Monsterblog

Wayfinder Classes

2011-12-19T18:29:00.001-08:00

After a semester of drawing science fiction, I got to indulge my taste for fantasy characters in these illustrations for the Wayfinder website (www.wayfinderexperience.com). It's one character for each of the five classes - more to come!

Pages 6, 7, and 8

2011-11-16T09:53:00.000-08:00

Three more pages from my 15-page comic.
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Page 4
Page 5

Werewolf

2011-11-09T09:43:00.001-08:00

A comic done for an Inking class with Matt Madden...the assignment was to make a comic that was at least 50% black.

Mommy Issues

2011-11-09T09:39:00.000-08:00

A school assignment - originally we made a small model, and then we based a comic off of it. I made a Victorian style bedroom with trees growing out of the floor and bed.

Ancient Gold!

2011-11-09T09:37:00.000-08:00

Four New Pages!

2011-10-20T21:25:00.000-07:00

Pages 2 - 5 of the comic I'm doing for my Principles of Cartooning class at S.V.A. Done with a Windsor Newton #2, a squirrel hair brush, and Dr. Martin's matte black ink. You can see page one here.

I'm a monster!

2011-10-13T16:08:00.001-07:00

Just a one pager I did for myself. I've been working with a large squirrel hair brush recently and liking the effect it has on my work, especially when inking animal fur.

How to Capture the Flag

2011-10-12T19:43:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wanted to know how we play capture the flag at role playing camp? Now you can do it yourself!
(made for a class I have with Gary Panter...the assignment was to make an instructional comic)

Holey Monster

2011-09-30T12:33:00.000-07:00

Another strange monster...

Weird Angel

2011-09-30T12:26:00.000-07:00

Another weird monster. I've been rediscovering nib pens, and though I like some parts of this I think I've got a while to go before I can get them to work for me.

Living Room

2011-09-30T12:22:00.000-07:00

Just a sketch of a living room that I was rather fond of...

As Yet Untitled

2011-09-30T12:16:00.001-07:00

In one of my classes this year we'll be making a 15 page comic over the course of the year, with heavy critique from classmates and the teacher, Keith Mayerson. This is the first page - it's shaping up to be the first chapter of a space story. More to come!

Space Warriors

2011-07-27T16:20:00.000-07:00

Not much time for drawing this summer, but some spacemen worked their way in anyway...

Space

2011-06-11T14:36:00.000-07:00

I wish I knew who these characters were. It was interesting trying to figure out how a dog spacesuit would work.

Macawsmonaut

2011-06-10T13:18:00.000-07:00

The pun works better out loud. I like space!

Bad Hair Day

2011-06-10T13:16:00.000-07:00

I think she's using the wrong conditioner...

Shaman

2011-05-20T15:10:00.000-07:00

The shaman again. I'm fooling around with ideas for a story with her in it. Who knows? She's certainly fun to draw.

Monday

2011-05-20T15:09:00.001-07:00

It is, in fact, Friday, but I did this piece for Draw-Bridge on Monday. I've been drawing a lot of weird monsters lately.

Subway Faces 9

2011-05-20T15:05:00.000-07:00

And...more faces. One of the guys I drew turned out to be drawing me at the same time, which I didn't realize until I went to get off the train. Good to have company.

Dreads

2011-05-20T15:00:00.000-07:00

This is a tiny doodle done on a scrap of receipt paper...probably not blog-worthy, but I really liked her! I think she's some sort of shaman with all sorts of charms and fetishes tied up in her hair. I drew her a few other times missing her right arm, which I think she sacrificed during a spirit journey. I usually try to figure things out about characters as I draw them, but they're normally not this developed.

Subway Faces 8

2011-05-20T14:56:00.000-07:00

Actually, a lot of these are people from school, but it's the same category of sneaky doodling as the subway drawings...

Some Sort of Monster

2011-05-20T14:52:00.000-07:00

This started out with me playing with the brush tip of a brand new Faber-Castell. Of course, it evolved...

Subway Faces 7

2011-05-20T14:50:00.000-07:00

I think I like the doodle of the subway seats the best. I also think I spend too much time on the subway...

Subway Faces 6

2011-05-20T14:48:00.001-07:00

The bottom half was all notes so I cropped it.

Giants

2011-05-20T14:46:00.001-07:00

Not sure what inspired these particular characters...

Subway Faces 5

2011-05-20T14:41:00.000-07:00

Sketchbook page. More subway faces...ignore the To Do list in the lower left.

