title="Go to homepage">Monkey Minion Press

Uh-Oh! Looks like ol’ DK’s reverted back to his building-climbing, barrel-chucking ways. Some habits are hard to break I guess, huh? I may finish this up as a print. Could be fun.

Anyway, sorry about the delay on this, folks. As you know convention season is starting up and one of our biggest shows is coming up next month: Emerald city Comicon in Seattle, WA. The past month or so, I’ve been so wrapped up in finishing our book that I’ve let some things slip. But good news! We’ve received the first proof of The Zombies Next Door, and it looks great! Can’t wait to get final copies! Emerald City will be the debut of that book, so if you’re coming be on the lookout for us!

Also, hopefully in the coming weeks, I’ll be adding some of our button designs to our stores here and at etsy. So keep your eyes peeled.

Not much to say about this one: It’s YODA!! I’m trying out some new things with my style recently, streamlining a bit, less hatching and relying more on the strength of the drawing rather than the rendering to get the point across. I think that this pic kind of shows that pretty well.

Monday I posted a He-Man pic. In the blog I went on and on about how he-man should look more bad-ass. Well, that got me to thinking: What bout Skeletor? Skeletor in the cartoons/comics/toys always looked like a hulked out smurf to me. He basically wore the same thing as HM, but he was blue and had a skull face (mask?). Buh. I’ve always hated his design and never understood why anyone would be afraid of this guy.

So today, I took it upon myself to do a quick sketch of what I think Skeletor should look like. Gone is the “Barbarian Smurf” motif of yesteryear. To me, Skeletor should be scary. He should be the thing that Eternian Parents use to scare their kids at night. The dude’s supposed to be a sorceror, let’s play that up. The tattered robes, the staff, the chain made from animal bones, the snake skull cloak pin all say “mystical scary dude” to me. I also think that the dude should be thin. Like skeleton thin. I think that in the western world especially, it’s scary when you look at someone and can see their bones through their skin. Like it reminds us of our own mortality. That should be Skeletor all over. His name is Skulletor, after all.

Agree? Disagree? Do it in the comments!

On a related note – If you’re an artist that like to draw with pen, you owe it to yoursef to check out the Pentel Stylo Sketch pen. I drew this with one of these and it was awesome. Variable line widths, easy to control and it flows smooth like buttah. Do it, you’ll thank me later.

I had this done on Friday, Honest. I just forgot to post it up. Sorry!

This is my version of He-Man. I always thought that He-Man looked a little too much like a wuss. Maybe that’s why Skeletor was always giving him trouble? If He-Man had looked like a proper badass, maybe Skeletor would have behaved himself.

In an unrelated turn of events, the Seattle Geekly  Podcast did a feature on our line of Valentine’s Greeting Cards! Click the link to check them out!

Howdy!

Great things are afoot here in the pressworks. We got our table assignment for San Diego Comicon, which is super exciting! I’ll post up a map when it gets closer to time.

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Today, I’d like to talk about friends. Specifically, my friend Daniel of Steam Crow Press. You see, Daniel has an awesome webcomic called “Monster Commute”. He also has fantabulous art, books and buttons that he and his wife put together. They are really cool, and when I was asked to submit an art piece for their upcoming book, a collection of monster commute strips, I jumped at the chance. This is what I came up with:

So, yeah. Now, Daniel is asking for a little help from his readers to get this book published and into everyone’s hot little hands. It’s called the Monster Commute Book Drive (get it? Book DRIVE?). It’s a lot like the PBS fundraisers you see so often, but instead of useless tchotchkies with Mrs. Violet Bucket (it’s BOO-KAY) on them, you get something super awesome from Daniel. Different levels of presale will get you different things. I ordered mine, and I can’t wait. I ordered at the “Artist’s Edition Patron” level so, not only do I get a copy of the book, I also get a 5×7 print and an original ink sketch in my book! Cool, yeah? And there are TONS of different levels from “PDF Patron” which will get ya a pdf of the book when it’s done (and a bunch of warm-fuzzies) all the way up to “Master Patron”, which will get you a whole slough of stuff AND will bring Daniel to your town! How cool would that be? (Answer: very cool. Daniel is a super fun dude) So go there and order, Patriot!

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THE MARCH ON 10,001.

As of this morning, we’re at 8400 views at my DA Page. Just remember, the 10,001st visitor (with a screencap) gets a free Personal Sketch Card Commission from me (a $25 value).

OK, I just heard the news, so I figured I’d share:
Monkey Minion Press (that’s me, folks) has just been accepted as a Small Press exhibitor at next summer’s San Diego Comicon!!! HOW FREAKIN’ COOL IS THAT?! I seriously squee’d when I got the news last night.

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Whassup everybody, so glad you’re here. It’s Dane-i-o puttin’ the flow back in your ear.

So this past weekend was the Portland Comic Book Show. This was my second year in attendance as an artist, and I just got 2 words: AWE. SOME. The show was straight up great. Even for me coming into the show with less than 2 hours sleep beforehand, it was a great show. People came, they were excited to be there, & they wanted what we were selling (and more besides, I had to promise to get a Supergirl print made LOL). I did a few sketches, and took part in my first Jam sketch (with Ron Randall & Randy Emberlin, no less!), and drew my first Alien xenomorph (on the jam). That was pretty cool for me. Hopefully I didn’t bring down the overall quality of the piece too much. Met some crazy MST3K fans, too, which was super-sweet. Great show, great fans. I’m already looking forward to next year.

