monstergram7 Hits 4,500+ Followers on Instagram

To mark the recent event of my Instagram feed surpassing 4,500 followers, I drew Tuff-Girl and her dog Wichita celebrating that same event. She just happened to be dressed in semi-western attire. The construction sketch and inking was caught in a time-lapse video (above).

Follow me on Instagram: @monstergram7

Hitting 4,000+ July 2018

Hitting 3,800+ January 2018

Hitting 3,000+ August 2017

Hitting 2,500+ April 2017

Hitting 2,000+ November 2016

@ Long Beach Comic Con 2017

Long Beach Comic Con 

is happening this Labor Day weekend in Long Beach, CA (naturally)!

If you’re attending, why not stop by and see Merrill and myself?

Long Beach Comic Con

September 2-3, 2017

Long Beach Convention Center

300 E. Ocean Blvd.

Long Beach, CA 90802

Bryan Mon

Artist Alley: B-24

Saturday: 10:00a - 7:00p

Sunday: 10:30a - 5:00p

Merrill Hagan @merrill_hagan of course is a writer for Teen Titans GO!, both the Cartoon Network series and the DC comic. Come over early if you’re a fan.

As with the cons earlier this year, we’ll have a limited number of ashcan previews of Unstoppable Tuff-Girl #3 - still in production.

I’ll have original art for sale, many of which have been featured on my Instagram @monstergram7.

And I’ll be taking on on site commissions with the following base prices:

Full single character inked and colored with pencil 12-inches: $80

Single portrait inked and colored with  pencil 12-inches: $40

Additional prices to be posted at the table.

As a rare treat, I’ll have some of Juan Ortiz’s old Silver Comic issues and branded items for sale.

L B C N U

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.

monstergram7 hits 1000 Followers

Hey, my Instagram feed, @monstergram7, hit the milestone 1000 followers! Just like I had with the 250 followers milestone, I made and uploaded a time-lapse video of me drawing and inking a special commemorative piece of art.

Thanks everybody!

Thanks to Tony and Tom Bancroft for pushing the number of my followers from 250+ to 600+ overnight with a social media mention of my stuff.

Finished in color pencil.

Video set-up minus iPhone for the 2nd attempt.

I actually drew and shot the process three times. The first time I had done at 990+ followers and was fine, but the following day, I thought that I could do better.

The second time the video was recording at vertical aspect and plays at 90˚. Ugh.

The third and final time is what I’ve posted here.

In the photo above of my crude set-up, the pink thing in the middle is an iPhone holder/ tri-pod with its flexible legs wrapped around a camera trip-pod. What-ever works you know.
I apologize for the bands that resulted from the video interaction with the flickering of the available fluorescent lighting. Maybe next time I’ll solve for that.


Thanks again!

monstergram7 - January & February 2016

Here’s what has been going on over at my Instagram feed, a.k.a. “monstergram7.”.
https://www.instagram.com/monstergram7/

What Shall I Draw Today? - January 24

Hey all, send me an idea or two of what I should draw.

Now taking on suggestions!

The guide lines:

- 1 -

I reserve the right pick amongst all suggestion of what to draw and what not to draw.

- 2- 

Suggestions fielded via one of these three portals:

• This blog, monotonae as a monitored comment (comments won’t appear instantly).

• Facebook comments (either directly to me Bryan L Mon or the group, I’m a Fan of Bryan Mon).

• Instagram comments (monstergram7)

- 3-

The window for suggestions on this round ends at 11:59 p.m. e.s.t. (9:59 p.s.t.) Sunday January 24th, 2015, with the last posting about 11:59 p.m. p.s.t. 

Most pieces will be drawn on 2.5" x 3.5" (collector card size) cut Bristol Board. I will post drawings on Instagram as I go, which will I share on my Facebook page and cross-sharing, eventually, to the Facebook group, “I’m a Fan of Bryan Mon.”

The top 3 “Liked” will be posted here in monotonae on late Monday, January 25th, 2016.

It’s that simple. I’ve already received a half-dozen suggestions. I’d better get crackin’.

Thank you in advance for playing.

 All art © Bryan L. Mon

TIGGER 7 EEYORE TM & ©Disney and A.A. Milne. STARFIRE TM & © DC Comics. WICHITA TM & © Bryan L. Mon.

monstergram7 - November & December 2015

Instagram posts from the last two months of 2015.
https://www.instagram.com/monstergram7/

That’s what you get form me: non work related sketches and doodles. No beauty shots of desserts. No declarative self-composed photos as locality testaments. Oh, and I’ll conduct “what shall i draw today” sessions, in fact I’ll be doing that in a few weeks.

