registration marks roughed in on a separate layer still turned on here. They just give

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