Today I received my artist edition copy of “Curse of the Pharaohs”, written and drawn by my good buddy Mark Rudolph, co-host of the always entertaining and informative Art & Story podcast. “Pharoahs”, an all-ages action / adventure book is 24 pages long, and printed with heavy stock cover and premium gloss interiors. The book looks gorgeous!

My copy came with an autographed original inked piece signed by Mr. Rudolph himself. “Curse of the Pharaohs” was my first exposure to Mark’s work a few years ago, as part of the original Sugary Serials line-up. I was blown away then, as I am now – holding the printed edition in my hand. This book screams quality – you won’t be disappointed. You can purchase your copy through his website.

Mark’s artwork perfectly compliments the rest of the pieces I have on my animation table.

-Krishna

Two more vehicle drawings up above, featuring their normal and “extreme” looks side by side.

-Krishna

A few days ago I received some nice fan art by reader Eddie Humphrey. He’d sent it back to me a long time ago, but in my haze, I forgot to post it up. So here it is, for all to enjoy.

You can see the original artwork on the left and the finished piece on the right. Thanks, Eddie!

Got some PCW fan art you’d like to share? You do? Well, hit me up!

If I get enough pieces, I’ll make a dedicated PCW fan art page.

-Krishna

Get ready for some artistic mayhem…

-Krishna

My exploration of vehicles continues with the pick-up truck sketches above. The top left drawing was created in Alias Sketchbook Pro. It’s a fairly consistent rendering from the photo it was taken from. I wanted to add a little cartoon flair to the truck, so I brought the design into Photoshop and applied a few Transforms to arrive at the version you see at the bottom right.

The perspective transform distorts the height of the cab, while the distort and skew transforms give the truck’s front and back some much needed flair.

-Krishna

Process work for a flying car I drew. The initial concept was arrived at by combining an old car with wings of an airplane. The concept was penciled in Sketchbook Pro and colored in Photoshop.

-Krishna

Taking a cue from Shawn Blanc’s excellent website, here’s a brief write-up on my current computing setup.

In my studio I use an early 2008 model Mac Pro tower with 10GB of RAM and a dual monitor setup (30″ Samsung 305T and 19″ Hanns-G), where the Samsung is my main display for work and the Hanns G keeps my e-mail, Twitter, iTunes, and other ancillary applications running. This is the machine I use to make comics and illustrations.

I have a Wacom Intuos 4 wired tablet (6×9) which I adore to pieces. My work is now 100% digital so a tablet’s essential for what I do. (You can see it tucked away to the right of my Mac Pro on the second photo.)

My other machine is a 15″ 2008 model Macbook Pro, outfitted with 4GB of RAM. This is the machine I use primarily for academics. It doubles as a portable drawing studio on those rare occasions when I travel.

Other input devices I use regularly include:

• Blu Snowball mic (excellent quality microphone for recording podcasts and making Skype calls)
• Kensington Orbit trackball (once you go trackball, the ordinary mouse feels sedate)
• Sony MDR-7506 headphones (great audio and well worn-in after years of use)
• Canon 4400F flatbed scanner
• Apple wired (small) keyboard (the best portable keyboard I’ve ever used)

For storage, I have all 4 drive bays of the Mac Pro filled. Whenever its time for me to upgrade the OS on my computer, I purchase a new hard drive. The older hard drives are kept intact as redundant emergency back-ups. One of my drives has Windows 7 Home Premium installed on it, which I boot into occasionally when I need to use Autodesk’s Maya. In addition to that I have an OWC Mercury Elite Pro for maintaining video footage and older data that I need to work with and access from time to time. SuperDuper and Time Machine are both used for my local data back-ups, while Backblaze is used for off-site back-ups.I use a Maxtor OneTouch 4 USB external drive to back up the Macbook Pro at regular intervals.

Why do I use this setup?

The Mac Pro is a blazing fast machine for the work that I do – it’s probably overkill, but I work with large image files on a regular basis, and having the extra RAM headroom and speed is nice. The expandability of the Mac Pro is something that I consider to be important as I use my production machines for a full 5 years before considering an upgrade.

Next blog post: Software I use on a daily basis.

-Krishna

Hey, a new Other World strip is now up. This is the comic I am creating for my site sponsor, Other World Computing. As always, thanks for supporting my site by visiting my sponsor!

-Krishna

Thomas Clemmons, the talented cartoonist of the webcomic Robot Friday sent this super swell piece featuring Bob. I really dig how Thomas interpreted the character and I’ve already dropped a line hinting that I’d love to see a PC Weenies guest-strip from him in the future. (Hint! Hint! Thomas)

-Krishna

The last set of prints I offered sold incredibly well (thanks!), so I’ve decided to make a brand new one:

This time around, I’ve made 5 limited edition prints on 8.5″ x 11″ 100 lb matte cardstock featuring one of my favorite robot creations, Domo Arigato. Each print will be individually signed, stamped and numbered. Optionally, each print will come with a bristol inked sketch featuring your favorite PC Weenies character of choice.

I will be including this offer for the next five Artist Edition orders of “PC Weenies: Rebootus Maximus”.

Already have the book?

No problem!

You may also order the print separately for $10 (print only, includes shipping worldwide) or $20 (with bristol inked sketch of your favorite PCW character, includes shipping worldwide).

Print orders are first come, first served. If you’re interested, please contact me.

Thanks for your support!

-Krishna