This Is What I Drew Sunday – September 27

Here are the top 3 “liked” pieces from this Sunday’s all-day session of “What Shall I Draw Today?”

#1 - Dark Knight Batman and Carrie Kelley Robin: suggested by LJ Mandap

#2 - Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie, Suicide Squad movie): suggested by Steven Sanchez

#3 - Frankenstein’s Monster and the Bride (cute style): suggested by Royce Thrower

And here is the whole Sunday set:

 Thank you to everyone who offered drawing suggestions and to those who voted with their Instagram and Facebook “likes.”

Keep an eye open January 2016 for the next WSIDT session.

Check out the Instagram posts: [Monstergram7]

Disneyland’s 60th Birthday

Disneyland Resort, Anaheim, California, U.S.A., Friday, July 17th, 2015 –  By the understanding generosity of my supervisor, I took the day off to spend most of yesterday, Friday, at Disneyland on it’s official 60th birthday, a.k.a. the anniversary of its opening day back in 1955.

For kicks and giggles I picked up an autograph book to use as a sketch book to record my thoughts through out the day. The book contained 12 double-sided pages and four sheets of character stickers. I shared some detail pictures on Facebook via Instagram (monstergram7). Here, however, is the complete volume (minus the sticker pages).

I arrived a bit after 10:00 a.m. and both parks at the Disneyland Resort, Disneyland and Disney California Adventure (DCA), had “special edition” souvenir guide maps (pamphlets) for the day, as well as special commemorative buttons for each guest. Other special items were available and for sale throughout the parks. You can bet that folks were anxious to pick up stuff on the special day.

I met up with my friend and former Disney Artist, Jeff for lunch at the La Brea Bakery. Here, I started my sketch book with a quick Mickey followed by Jeff’s better Mickey. Then I did lunch themed doodles.
I poked around DCA a bit to explore the recently re-themed Grizzly Peaks Airfield and to see for which showing of the World of Color water show Fast Pass ticket were being distributed.

A new way that Disneyland devised to experience the Parks is a Hidden Mickey scavenger hunt called “Looking for Mickey Quest.” Largely, I let the quest guide me to different areas of the park, but not slavishly so. I had to check out the upgrades to the Matterhorn.

One of the Quest’s clues pointed to Mickey’s Movie Barn, which is the finale of exploring Mickey’s House in Toontown and not strictly listed on the guide map. Here, believe it or not, I got my first Toontown introduction to Mickey.

The afternoon parade, Mickey’s Soundsational Parade, now in its fifth year running, was kicked off by a special precession featuring several “original” Cast Members who worked in the park in 1955. I sketched some of the waiting crowd and made note that several guests were costumed in clothes reminiscent of 1950’s American style, skirts, white glove, fedoras, etc. I think this is where I received the most sun.

Next, on to Frontierland, a trip around Rivers of America on the stern-wheel steam ship Mark Twain for two Quest clues and Pirates of the Caribbean which occupied three clues on the Quest sheet. The difficulty of questing during this ride is compounded by the fact that it is a dark, moving ride. Without prior knowledge of the clue answers, one conceivably would have to memorize the choices of the clues.

Big Thunder Mountain broke down while I was on queue. And I rode on The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. I wonder if folks get motion sickness on this attraction.

Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.

By about 7:30 p.m. I found myself in the Disneyland Opera House for a performance of Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln.

Then I met up with Linda and Olav. I had a birthday cupcake and squeezed in the Main Street crowd for my first-time live-viewing of the new Paint the Night Parade, which was followed by the Disneyland Forever fireworks display. Linda and I caught the second showing of this summer’s edition of DCA’s World of Color waterworks and lights show World of Color: Celebrate.

With Linda treating herself to a Dole Whip, our last experience of the evening was Peter Pan’s Flight featuring “new magic”.

 By 1:00 a.m. I was tired. I was probably tired before Pan, but was occupied enough to ignore it.


EPILOGUE:
With the remaining five pages, I made these epilogue sketches this Saturday afternoon with the luxury of time, a blue pencil and a brush tip pen:

Something inspired by Adventureland: an explorer captain in a hippo encounter.
Something inspired by Tomorrowland: a spaceman and a spacegirl.

Something inspired by Frontierland: The Frito Kid.
Something inspired by Fantasyland: Snow White and guest.

