I'm Not Sure If This Is Sweet...

...or just sorta odd.
Maybe it's a little bit of both, in a Swedish-humor kind of way.

I made this picture for my mom for Mother's Day (in case that wasn't clear enough). This door-to-door salesman with a sun-for-a-head goes around town with his rain cloud buddy, Pete, selling his sunny outlook on life. He's probably the type of guy that tells you to "keep on the sunny side of life." Why I chose him to send my greetings to my mother isn't exactly clear to me yet.

She got it in the mail yesterday (even though I did next-day shipping last Friday - obviously that worked out) and I think she found it as a nice surprise. I suspect my mom was more impressed with the fourteen dollar frame from Target than the actual picture, but that's OK.

A God and His Orca

Behold! The almighty Neptune, King of the Ocean. It would appear that he's late for his manicure . Turns out that his newly acquired, more fuel efficient orca is stalling in the middle of the sea. Serves His Majesty right for trading in his six-dolphin chariot for it.

This should be viewed bigger, so if you have the patience, click on the image to get a more appropriate view. If anyone has any suggestions as to how to post things bigger on blogger, I'm all ears.

This piece was fun to do, and certain aspects of it turned out nicely. It is an attempt at Mr. Madison's character design challenge this week (or "CHADES" as he likes to call it), in which the theme is "Hairy Gods." Perhaps I could've upped the hairiness. Oh well.

This was one of my more extensive uses of Photoshop (just to color), and seeing how much fun I had making it, I look forward to doing more color work. The challenge for many of us is to keep the organic quality of a real brush stroke and to "downplay the digital." Whether I succeeded in this or not is up to you, but in any case the colors pretty much turned out the way I had hoped.