My designs were all for two projects of mine: Art Geek Zoo: A music fantasy adventure that centers around a penguin (Pick Wingvey) and his mystical guitar friend (Crunchy). And also: Thellos Village: My future graphic novel and video game project about a village (Thellos) besieged nightly by monsters in the nearby woods.

This challenge was at times for me, ahem, a challenge. I have to admit feeling a sense of relief as I posted my 29th and 30th characters. I know I commented far less often as the days grew closer and closer to 30… as I was adjusting to the time it takes to do these in the way I wanted to do them that included time to play and learn tools and techniques I hadn’t yet practiced. What a great experience though, the practice made me more comfortable with digital painting in photoshop and with art processes for character creation. It’s been an awesome time exploring outside my comic creation comfort zone.

Javen Ackerman and Ken Drab – it rocks that you guys joined the challenge, it was frickin’ awesome to see your character posts and be a part of this with you guys.

Also a special thanks to Tyler James for being the instigator. Let me know when you throw down your next artist challenge (but please, give us at least a little rest first!).

If you’d like to check out my other projects or connect via social media:
on twitter: @RobStenzinger
on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/rob.stenzinger
my comic: http://www.artgeekzoo.com

Again, thanks to everybody for the encouragement and/or other comments and for Tyler for putting this whole shindig together… I hope everyone keeps creating and gets the success that they’re after (unless you’re doing it just for grins…keep grinning, I guess) It’s been fun! It’s always neat to interact with other artists/creative types even if it is only through the internet!

*Obligatory Shameless Plug: Please check out my Zuda entry whether it’s on Zuda or my own site…. I should know one way or the other 2 weeks from now…

http://crashlanden.wordpress.com/

From For the Trees

From MSP Stories

From Geocentricity

From The Winchcombe

This was a great challenge!

Thanks to Tyler for putting it on.

Thanks to Rob for asking me for a challenge.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to view and comment on my stuff.

And thanks to everyone who participated and shared their work for me and all to see. Your hard work over the last 30 days has been truly inspirational.

This challenge was a blast! A month ago one of my twitter friends @BlaqueSaber told me about @TylerJamesComic and his idea of creating 30 characters in 30 days. He thought I would really be into the idea. Whazzza, He was right! I knew I wanted to participate the second I read about it. I had been doing a daily comic sketch on my own blogsite at the time, but the idea of creating a series of original characters just seemed to fun.

I had originally planned on coloring all my new characters in photoshop. Well that only worked for the 1st two. I went ahead and just posted my pencil drawings. These weren’t just sketches like I was doing on my own blogsite, they were tight and more refined. I found I started to get a rhythm and style with this series. The character design drawings look like my regular style of drawing but evolved into it’s own version of my style. I’m really pleased with the result.

Thanks to all the great comments on the characters, both the constructive and positive. Seeing everyone’s awesome work helped keep me motivated. For this challenge I was in the company of super cool artistic and creative people.  -SHAZAM!

Let’s be friends: Check out my blog and other social media spots.

Pencil

Watercolour

I have to thank all the folks who have entered the challenge – you guys are all awesome. Genuine comraderie is tough to find these days and your constant encouragement has me fired up to create more than ever! I can’t wait to see all of your next and current endeavours come to fruition. And I would be remiss without thanking Tyler James who was already high in my cool book, but has knocked himself a few notches up throughout the challenge and by putting together this motely crew. Rock out with your socks out guys!

EDIT:  ARGH, this is a pain in the ass!  The thumbnails keep on linking to the pictures, not the profiles.  And every time I painstakingly manually edit it to have it link to the profiles instead and press “Update”, it keeps on randomly reverting to linking to the pictures again!  Anyone know how to fix this?

EDIT AGAIN:  FIXED IT!

While I’m here, I just want to say thanks again to everybody who took the time to read my character profiles, especially those thoughtful enough to leave feedback – all of it was greatly appreciated.  And thanks for bearing with my shoddy artwork.  Like I said at the beginning, I’m a writer, not an artist, and  I only tried drawing my characters to better fit in with what everyone else was doing.  Hope the art didn’t detract from your enjoyment of the profiles.

This was a challenge, one I never thought I’d complete, so I’m proud of making it the whole way through.  It was great fun.  Tyler, many thanks for organising it all.  You should do another one of these, or a similar challenge, in the future!

Thanks again,

- John Lees

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edit

for some reason not all my thumbnails are showing up. Here are links to the rest of my characters

http://30characters.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/10-harold-grey/

http://30characters.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/17-sharon-clarke-hummingbird/

http://30characters.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/20-alan-channing/

http://30characters.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/27-barbie-molrone/