And lastly, the artist’s pick, something inspired by Bear Country (now Critter Country): Henry the bear and Sammy the raccoon from the now non-existent (in Disneyland) Country Bear Jamboree.

I should admit (or perhaps by now re-iterate) that I don’t have the reputed artist drive to sketch all of the time, so I don’t. There were times I’d be on queue for a few minutes before I remembered that, “hey, I was going to be sketching today.” Then, of course, I had to decide what to sketch.


Thanks for a magical day, Disneyland.

Unstoppable Tuff-Girl, 10th Anniversary

This year, the character Tuff-Girl celebrates the tenth year from first appearing in the pages of Silver Comics issue #5!

To commemorate this milestone, I created this Art Deco inspired poster (above). The poster measuring17" w. x 36" h (43.2 cm x 91.4 cm), will be first available for purchase at the ever nearing Heroes Convention, June 19-21 in Charlotte, NC. I will be arriving at the con with a limited number of copies of the poster priced at $10 each, and at the con, you may, of course, get Tuff-Girl creators Bryan Mon (that’s me) and Merrill Hagan to sign copies of the poster.

I had run through multiple thumbnail drawings for concepts for art to commemorate this special occasion, and narrowed it down to this, albeit another, running pose. Well, Superman flies, Spider-Man swings, and Tuff-Girl runs. From a rough pencil drawing I developed the final art as vector art in Adobe® Illustrator. In the image above, the black lines represent the outlines of the vector shapes, over the red pencil lines of the roughly drawn art.

Admittedly, I’ve been terrible at social media and by extension I’ve been terribly terrible at utilizing social media to promote my self and my projects. That said if you find me at Heroes Con this coming weekend (AA-1511), and utter the code word, “Montreal,” I will sell you a signed copy for the promotional amount of $1 USD.

We’ll see you at Heroes!

Over My Header

Hello.

It’s been 59 days since my last posting here, or as I like to think of it D*C+50 - fifty days after my last convention appearance, Dragon*Con. True, that doesn’t help explain anything at all regarding why I haven’t posted any thing new earlier than today.

One of the things with which I’ve been playing I represent with these two sample headers.

And that’s all I’ll say about that, because it’s still too much in the concept stages.

Pretty Tough

Full illustration for MegaCon print.

Digital mixed media.

27.94 cm  x  43.18 (11 in.  x  17 in.)

2013

Detail of pencil art for illustration.

Land of Wonder

This year at the Monster Enterprises table in the small press area of WonderCon:

Me (Bryan Mon) with issues No. 1 and 2 of Unstoppable Tuff-Girl, some sketch book, prints and scratching out some commission sketches.

Stephanie Gladden (GirlsOfMonsterParadise.com) will also be sharing table space with goodies and commission sketches.

If you’re lucky, you may catch writer Merrill Hagan (DC Nation).

Ya’ll stop on by an’ say “Howdy”.

Cartoon Network’s 20th Birthday - Extra

TUFF-GIRL vs. ED BENEDICT

Ed Benedict was an animator and layout artist who, in his work for Hanna-Barbera Studios, helped design many of its early television series including The Flintstones.

Character design and animation of this period had almost everything to do with economy, or in other words solutions to limited television budgets. As result you have a lot of characters who stand and talk, characters in lengthy walk cycles and running cycles (against repeating backgrounds) also usually talking, and characters with convenient accessories of collars and neckties that clearly define the body and a talking head.

This design is a caricature of anatomy and not very reliant upon a working skeletal structure. Peculiar to The Flintstones, for example, are Wilma’s and Betty’s skirts which operated more like puffs of fur from which their legs may protrude in any direction without, for the most part, disturbing the puff’s shape.

A large part of the joy of drawing The Flintstones are not only the fanciful dinosaurs but even more fanciful low-tech gadgets. How is it possible to cobble together a motor bike using stone wheels, logs, a tortoise shell and bee hive? If only real engineering were as easy and fun.

In the concept sketches, I tried giving Wichita a saber-tooth look which only complicated the fuzzy muzzle I wanted to keep in the design. The layout on the whole is not, admittedly, consistent with the original Flintstones series in which all action takes place parallel to the screen, left, right, up and down. Fred always made U-turns off screen. The change from a running dinosaur was to better fit it in frame without worrying about its tail, and benefitted from having a more interesting twist in its posture and its head popping out over the hill in groundhog fashion is a better visual than merely a hungry dino.

