January - Started the year off doing a freebie color piece for =Teruchan. I had ended 2008 exploring what I call the opalescent style of coloring, where cyans and yellows appear white because of their surrounding colors. When starting out this image, her dress and wardrobe weren't white but closer to an orchid color.


February - Participated in the coloring contest for the 'Be My Fella Valentine.' I took the original template, and stuck them together twice in each direction, erasing bits here and there so the lines looked more connected. While there are hearts and fellas aplenty in these lines, I decided to symbolize the embodiment of love and devotion: Sargeant Schultz from Hogan's Heroes.


March - I went months without coloring a thing for the club I run, the #color-me-club. It's not good PR to be in charge of a club, and not even using its resources. It's like being the CEO of McDonald's and not eating at my own restaurants. Not to accidentally incriminate fast food CEO's or anything of bad PR. Anywho, this still remains one of the trickiest, and most time-consuming color jobs I've done for the sheer amount of detail and texture I put into it.


April - Dagger from XMen, an image which the line artist *windriderx23 had to give me very specific directions on how to tackle. One of the biggest design elements; a bright glowing character, seemingly luminescent, against a very dark unlit background. Confusing as the order sounded to my light-logic instincts having a brightly lit character in an unlit environment, the combination worked beautifully, and became a layout I experimented with further.


May - *ebas posted these lines, and I decided to take a shot at coloring the work of a very well established line artist in the comic industry. This was more of a practice session working with backgrounds and environment, as well as anatomy. Eric even gave me some pointers after finishing a first draft on how to make the lighting and anatomy better, which are lessons that I'm holding on to dearly. GO ASS!


June - Did a few images by *Crimsonsea, this one inspired by the tavern in Megaton in Fallout 3. Another exercise with background and composition, this is probably my favorite image I did in 2009. Everything just worked on this one, it all came together without a lot of wrestling with the lines. I'm particularly fond of a color combination of deep reds and soft warm browns.


July - The most "Return to Sender" image of the year, this was a charity piece done with *windriderx23 for the Pittsburgh Comicon's Make A Wish Foundation Auction. I ended up revisiting and tweaking this one multiple times with a looming deadline approaching fast. The culprit? The fire on the sword. Everything was a go on the first draft, except that fire, which I ended up doing several times. Totally worth it. I learned quite a bit with glow and fire effects while working on this image, particularly how to adjust and modify it with the Photoshop software.


August - One of my slowest months due to an incredible overtime season at work, this *Crimsonsea piece was one of my more animated images. It also has the strongest resemblance to my more classic coloring style, with strong reds and blues for the rim lights and a blazing yellow for a spotlight.


September - Colored a lot of character concepts for ~JustArt27 for a pitch bible on his pet project. This image embodies the difficulty of the industry environment, as ~JustArt27 was looking for a publisher and not getting any hooks, my own workplace showed its tumultuous nature by laying off 80% of our department. Luckily, I dodged that cannonball, and still have a job.


October - I don't do furries very often. I don't know why, it could be my OCD painting style demanding I capture every single detail of a character, and furries would force me to shade every little whisker on their body. :devxAll1sonEmeryxX: though has a functional style that meshes well with my coloring method without resorting to insanity. I was glad to help her out and hash out this image.


November - *windriderx23 and I got together, and decided to pitch collaborative commissions. The turnout was spectacular, as every offered slot filled within a few days. Among them was this character, Comrade Hero. I love the old propaganda posters of the Stalin era of Russia, and tried to capture the essence of it in this picture. Wanted it to look less like a superhero pinup, and more like a labor party uprising/motivational/anti-capitalist poster. Surprisingly, despite the strong resemblances to working class paraphenalia, Shephard Fairey has not yet stolen this image for his TShirts. Surprising, I know!


December - And the only non-collaborative image on here, this image is pure me. Pure, quirky, obscure me. This was one of the mascots at our work which we adopted from Tony Hawk: Project 8. It was originally from the amusement park level, where there is a palm tree with a huge dumb smile on it. In 2007, one of my coworkers took a screen shot of the tree, and sent it to another guy with the caption "I'M SO FUCKING HAPPY!!" to cheer him up. Mission accomplished.

At the end of 2008, somebody went into the Email archive, and started a "Best of" Email thread, giving accolades to the classics that brought joy to our inboxes, and the So Fucking Happy Tree made the list. While working on Guitar Hero: 5, somebody decided to remake the tree while testing the graphics functionality of the Band Logo editor, and emailed it out. The So Fucking Happy Tree Logo made the best of 2009 list sent out two weeks ago.

To celebrate this, I grabbed my coworker's $30.00 drawing tablet he purchased off of w00t.com, a flimsy trainer's tool from a company that went belly-up and no longer offered downloadable drivers for it. So using the cheapest tablet ever made and without drivers, crafted the So Fucking Happy Oak as a means of creating a more detailed, highly realistic version of the original Tony Hawk prop piece. When it was Emailed out to my coworkers, the caption at the bottom of this image originally read 'I'M SO FUCKING HAPPY!!' instead of the Christmas tidings it carries now.