Pantagruel and Gargantua

2011-05-20T14:33:00.000-07:00

An illustration inspired by a piece of text from The Life of Pantagruel and Gargantua. "The same day Pantagruel passed the Isles of Vacuum and Void in which they did not find so much as a frying-pan, for the great giant Slitnose had swallowed all the pots and pans, kettles and cauldrons, saucepans and dripping pans in the whole land, owning to the lack of windmills which were his ordinary food."

Hands and Feet

2011-05-20T14:31:00.000-07:00

A weird Hindu potato god, I think. I was playing around with body language, and tried to give him a neutral face that could work with any of his hand positions.

Dream Paintings

2011-05-20T14:27:00.000-07:00

Two paintings meant to hang side by side. They're collages of dream imagery and personal experiences.

Subway Painting

2011-05-20T14:25:00.000-07:00

The latest oil painting I've done. This took something like five weeks (it got excruciating near the end) and is 6' x 30".

Nude

2011-05-20T14:24:00.001-07:00

Some of the oil painting I did this semester...this took three weeks and is 5' x 30".

Will Eisner's Spirit

2011-03-07T13:51:00.000-08:00

It's Will Eisner's 94th birthday. His comics continue to be among the most inspiring I've read, and I love his character of the Spirit.

Hellboy

2011-03-02T18:28:00.000-08:00

Quick Hellboy sketch for drawbridge today, I sure do love Mike Mignola!

sketchbook page

2011-02-24T12:27:00.000-08:00

Some very old angel creatures, maybe for a little comic? I love drawing old faces.

Subway Faces 4

2011-02-24T12:26:00.000-08:00

Subway Faces 3

2011-02-24T09:45:00.001-08:00

Subway Faces 2

2011-02-24T09:43:00.000-08:00

Subway Faces 1

2011-02-24T09:35:00.000-08:00

I've started drawing on the subway. It's an exercise in sneakiness; the best targets are people who are sleeping, or deep in a book. It also seems to be an invitation for people to come talk to me, which always leads to interesting conversations.

Adventurer

2011-02-02T17:59:00.000-08:00

Just a character...I've been all about Jaime Hernandez recently, and I love the way he draws women. It's an inspiration to draw more figures. This girl's just won a game of capture the flag, I guess...

Patent Pending

2010-11-23T10:13:00.000-08:00

Sir Ian

2010-11-23T10:11:00.001-08:00

If you haven't seen the Extras clip this is from, it's great: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyoWmkhRyp8&feature=related

South Beach Diet

2010-11-23T10:07:00.000-08:00

Drawbridge theme the other day was 'New Yorker Cartoons..."

Now in Technicolor!

2010-11-15T13:35:00.000-08:00

Sphinxes

2010-11-15T08:01:00.001-08:00

I'm working on a little comic right now about Oedipus's interaction with the Sphinx, who is a pretty cool cat...

Armor Is Important

2010-10-20T10:01:00.002-07:00

Sometimes an illustrator is just compelled to draw giant, impractical, video-game armor...

Monster!

2010-10-20T10:01:00.001-07:00

Kinda creepy...Halloween themed?

Characters

2010-10-20T09:59:00.001-07:00

Some rather silly characters for a project I'm working on with friends...

Stag Tattoo

2010-10-20T09:57:00.000-07:00

Tattoo design done for a friend of mine.

Sketch Page

2010-10-20T09:48:00.000-07:00

Page from my sketchbook - character design for the main girl in a space comic I want to write. It's based loosely on the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty, but everything's better in space.

Ramanujan

2010-06-21T14:56:00.000-07:00

was a self-taught Indian mathematician who believed that his family's goddess wrote divine equations on his tongue. I wonder what they tasted like?

Franzetta!

2010-05-31T13:01:00.001-07:00

I'm pretty bummed he's dead. There are no big cats in this picture, which probably disqualifies it as anything Franzetta-inspired...

Doctor Who

2010-05-11T15:27:00.000-07:00

is probably my favorite show. I'm really liking Matt Smith, and I thought he had a really odd and interesting face that I wanted to capture. Not quite sure if I was successful or not.

New Moon 2010

2010-05-10T09:44:00.000-07:00

Registration is now open! Everyone should come, tell your friends.

Short+Steamy

2010-04-28T21:21:00.000-07:00

One-page story done for my fiction class. Thank god for teachers who accept comics as legit fiction! The story in this could definitely use work but I'm a fan of the layout - if it works as intended, it moves the reader in a reverse S shape across the page.

