It’s in the cards: My ATC creations from zombies to superheroes

Most craft and art stores carry blank packets of Artist Trading Cards. It’s your job to fill these tiny canvases with something amazing.

Comics on the Brain has written before about its enjoyment of the whole ATC art movement — where artists create little masterpieces on paper the size of a baseball card and then either trade or sell them with other artists and fans.

Well, we still love making them and later today the CotB staff is heading out to an ATC workshop where we’re hoping a bunch of other artists will be creating their own.

We can’t wait to see what’s in store.

As for us? Well, we’ll be sticking to cartoon-style versions of fiction’s finest! From the Lone Ranger to a zombie bookmark, we’re having a lot of fun with our ATCs.

We hope to see some of yours!

Church Sketches X: Back in the Mix

Do you know how long its been since I’ve put up a collection of doodles & sketches? It’s literally been years. And while it’s been a long-long time, I have managed to keep collecting all my sketches.

In fact, I currently have a bursting-at-the-seams folder with all sorts of stuff inside — logos, character sketches, super-hero designs and random “funny animals.”

This group of sketches comes from my “random” subfolder, where I throw all the things that aren’t my own or just too weird to bother doing anything else with.

In the image above, we have a Scarecrow, followed by a Bruce Timm-style Captain Marvel. From there, we have Santa Claus, the Marvel character Jack of Hearts and finally a grumbly monk!

This batch includes a random guy who reminds me a bit of a Dick Tracy villain, a scruffy dog and two robotic creatures.

We start off here with a steroid-loving version of the Phantom, cartoon dinosaur, a sneaky Batman, my favorite cyborg — RoboCop— and then some random guy.

This one starts off with an athletic bird, a salamander rocking an awesome belt, a demon-type of creature and a knife-wielding penguin!

Here we start out with a rather emotive superhero, a poodle to counter the earlier penguin, a singing jester and a rolling wave, which I really like since it turned out really well and I really need to practice drawing water!

Looking for more in this series? Here you go!

• CHURCH SKETCHES — Rabbits and dwarves
• CHURCH SKETCHES II — The Peril of Hypno-Croc
• CHURCH SKETCHES III — Heroes and oddities
• CHURCH SKETCHES IV — Jesus and the Easter Bunny
• CHURCH SKETCHES V — Of Angels and Underdwellers
• CHURCH SKETCHES VI — Catching up
• CHURCH SKETCHES VII — Calling all Heroes
• CHURCH SKETCHES VIII — Heroes and villains of the Blackout
• CHURCH SKETCHES IX — A Fine Collection of Supers
• CHURCH SKETCHES X — Back in the Mix

An Iron Man sketch

The other day, Comics on the Brain sat down to draw everyone’s favorite armored Avenger, Iron Man. We finished our pen-and-ink sketch a few hours later, as seen above.

The great thing about Iron Man is that his armor has so many variations that he’s a lot of fun to draw. Beyond his original yellow armor and his familiar Bronze Age armor, there’s still a bazillion different variations.

Where does this one lie in the samples below? Somewhere between Models 29 and 30.

Halflings: The toons of D&D

Comics on the Brain loves role-playing games. There’s nothing more fun than sitting around a table with some buddies and delving into an imaginary world where life and death is decided by the role of a die.

These sorts of adventures might seem boring to some — especially the generation that has amazingly sophisticated video games that allow you the customization at the level that the we enjoy on tabletop games.

There’s even a level of interactivity in the new games.

But somehow tabletop games offer something a little more. There’s the game in the mind’s eye that is shaped entirely by the person playing it — unlike those video game players who rely on someone else’s imagination.
When CotB plays Dungeons & Dragons — or any other RPG — we like to construct our vision on paper.

The images, drawn with a ball-point pen, and can be seen around this post are what we did as we were playing a halfling wizard a few campaigns ago.

We tried drawing a new image for every game session. Sometimes those sessions went well, sometimes they went bad for our little spell-flinger.

Of course, these are very cartoony and D&D often isn’t but come on — it was a halfling.

They see the whole world as a cartoon.

Rhinos, hurling, robots and zombies

 

One of the things the Comics on the Brain staff enjoys most of all is drawing and creating things. With that in mind, we’ve built up a decent selection of products that you can buy on Zazzle, the custom merchandise website.

The little window below here shows a bunch of the items CotB has created over the years. Please buy a whole pile of it! Want something customized? Or your very own design? Just contact us here!

 

Visit our Zazzle store for all sorts of options on what you can buy, including items to wear to “The Hobbit
” premieres, your favorite gaelic game teams, to the bar or just because you want a rhino on your shirt.