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Showing posts with label Tuf-Gurlz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tuf-Gurlz. Show all posts

Sunday, March 7, 2021

6,500+ Followers on Instagram


 https://youtu.be/dwvRXUsdfjM

My Instagram feed, @monstergram7, has recently surpassed 6.5k followers. To mark this milestone, I present this stop-motion video of me creating a little piece of art to commemorate the achievement. The featured quintet is Little Tuffy and the Tuf Gurlz.


From left to right: Cat, Monica, Little Tuffy, Barbara and Maui-Anne. These thrill seeking surf girls appear in supplemental comics within my self-published comic book Unstoppable Tuff-Girl.
 
6,500 thank yous to everyone following my Instagram. 


Bonus: pictures of my quite low-tech film set up for my stop-motion drawing demonstration.

Like a bridge, a yard stick is suspended about 20cm (about 8 in.) over the drawing surface between two book easels. At the top is an LED portable light to help fill the room’s overhead lighting.

My cel phone/digital camera strapped to the yard stick with a simple rubber band. Ready to film the drawing process.

Wednesday, September 5, 2018

Long Beach Comic Con 2018


Monster Enterprises, LLC presents
Bryan Mon (That’s me) (Disney Consumer Products)
&
Merrill Hagan (Teen Titans GO!)
returning to


Artist Alley:  table A-13


Long Beach Convention Center
300 E. Ocean Blvd
Long Beach, CA 90802

September 8-9, 2018


#LBCC2018




L B C N U!

Saturday, September 10, 2016

Long Beach Comic Con - Long Beach 2016 (final)


Monster Enterprises presents
Bryan Mon and Merrill Hagan
return to 
 Long Beach Comic Con 

Artist Alley:  P5

September 17 & 18, 2016
Long Beach Convention Center
300 E. Ocean Blvd.
Long Beach, CA 90802


Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Sketches from Disneyland

Last Sunday, July 17th, 2016, I spent the day at Disneyland with friends. It was the Park’s 61st anniversary of it’s opening day. The Disneyland Resort has bag check security gates that visitors (guests) must pass through before entering the courtyard where the ticket booths are and exist still outside of the parks’ entrance gates. In the morning, the bag check gate lines were longer and slower than the entrance gate lines by a factor of about 8.  These sketches are an almost hourly account of my impressions of the day.

Our group of 3 got in the stand-by line for the first performance of the new “Frozen” live stage show in Disney California Adventure (DCA) theme park.  If you catch this stage show, Disneyland’s Disneyland Forever fireworks and DCA’s World of Color water fountain show, you can hear the song “Let it Go” three times in one day’s visit.

Sometimes, as with this drawing of Merida, what I draw has more to do with samples of nearby conversations than actual sights or attraction experiences. I saw the Disney Junior puppet show for my first time and was pleasantly surprised, as much with the young audience’s engagement as with the show itself.

Hopping back to Disneyland, we enter Tomorrowland, which is pretty much temporary “Star Wars Land” now. Hyperspace Mountain is the same good attraction of Space Mountain with John Williams’ music. Okay, it’s a little more than that.

Returning to DCA at our Fast Pass time to the renewed Soarin’ Over the World (Formerly Soarin’ Over California). It’s both better and cheekier than the original attraction movie, which in my eye cancel each other out for a “meh” experience. Mr. Kylo Ren was looking at me from the Park guide.

Main Street was starting to fill up with folks for the night time Paint the Night parade, and we headed to the magical Peter Pan Flight dark ride. Here’s Tuff-Girl’s pup Wichita with Tinker Bell. Then the parade, this time viewed not from a Main Street vantage but in the it’s a small world mall. Disclosure: Snow White is not in the parade. Disclosure #2: this is not how you paint the night with magic.

Disclosure #3: this is not how you “step into the magic” as the parade’s song encourages. And then... time to go home.

But hold on, I didn’t. I hung around a bit more, lingering in the Disneyland Gallery and later meandering through Tomorrowland. It only just hit me that night that the Starcade shop in Tomorrowland is 100% Star Wars themed merchandise. Then I went home.

The next day I drew this bonus drawing. According to the information on the internet, both Tom Sawyer Island (as an attraction experience and not merely an island in the Frontierland located Rivers of America) and the Davy Crockett Explorer Canoes celebrate their 60th anniversaries this year. Here Little Tuffy and the Tuf Gurlz celebrate the original Disney Park.


Friday, December 30, 2011

Monday, October 31, 2011

Beach Holiday

 
Carmine red pencil and graphite on copier paper, detail.
5.08 x 7.62 cm (2.0 in. x 3.0 in.)

Watercolor on paper, detail.
5.08 x 7.62 cm (2.0 in. x 3.0 in.)

As soon as fall hits, the clock starts; the countdown to the end of another year and the beginning of a new one. In between, there arise successive holidays each bigger than the last. On my mental production schedule, the autumnal equinox means that it’s time to start on Christmas cards.

This year it concerns Little Tuffy and the Tuf Gurlz, a front-back spread and in watercolor. I’ll reveal the whole image some time after the New Year (sooner perhaps on “Fan of Bryan Mon” on FaceBook). However, in this detail, I demonstrate my restlessness as an artist; meaning that as long as I’m working on a piece of art, I’m tweaking it. In the draft, I roughly drew the layout in red pencil. I then transferred the image to watercolor paper by rubbing graphite on the back and drawing over key parts with a hard graphite pencil. 

