Find Me At Awesome Con!

As you’re reading this, I’m on my way to Awesome Con! It’s happening March 8-10, 2024 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. Find me sharing table J-05 with my buddy Ben Wright-Heuman!

I have a ton of new mini-prints to showcase at Awesome Con, including some exclusives! Here are some sneak peeks at what I’m bringing with me…

Can’t make it? No worries – my Ko-fi shop will be open! Plus you can catch up on my YouTube channel, as well as my webcomics: The Legend of Jamie Roberts, New Punk Signal, and Vanita and the Demon King. That last one will have regular updates coming back March 24! Catch new pages on my email newsletter.

That’s all for now. See you at Awesome Con! And if you’re outside of DC, stay tuned, and thanks for reading!

You. Are. Awesome.

Fanart Friday – Janemba Expressions

On Tumblr and other places, I’ve been (inconsistently) posting Fanart on Fridays. I’ve posted this sheet before in other places, but I’m just so tickled every time I see this.

If you don’t know who this is, don’t worry. He’s niche, even in the cannon he’s from.

This is Janemba, the main antagonist of Dragonball Z movie 12: Fusion Reborn. Folks in the fandom like to say he’s a worse version of Buu, but I respectfully disagree. To me, Buu is a recent prison escapee with absolute freedom to do whatever he wants, so the world is his toy. I see Janemba not as that, but as a potential god of Chaos. In the movie, he’s supposed to be Evil Incarnate. But how can you say that about a teenage boy caught in a chemical explosion because he had his earbuds in?

Nah. Janemba’s just here for a good time and to make shit up as he goes along. It’s just that he doesn’t take criticism very well. Like, he literally cracks if you insult him.

The other thing about Janemba is: he never speaks. Yup, he’s a mute villain.

This makes some people think, “Oh, he doesn’t talk? Then he has no personality.”

And I saw that train of thought and went, “What if Janemba, mute as he is…had the same breadth of expressions as Crash Bandicoot?”

Both characters are mute! But that doesn’t stop them from having a personality! So I drew this character sheet as a proof of concept. Like, “Hey! Janemba can be expressive, too!”

He’s also just plain fun to draw for me. So if you want to see more of this guy, let me know and I will post more stuff.

That’s all for now. Thank you for checking this out!

You. Are. Awesome.

P.S. I’m live streaming on YouTube tomorrow at 1 pm EDT. Hope you can make it! I’ll be drawing commissions.

Sailor Mercury: A Sketch

sailor mercury fanart sketch made with brush pen and copic marker

I didn’t grow up watching Sailor Moon – unlike apparently 99% of other Millenials. I knew it existed, but I didn’t watch it regularly.

But when I DID watch it, I watched it for Sailor Mercury.

Mostly I watched for her because Mercury (the planet) rules Virgo, and that happens to be my astrological sign.

But also she’s smart. I REALLY liked smart girls in my cartoons who were also cute as heck. Surprisingly, not many girls on TV at the time were smart AND cute. You were one or the other. But Sailor Mercury dared to be BOTH.

So yeah. I drew her.

She’s available as a hi-res download now, too, on Ko-Fi and Patreon for just $1.

The original sketch will be listed on Storenvy soon.

Thank you for reading!

You. Are. Awesome.

“I Am The Land,” An Art Piece

i am the land american gods art illustration by kelci crawford

If you’re a fan of Neil Gaiman’s book, American Gods, like I am, then you know why this piece is called “I Am The Land.” If you haven’t read the book (or read the comic, or seen the TV show) yet, you should fix that. Like, ASAP.

American Gods is one of those books that shook me when I first read it. Every time I re-read it, I discover something new about it. It’s dream-like and jarring yet also grounded (in the sense that the god characters act like people and not like high-concept “I am above petty emotions” personalities. Zack Snyder should learn a thing or two from this book).

One of the recurring characters in American Gods is a man with a buffalo head. He doesn’t outright murder anyone in the book. However, when I got the idea for this piece of art, I finished a section of the comic book adaptation of the novel – specifically, the section about Vikings landing in Canada and killing a Native American, and then the Natives killing every Viking in retaliation. Yes, the account is fiction, but there’s an element of truth to it, to the idea that America is a land stained in blood.

That’s why I made this piece.

This was drawn with my trusty mechanical pencil and Pentel Brush Sign Pen, with colors by my Copic markers. The background color was done with a Kuretake Zig Clean Color FB brush pen. It’s dying out a little though, so I’ll need to replace it soon.

Soon this will be a print measuring 11×17 inches. When it’s in the shop, I’ll announce it on the email newsletter first. It’s going to be a limited print run, though, so because of that, it’ll be a little more than just $10.

Thank you for reading!

You. Are. Awesome.

Fan Art (Among Other News)

Not gonna’ lie, most of the art I’ve made this week has been… fanart. Of Dragonball Z.

You have no idea of how much love I have for this series. (I wrote a little about it in this post.)

metacooler from dragonball z return of cooler

I also wanted to try some things in Manga Studio because I haven’t fully experimented with it until recently.

Anyway, the characters I’ve been drawing actually come from the movies in the Dragonball Z series, especially Return of Cooler and Bojack Unbound. Continue reading “Fan Art (Among Other News)”