WXBC

2010-04-14T18:41:00.000-07:00

is the radio station at my college. You can check out the schedule and download it for your iTunes here. I recommend shows by good friends such as Maxwell Haus and The Sound the the Forte. Anyway, here's the shirt design for the station. I've been watching a lot of Mad Men lately and I love the way old-fashioned radios look!

Tea Robot

2010-03-15T18:46:00.000-07:00

Basically I am procrastinating from my midterms, but I wanted to draw a robot that didn't look like robots usually do. Who says that robots couldn't be made out of wood, carved like a cello, painted with designs? This robot does very little. It boils tea inside itself, dispenses milk out of the side faucet, and has a little drawer full of different kinds of sugar.

Brave

2010-03-10T21:26:00.000-08:00

Illustration Friday's topic was BRAVE this week. I decided that crocodiles are pretty much the scariest looking things around, so their dentist birds definitely deserve the adjective.

Pelf Sortrait

2010-03-01T15:15:00.000-08:00

Yep...this is what I look like. Lines are ink, color is Photoshop. I used the Noise filter to give it the slightly gritty look.

Perspective

2010-02-26T07:21:00.001-08:00

Another one for Illustration Friday...I'll probably do more on this theme, but I went to the Pratt Pre-College Summer Program when I was sixteen and we had to illustrate a concept - I picked perspective. I feel like I've grown a lot as an artist since then!

Prop A Gate

2010-02-24T14:23:00.000-08:00

So I found this site called Illustration Friday where they send out a theme every week and accept illustrations on that theme from artists of all skill levels, one of which is picked each week. Also, instead of sending in an image, you send in a link to your site, which I like. So here's mine, on the theme of 'propagate'. I've been feeling a little...punny...lately.

Designs

2010-02-19T09:18:00.000-08:00

I kind of like doing abstract, geometric designs like this. I'm naturally drawn to circular symmetry, like the first two, but I tried to shake it up with the third one.

Website!

2010-02-15T16:22:00.000-08:00

After spending many hours deciphering cryptic instructions sent to me directly by the GoDaddy girl, I'm pleased to present www.mollyostertag.com. I'm still working out some kinks and not everything is up yet, but the new site will have high-res images of the comics that have appeared on this blog in lower, unreadable resolutions. There are also (tentative) plans for a webcomic in the works, which would go on the new site as well.

Bookmark it, tell your friends, buy the t-shirt, get a tattoo:

Rocky Spine

2010-02-10T11:20:00.000-08:00

Cybergraphics homework - she's got the fjords of Norway in her hair, the Grand Tetons on her right shoulder, and the Nile running down her back. It's too small to see in this copy, but the sun is rising in her eye.

Half of the class involves printing on very nice paper using very nice printers, so I'm trying to make things that I'd like to have on my wall or give as gifts.

Ganesh the Astronaut

2010-02-02T19:09:00.001-08:00

I don't want to make this a Photoshop blog, but this was my first assignment for my cybergraphics class (which sounds very exciting, but really just covers Photoshop and Illustrator) and I kind of liked it. The specific assignment was to make something that was physically impossible, but which created the illusion of reality. This image is physically impossible because the elephant wouldn't survive with his helmet off.

Virgil's Aeneid

2010-02-01T17:48:00.000-08:00

Done for a class: Virgil's epic is familiar, as in many ways it follows the path of Homer's Odyssey. In one of these similarities, Aeneas ventures to the underworld to speak with the spirit of his father and receive gifts. I was fascinated by the idea of the underworld as a physical place, one that you could reach in the proper cave and with the proper blood sacrifice. This comic is rough, I didn't have a lot of time with it, but I tried to evoke Attic-vase figures in the stark black-and-white.

This comic needs a witty title

2010-01-25T14:22:00.000-08:00

Another comic based off a short story I wrote - I like the comic more, so I won't post the story. I'm slowly figuring out how to use Photoshop, and coloring this was a learning process. The way I see it, once you learn to think in layers everything else is easy. Well, not easy, but doable.

side note: I've never actually watched CSI in my life, but I hear it's pretty addictive.

