What do these two drawings have in common?

They were the first two finished characters to be drawn on my new Cintiq! I'm totally digging this thing. I wanted to take a picture of my workspace to show alongside them, but I'm having trouble getting a new video card working for my computer; this means I haven't gotten both the Cintiq and the monitor running simultaneously and that was the shot I really wanted to get.

Also, the contract work I mentioned a few posts ago officially went belly up after DIS underwent a major round of layoffs this Thursday, so I can't afford any of this. So that's awesome.

Sketching away

So as I mentioned in my last art post, I've been tooling away on a bunch of projects even though I haven't been posting much. The images I've been spending the most time on are a couple of lineups that aren't ready to be shown, but I figured I'd post a few sketches I was doing tonight of one of the hero characters for the steampunk project in my portfolio.

Testing

I'm re-working my portfolio, so I've got several projects I'd like to get character and environmental designs for. Ideally I can get a distinct visual style for each of them going on, and this is just a color test for the first of them (actually, the first of them is just me collecting the old steampunk stuff I did and re-doing it).

EDIT: Accidentally loaded a ginormous version. Fixed.

New Year's resolution

Maintain a paycheck for longer than a month.

That's the main one. The contract work that I mentioned in my previous post has been pushed back, and I'm reaching that point where I'm starting to get worried. So far my plan if this gig doesn't work out is basically to cross my fingers really, really hard. You might be thinking, "Jason, that's not a very good plan." And you'd be right. It's a terrible plan.

Anyways, I doodled a colored version of an old design I posted a few months back. I've been trying to use various brushes to get a more textured feel.

Hope you're all having a good new year!