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The march to 10,000.

So, it looks like I am SLOWLY creeping up on 10,000 page views on my deviant art page. Crazy. It’s kinda weird how it works, and I still don’t know how it happens. But anyway, 10,000. It’s kind of a big number, but not to important. However, 10,001? Now, that’s an important number. (Not really, but pretend, ok?) So, here’s what’s gonna happen. I’m going to have a contest for the 10,001st pageview. If you open my page and see that you are the 10,001st viewer, take a screenshot and send it to me via note. That person will win a custom Personal Sketch Card commission from me of whatever character you choose (preferably characters with an established look, if you have your own character and have pics, that’ll work, but I’m not designing a character from whole cloth).

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Well, that’s it for now.
D

Hey all,

Just about caught up and I have a little time to myself, so I wanna give it to you. So, I figured I’d open up some sketch card commissions. Yay!

I’m opening 10 slots. I have to ask that we keep it to single cards for this one (read: No puzzles), just so I can get them done in a reasonable time frame. To clarify: you can order up to 3 cards, but not as a puzzle set because I’d like to get these done and out by Christmas.

Each card will be $20 fully colored, inked.

Email me at dane {@} monkeyminionpress.com to reserve your spot.

Thanks in advance to everyone!

samples:

P.S.
I still have copies of my 2009 sketchbook available.

$5 or $10 with a b/w Inked sketch in the back.

P.P.S.

¡¡¡ORTLAND, PDX, PORTLANDIA!!!

November 11, 2009 is the next Portland Draw Night!! We’ll be meeting at the Original Hotcake & Steak House at 1002 SE Powell Blvd. in Portland. I’ll probably get there at about 5:30-ish. We’ll probably hang out until 9-ish. Swing on by, eat some hotcakes and draw some pictures. We’ll probably do some speed sketching, and hanging out.

here’s the facebook link:
[link]

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November 15 is the Annual PORTLAND COMIC BOOK SHOW ([link]) at the Memorial Coliseum here in Portland. I’ll be set up in the Artist’s Alley, taking commissions, selling art and just generally being awesome. You should come by, maybe I’ll share some awesomeness with you.

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Also, I just submitted a proof of my book to the approval board at San Diego Comicon to get a table at SDCC 2010. I’m asking everyone to cross their fingers for me!

That’s it for this round. See you on the flip-mode!

Dane

So, It’s October, and you know what that means: Halloween! Last weekend was the Portland Halloween Bazaar, I went and set up there to sell Zombie Greetings and my new Pimp Monsters. The show was good, the turn-out was ok, all-in-all the day was a good one.

Also, I have been interviewed again! This time, it’s international, baby! Yeah! Paul Bines from UK Cardcast , the internet’s best podcast about non-sports card collecting and sketch cards had me, Brandon Kenney, Trv Murphy and Ingrid Hardy all on talking about sketch cards, art and illustration. It was a good time, and Paul was a lot of fun to talk to. Go there, listen to both parts of episode 21 (I’m the second half of part A, by the way), and then subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Figured I’d post up some of my recent commissions:

This is a Silver Surfer Commission I did last week. This is a Sketch Card Commission and it measures 2.5″x3.5″. Drawn in Micron Pen and colored in Prismacolor markers.

The Rapahel card was done for my book that I take around to conventions. Mainly just because I wanted to. I may do the other 3 at some point in the future. The Phoenix was a commission I just finished. Both measure 2.5″x3.5″. Drawn in Micron Pen and colored in Prismacolor markers.

So, welcome to the first post of Monkey Business, the blog about me and Monkey Minion Press, my illustration and design company. So let’s get busy!

Lots of new developments in the MMP world. But let’s start off with a little history first: Remember last year when I was helping Steve Rude with some photoshop coloring touch-up work? Well if you don’t, I just reminded you. Basically, what it was was that Steve was touching up the 20-some year old colors of his Nexus comic series for inclusion into the definitive printed verion of the stories in the Nexus Archives books from Dark Horse Comics. My job was to use photoshop to make the changes he needed made to the artwork. This included recoloring characters, pages and panels, making the effects more prominent, moving, deleting and rearranging word balloons, and so on, so forth.

So, why do I bring this up? Well, mainly because that gig has pretty much led directly to my new gig: doing color touch ups on Invincible for the new animated comic series coming out from MTV Mobile and GAIN Limited. Check this action out! (I would have embedded it, but apparently blogger can’t embed flash vids.:() This is super huge for me because I am a HUGE FAN of Invincible. I’ve been reading the series since issue #9 when Ryan Ottley started drawing it. I’m really excited about it. AHH!

Also, I’ll be doing sketch cards for the upcoming Marvel Masterpieces 3 set coming out of Upper Deck. I’m doing 75 cards, and hopefully I’ll get to do most of them in color. Gonna be sweet!

What else? Oh yeah! Since moving to PDX, we have hooked up with a great group of artists here and have been showing my work around, and I have a show of my artwork set up in September at a small gallery here in town. And of course, I found an artwalk to participate in, the Alberta Arts District Last Thursdays! I’ll be set up in front of This Place Blows a really cool little Glass Blowing Studio and Shop (This is also where my show will be in September).

So, I think that’s enough for now. Check back soon, because I hope to have more news!