newjackcole

Silks of the Golden Bull

Colors - pencils - inks (digital)

Through the Forest

Fox guy making their way through the undergrowth. Colors and inks.

Bear and Foliage

Just hanging out. 2 Different versions of tones.

Freshwater Selkie

Making his way through basalt gorges. 

The first image is the version I like best, the second is the image without screentone, just the lines, and the third image is my first pass at screentone, that I came back and gave it a second shot about a week after.

Terrace

Fox goma and lion gohma. The drawing itself is from somewhere between 2014 and 2016 I think. I was experimenting with different techniques, using brush, technical pen, and a white gel pen, and laying down tones with pencil.

I almost abandoned this one completely to be lost in the "never show pile" because the perspective is off and the characters are kind of wonky, but I gave it another shot coloring a couple weeks ago and managed to get the colors to a place I like. The abstract shapes...

Couple

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Meditation Stone

Starlight Minotaur. The minotaurs I depict are different from the Auroch Gohma. I have three different kinds of minotaur goma, fire, storm and starlight. The fire ones can breathe fire and withstand extreme temparatures, the storm ones breathe out storms and raise winds and lightning, and the starlight ones can summon light in dark places, and bring forth darkness is bright places.

The meditation stone is a sort of agatized magic/psychic substrate. It would cast those rainbows even with...

Gohma Alcove

A lion gohma inhabiting architectural ornamentation. Originally the lion was going to be red in this image, and I had the image mostly colored when photoshop crashed on me (There's a glitch on cs5 where if I have the file open for too long without saving and then I accidentally hit the edge of the image with the eyedropper tool it freaks out and crashes) so I had to recolor it from the start.

I decided to explore some different color variations gohma might take and came up with this one...

Snakeworld

Every now and again I like to do a photobash/collage, which is what the background of this one is (with a bit of extra painting and touching up), which got bashed to the point of abstraction. That's also why it's a bit blurry since I did it at low resolution.

But, basically, this snakey guy making his way through a strange dark world.

Fox and Waterfall

This was the first piece of these black and white illustrations I made, I almost abandoned it because I wasn't sure how it was going to turn out, but I came back and tweaked some things and now I like it enough to share. Although I'm starting to run out of titles...

Elephant Gohma

The Elephant Gohma represent/embody wisdom and foolishness, which can range from a high sagely quality, to a bacchanalian revelry. Foolishness in this context doesn't necessarily equate to something like stupidity, but is closer to self abandon, or the sort of energy and enthusiasm similar to what the fool tarot also represents.

In this particular image, on the gohma's head is a cousin of the emerald tablet of the alchemists. In the glass case is the bee, which I like to pair with the s...

Comet Fox

Fox goma traveling through a liminal realm. The foxes also take a secondary form as a flame, which are in the background. Those are other foxes in the shape of flames traveling over these comets.

The 2 fish swimming about one another with crowns is a symbol I like to use from time to time. They essentially represent a sort of dynamism and movement, among other things.

The presence of them in this image is either as a sort of navigator through this realm, or as a manifestation of t...

Canyon Oryx

Digital. Regular resolution and higher resolution just in case the screentone changes the way the image displays. I don't have much to say yet thematically about these pieces since I'm still figuring them out, but I hope you enjoy them anyhow!

Rainbow Halo

Ink, 11x17in.

Fox in the Thicket

More experimentation. Different resolutions and a middle point when I was adding the character in after getting the background done that turned out oddly charming.

Lion Gohma -- Fruiting Ruins

The Gohma have multiple aspects of what they represent. The Lions embody subconsciousness which I most often depict in it's more feral form like some combination between Zeus and Pan, but they also embody more chaste and austere aspects like figures from what I would call "Teacher Religions" and I think are called "Revealed Faiths" e.g. Christianity, Buddhism, Zorastrianism, etc.

This Lion here is closer to the end of the spectrum I just described. The other symbols in the picture are f...

Boar Ravine

Digital. Trying out a new technique that I have been thinking of for a while. I've posted here both what I upload as a typical "web" resolution, and the higher resolution, since it has screentone I'm not certain how it will display on everyone's monitors.

Mask II

A mysterious masked figure. The original sketch was from 2010, then was just recently inked and colored.

I remember the original inspiration just being that I wanted to draw some masked characters who were somewhere between a wizard, a superhero, and and erstwhile partygoer from some inifinite, unknown, occult masquearde.

Oryx and Mossy Falls

Ink, Watercolor, and Gouache

Trying to get better at watercolors, and trying out putting a wash down before coloring. I saw Hermann Huppen on his youtube channel using this technique, and I'm pretty happy with the results. 

I might fiddle digitally with the colors a little bit more to try and match what it looks like on paper better, so you might see this post again as an update sometime in the near future.

Emerald Rock

Watercolor & Ink. Painting of a coastal scene with a Selkie. Originally I had planned to fill in the rock like normal, but decided to make it transparent to add extra interest to the image and to challenge myself a bit. I haven't figured out how to get the "full-bodied" color I like from digital, but there is a certain texture and the way that colors mix in watercolor that I think is unbeatable.

My cellphone camera is a bit crummy, but at least I remembered to take some process shot...

Mask I

A mysterious masked figure. The original sketch was from 2010, then was just recently inked and colored.

I remember the original inspiration just being that I wanted to draw some masked characters who were somewhere between a wizard, a superhero, and and erstwhile partygoer from some inifinite, unknown masquearde.

Nursery Log Shrine

Ink, Watercolor & Gouache. 11x14.5in.

A sacred fruit shrine in the stump of an ancient life giving tree surrounded by waterfalls.

[EDIT 9/16/2022] Balanced out the colors from the original scan and got the colors way closer to the original. Fresh colors are now the first image, and the previous colors second. Also added the image dimensions.

Fish Pillar

Couplings happening in strange magic places.

RUBBLE OF THE LOTUS

Here it is, the first 21 pages of my comic RUBBLE OF THE LOTUS. It is a comic I've been trying to conceptualize and start making for over 10 years now, and is the synthesis of the ideas I've been coming up with through my illustrations, but now being carried through into a story.

My intention is to keep this comic going perpetually. That probably won't mean that its the central project I work on, it might be put aside from time to time as I work on other comics, but I've been thinking a...

Alchemist's Lab II

Companion image to "Alchemist's Lab I" furthering themes I described in the last one, and drawn at the same size.

Alchemist's Lab I

The fundamental idea behind this one is of a space in which various disparate ideas come together, and through their interaction create new and strange and compelling things. Max Ernst and Andre Bréton used Comte de Lautréamont's line "the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table" from Les Chants de Maldoror to describe the phenomenon the Surrealists were trying to achieve, to create powerful poetic imagery beyond the confines of the rational mind.

When...

Soft Garden

A couple boars. Inks 2016-2017ish, colored just this week.

Secret Chambers of the Heart

Watercolor & Ink

Tier Images

Pencils, inks, and colors of the artworks I made for the tiers. Since you can put images over the tiers, I wanted to do something thematic. Originally I had the tiers titled "Correspondence Card" "Just the Stamps" and "French Postcard" but opted for titling them something more straightforward.

Desert Vessel & Auroch Pool

Back in high school I would draw and color at least one illustration a day. The results aren't too much I would excitedly show off today, but every now and again I think of the sheer volume of work I created, and the breakneck speed I was doing it at (often trying to get one done in the span of a class) and think "hey, what if I did that now?"

It tends not to last long, unfortunately my brain is going in too many directions at once these days. These couple illustrations are the result o...