[final color art]


TUFF-GIRL vs. CRAIG McCRACKEN

 A lot of the designs of The Powerpuff Girls (PPG) were co-developed by both Craig and Genndy Tartakovsky (Dexter’s Laboratory). With both having worked at Hanna-Barbera on Two Stupid Dogs, it’s not surprising that both their first shows, PPG and Dexter’s Lab, carry on the H&B style. I describe much of the style as a theory of letting shapes be interesting first and descriptive or representative second. So there are irregular zig-zagging lines which could be a row of teeth, fingers or a torn shirt and loopy curls which could be puffs of hair, a tree canopy or a bunch of flowers.

It’s possible that from his work on Batman, The Animated Series, Genndy imbued strong lines of action to character designs, often as unbroken arcing lines on one side of an arm or leg.

As a pre-wide-screen series, rarely did PPG have more than three characters in an action scene, and as such, this layout is too busy as a faithful show set-up. This is really two scene squeezed together. Although I’d like the focus up front, but it’s kind of better to flatten the space to have Tuff-Girl more fighting along side all three Powerpuff Girls.

My first concept sketch is a post-battle, victory scene. This is what I do when I haven’t figured out what the characters look like. Once I’ve a design (and in a sense am bored with it), then more interesting poses come out as an expression of “I wonder what else this character can do?”

My Dexter’s Lab styled Tuff-Girl and Wichita would probably be the same as this. And I probably change little for a Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends style, also a show by Craig.

[final color art]


TUFF-GIRL vs. MAN OF ACTION

Ben 10 was created by a group by the name of Man of Action (Duncan Rouleau, Joe Casey, Joe Kelly and Steven T. Seagle). Although drawing upon stylistic influences of comic books and Japanese Anime, much of what ended up on screen became less stylized, more rounded and generally having less of a distinct style. This then became my biggest struggle – what does a Ben 10 styled Tuff-Girl look like? My solution mostly relies on a bigger head and an Omnitrix hour-glass motif worked into her costume.

My choice to draw Diamondhead as Ben’s alien-hero transformation did come from his sharp, crystal edges being a reasonable contrast to Tar Bear’s sloppiness. It is also a reflection of how much more comfortable I am now drawing him than seven years ago. Diamondhead was mostly designed to be seen in certain angles that allows his brow/ visor to naturally form a “V” for an intense gaze. There are other little details of his design that don’t work in three-dimension, so half about Diamondhead is figuring out a cheat for a better, stronger pose.

I like having Tuff-Girl (and Wichita) chasing Dr. Animo. Story-wise, once T.G. catches Animo the fights over and the action’s done and that’s not what you want on your comic book cover. Having decided to change the layout to have T.G. in the foreground, Animo still had to be in the fight.

[final color art]


TUFF-GIRL vs. PENDLETON WARD

Pendleton Ward created Adventure Time. Although he worked as a storyboard artist on The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, there is perhaps no one source of stylistic influence for the show’s design.

For sure there are a lot of small button eyes, big round heads, rubber-hose arms and legs, small 3-fingered hand and a general absence of noses. Although none of these are shared by Tuff-Girl’s traditional design, it’s perhaps due to these that so much fell into place quickly. A lot of stylized Tuff-Girl draws upon the Fionna character design as opposed to series regulars like Princess Bubblegum or Marceline the Vampire. Stylized Wichita is somewhat based on a wolf cub that appeared in an episode. Stylized Eagle One could be based on any of the rugged warriors that pop up in the series.

The back story also seemed to fall in place quickly. As the last of the four scenes I was creating for this celebration, the victory moment also seemed appropriate.

[final color art]


TUFF-GIRL vs. IWAO TAKAMOTO

Iwao Takamoto was a Japanese-American Animator who was a production and character designer for Walt Disney Productions and for Hanna-Barbera design characters for such shows as Scooby-Doo.

My exploration here is a slightly shorter Daphne in a simplified Tuff-Girl costume. Given how this basic girl design served as the house-style over many years, there wasn’t any reason to push it further.

Wichita is her same silhouette with Scooby eyes.


TUFF-GIRL vs. GLEN MURAKAMI

Glen Murakami is an animator, animation director and producer known for his work on Batman Beyond, Teen Titans and the Ben 10 series Alien Force and Ultimate Alien.

My exploration keys in on Murakami’s signature style of strong posing and lines and sharp definitive corners. A finer tip pen would have helped. Her costume has much larger areas of black than I usually design just to take advantage of Glen’s sense of using strong black shapes in his designs.

Wichita’s design is almost all made up as his designs for terrestrial, four-legged creatures is rare, especially small, furry ones.