The Peaches of Apathy

2010-01-24T16:52:00.000-08:00

Feeling New Yorker-y

2010-01-24T16:40:00.001-08:00

Up Next

2010-01-16T16:49:00.000-08:00

Just got back from two weeks in the city, interning with the guys from Studio XOXOs and Deep6. They're all extremely talented and it's a great learning experience to work with them...I wrote, pencilled, and inked a four-pager in my time there and am in the process of coloring it right now. In the meantime, here's something that I did for a final project this semester...an illustrated rendition of Dante's Inferno. This section of hell is reserved for fortune tellers and soothsayers, whose punishment for pretending to look into the future is to be forced, forever, to look backwards...the Inferno is full of excellently nasty punishments, but this one really stuck with me visually.

Europa

2010-01-05T18:58:00.000-08:00

A pinup of Europa, character of Grecian myth and legend. She was the beautiful daughter of a noble who attracted the attention of Zeus. Continuously intrepid, he disguised himself as a beautiful bull and hung out where she was picking flowers. She became interested in the animal and, seeing that he was gentle, climbed on his back. At this point, he ran away across the ocean and brought her to a new continent, which took its name from her. Moral of the story: don't run away with strange bulls...

Genesis: the legit graphic novel

2009-12-24T19:26:00.000-08:00

Now, I'm not going to lay claim to this particular work, but I'm halfway through R. Crumb's Genesis and I've enjoyed it immensely so far. Adding a graphic element to a text such as Genesis makes a lot of sense. We live in a visual culture, and ancient texts are becoming less and less accessible as we lose the skills of close reading and attention to detail. To reiterate every idea visually adds a whole new level of understanding to the narrative. One of my favorite parts is in the beginning, where God punishes the serpent by taking away his legs. When reading the text of Genesis, you don't stop to think about what the serpent was before his legs were removed. Here, Crumb shows us a scaly, reptilian humanoid who is only recognizable after his punishments. This book has reminded me why I love graphic novels: the words and the images balance each other out. Both are valid without the other, but together they tell a story. Expect more on illustrating the classics at a later date.

Genesis: the short comic

2009-12-24T16:24:00.000-08:00

Here's the 5-page comic. Color was a mix of Prismacolor markers and colored pencils; inking was done with a brush.

-M

Genesis: the short story

2009-12-24T16:12:00.000-08:00

I guess it's appropriate that this should be the theme of my first post. Genesis: the craziest book of the Bible, filled with violence and ambiguous mythology. I read it for the first time a few months ago and was captivated by the old stories, many of which have been built into the foundations of our culture, in their original form. The Garden of Eden, in particular, has always been of favorite of mine, so here's the result of my reading: first a (very) short story, and then an also short comic.

I went east and found the garden of Eden. I wasn’t looking for it, but I guess that’s the way it is with most of the things we find. I hopped the fence of a backyard plot behind a seedy apartment in Birjand, Iran, just an American with no money looking for somewhere to spend the night. By the light of the streetlamps I could see it was nothing special – some flower bushes, clinging to the dry soil, and two old trees with a few apples clinging to the branches. I wouldn’t have suspected their significance except that there was someone there to enlighten me, an angel with the fiery sword set to keep watch over the garden forever. The fiery sword had long since gone out, he told me, and if he had wings they were folded up under his dusty shirt. He was very old, really just a pair of eyes glinting out from a topography of wrinkles. He called me daughter of Eve, even though I introduced myself, and told me where I was. I guess I was surprised, but I was in the right location and you just have to go along with these things. People have been searching for the garden of Eden forever, but no one thought to look in a backyard in Birjand.
“So can I have an apple?” I asked. I’m pretty sure the serpent was purely metaphorical, because I didn’t need to be tempted by anything but my own curiosity. I always supported Eve in her decision to eat the apple anyway, in the choice of knowledge over naïveté and the unknown over the familiar.
The angel didn’t care one way or the other. He’d been forgotten in the garden for thousands of years. So I took an apple. I still don’t know if it was from the tree of knowledge or from the tree of life. And nothing happened – no fire and brimstone, no smiting. I figured that we’d already been kicked out of the garden of Eden and nothing more could be done. So I left the next day, just an American in Birjand with no money who’d tasted from the garden of Eden. But writing this six years later (to the day) I think I’m realizing the results. The side effects of global warming have been growing worse at an unprecedented speed. The seas have risen four and a half inches, we’ve run out of names for hurricanes, and I haven’t seen snow for years. The government started talking seriously about inhabiting new planets four years ago and today I booked my flight into the stars, first to one of the space stations built for temporary housing and then to another solar system, another world. I’m going early because I know it’s inevitable: we’re getting kicked off Earth. It’s time.