Three of a set of six illustrations produced for the food section of the San Francisco Panorama, the recent McSweeney’s newspaper extravaganza.  They accompanied an article on making chicha, a Latin American beverage derived from chewed-up corn.

A set of food illustrations for the Food section of the San Francisco Panorama, the McSweeney’s newspaper spectacular.  It accompanied an article by Katrina Dodson of Weird Vegetables fame. The characters are, clockwise from top right: hachiya persimmon, Jerusalem artichoke, sorrel, blue potato, singua, chantrelle mushrooms, long beans, fuyu persimmon, ong choy, stinging nettles, long eggplant, bitter melon, yu choy, red giant mustard greens, and rosa bianca eggplant.

An ad for a play written by the incomparable S. Weiss.  The play involves “Tomorrow’s Pioneers,” a Hamas-produced Muppets knockoff.  Below, just for fun, is the first draft.

Postcard ad for a play by Samara Weiss.  The play was based on The Garden of Earthly Delights, the characters based on figures in the play.  (The character depicted in the postcard is in the lower left corner of the center panel, just below the mussel shell and to the left of the big fish.)

This was for a project of Mike Limm’s through Mary Power’s lab at Berkeley.  This particular part of the project involved looking at the composition of caddisfly casings, in which pine needles are placed at hydrodynamically significant angles.  This shows casings at five different stages of caddisfly development.  It was the first insect illustration I’d done in a while.

Dunno what the moral of the story is, but I was pleased with how the art came out.  The background images are all from a walk around Union Square.  See the comic in its original context here.

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Brown Girls is a weekly webcomic written by Deepa Sood. See her blog!

Never drew a drunk person for a project before. It was fun. A playwright/screenwriter friend assures me that the situation depicted in this comic is “SO TRUE.”

“Brown Girls” is a weekly webcomic written by Deepa Sood. See it in its original context on her blog.

Background photos from Dolores Park, the Dolores Park Cafe, and Bi-Rite.

“Brown Girls” is a weekly webcomic written by Deepa Sood. See the strip on her site here.

This is a diagram for a paper on foliar uptake in plants — a phenomenon whereby plants absorb moisture directly through the leaves (which is rare, since that’s usually what roots are for; however, you can see this happen sometimes in foggy areas).  Emily Limm from the Dawson Lab at Berkeley did a trial on ten common redwood plants, with results as shown in this diagram.  The down arrows represent the degree to which foliar uptake happens; the up arrows represent the amount of moisture that leaves the plant overnight via the leaves.  Under review for publication in Oecologia.

I like this script a lot.  Silly housemate reference photo of the week:

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Brown Girls is a weekly webcomic written by Deepa Sood. See this comic on her blog.

(The joke here, since I’ve had a lot of people ask, is that the aunties have gone to the inauguration not to see Obama, but rather to see Sanjay Gupta, the nominee for surgeon general and potentially the first South Asian American to serve in a cabinet level post.)  

First, I draw a pencil sketch based on the script.  

Once the sketch is approved, I draw final versions of the characters and objects to be included.  Then I ink these with Micron Pigma and Pitt brush pens.  

If necessary, I get my housemates to pose for silly reference photos.  

Once the linework is finished, I scan it and use Photoshop to isolate the inked lines.  These form the top layer, and I build up the coloring in three or four layers underneath (one opaque layer of base coloring, one transparent layer for shadows, one layer for supplementary color, etc.).  Once the final composition is in place, I add background images (in this case, Creative Commons licensed photos from a pre-inauguration concert).  Finally, I create panel frames and text using Flash (since it’s much easier to do in a vector program than Photoshop).

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Brown Girls is a weekly webcomic written by Deepa Sood. See her blog.

Drawn from my home office, which I share with my fellow illustrator and seventh grade dungeonmaster Andy.  The magazine cover is a photo from this spread.  Brown Girls is a weekly webcomic written by Deepa Sood. See her blog.

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Apologies to Shepard Fairey. Brown Girls is a weekly webcomic written by Deepa Sood. See her blog.

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Fun with panel frames.  December 9, 2008. Brown Girls is a weekly webcomic written by Deepa Sood.  See her blog.

Drawn during the week after the terror attacks in Mumbai. December 10, 2008.

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Brown Girls is a weekly webcomic written by Deepa Sood. See her blog.

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November 26, 2008 - special Thanksgiving post. I saw the movie a week after the strip ran and laughed at several inappropriate points (during the brothel scene, for instance, when I realized where the jewelery in the second panel came from). Brown Girls is a weekly webcomic written by Deepa Sood. See her blog.

One of a set of Flash banner ads created for a VoIP company.

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First Brown Girls comic.  October 6, 2008.  Brown Girls is a weekly webcomic written by Deepa Sood. See her blog.

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Doubtsourcing, a webcomic devoted to finding the funny in IT outsourcing, was written by Sandeep Sood.  It has recently evolved into a series of video shorts, look for them soon.