You’ll note that I did not transfer the seaweed vines (at top wrapped around a cluster of surfboards), nor by accident the sandman’s hat. The prior allowed me to finalize the seaweed pattern on the watercolor paper more cleanly. The latter only meant that I had to draw a new hat. I might not have redrawn a wider brim in the transfer process, but certainly being forced to draw a hat granted me liberty to do do so or draw a different style hat if I wanted.

Everything else, including placement of shadows to suggest the undulating surface of the beach is part of the coloring process. I’m only a painter because of a medium. But more accurately, I am a colorist, layering on colors to manipulate focus, suggest temperature or emotion, or as I did here, add spots of red and green because of the Christmas theme.

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Roasting on an Open Fire

Little Tuffy and the Tuf-Gurlz
Camping on the Beach
conceptual sketch
Scarlet red pencil on paper
2011


Monday, August 22, 2011

Little Tuffy Backyard Surfing

Red pencil and black ball-point pen on paper.
Digital color over cleaned scan.

Something I drew today.
Little Tuffy with Wilson and Catalina.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Ready and Wilson


Little Tuffy and Wilson
sketches
Color pencil and ball-point pen ink on paper with Digital color over cleaned scan.
21.6 cm x 27.9 cm (8.5 inch x 11.0 inches)
2010.


Surfer girl Little Tuffy has a pet Shar-Pei, Wilson.

Why a Shar-Pei? Because when I thought about it, I couldn’t think of any other cartoon or comic strip that ever had a Shar-Pei. Think about it.

Done?

Right, so L.T. would have the first cartoon Shar-Pei. I started in earnest designing Wilson one month ago, with little success. One month later, attacking the challenge only twice more in between, here above is pretty close to what he’ll look like.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

That About Covers It


Cover, "Unstoppable Tuff-Girl", No. 01
Digital mixed media

3,975 x 6150 pix

March 2010


Matthew Crouch designed this second logo after I decided that the book title needed a modifier and his first "Tuff-GIrl" logo with its stepped outline proved to be too much of a pain to simply stack the long and by nature very horizontal "unstoppable". He kept the typeface of the first and explored different envelope shapes and different treatments for "unstoppable".

Merrill Hagan "captioned" the illustration with dialogue after the art was done.

The illustration was hand-inked and colored digitally. For the most part, the colors are mixes of cyan, magenta and yellow of the standard CMYK printing process with only a gradient of black behind the masthead. Last year I thought that I might use a colored version of the art I made for "Tuff-Girl" sketchbook No. 2 for at least the main image if not the whole thing.

The Wichita logo is a temporary (so I say) design I put together loosely based on the kilted lettering of Mickey Mouse title cards.

The Tuf Gurlz logo is just Cooper typeface mashed together similarly to the "Beach Boys Pet Sounds" album title.

Is it "fantastic", really? Yes. Yes it is.

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Cover Girl


Cover, Unstoppable Tuff-Girl, No. 01
Carmine Red Col-Erase pencil on Bristol board
25.1206 x 38.862 cm (9.89 in. x 15.30 in.)

Now this is starting to feel like progress.

I'll follow this up later with a montage of the thumbnail drawings done leading up to this composition, and at that point it will make sense of my thought process.

Here you can get a sense of the pleasure I get from the DC Comics covers from the late sixties and early seventies that, unlike the mini movie posters on modern comics, had tantalizing outrageous imagery like more playful pulp novel covers. It may be especially evident that the multiple panels motif is borrowed from their 100 Page Specials which contained multiple stories in a "something for everyone" sort of way.

This first issue promises adventures of this new hero against a bounding man-lizard, a befuddled pup impossibly fitted in a magician's top hat, and a little pig-tailed girl enjoying the California waves.

Sound like fun?

I can hardly wait until I can fill the top with the official logo. Oh, but I must.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Happy Valentines Day


Digital color over scan of India ink and brush.
17.78 cm x 15.24 cm (7.00 inch x 6.00 inch)

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Tuf-n-Stuff


"Little Tuffy and the Tuf Gurlz"
character design concept sketches.
Red pencil on paper.
21.59 cm x 27.94 cm (8.50 inches x 11.00 inches)

I can't say that I have so many ideas that I don't know what I should do with them. I have, however, had minor ideas that I wanted some to just steal, out of curiosity of how they might turn out.

This isn't one of those ideas. Part of the Tuff-Girl mythology is that the seed of Debby's idea of her becoming the adventure hero comes from a cartoon character she created and printed on tee-shirts. My initial plan was for that character to be a little like "The Powerpuff Girls" crossed with "Emily the Strange" - simple and graphic and really just one drawing with slight alterations to the hair, clothes and random raspberries or bandages.


"Little Tuffy and the Tuf Gurlz"
character design concept sketches.
Red pencil and black India Ink on paper.
21.59 cm x 27.94 cm (8.50 inches x 11.00 inches)

As I've progress on my comic book, the notion of placing that cartoon character in a minor feature percolated in the back of my mind. Here is the most developed realization of that idea: Little Tuffy, Monica, Barb, Malibu, Catalina and the Shar Pei dog, Wilson.

Yes, the design is a lot more complex than it began, but that's what happened when I started mixing in the influences of Walt Kelly's "Pogo" and Bill Watterson's "Calvin and Hobbes."