Castles and Cooks/ Look at this Dog

Many months ago, my friend Jesse asked me to do some banners for his website. Castles and Cooks is a blog that fuses geek and gourmet culture. Basically, if you'd like to eat a dragon, this is the site for you. So, here they are, along with the initial sketches:

The characters are the proprietors of the blog, as their culinary alter-egos. I tried to theme them pretty strongly by color, so they'd look distinctly different at a small size. In the course of painting, I kept the thumbnails handy as reference so I wouldn't stray too far from the intended mood for each banner. It probably would have been better in the interest of time to tighten up the thumbnails, but painting is so fun that I usually dive right in. This project was a bit of a style departure for me, and I'm not a text person, so this was a pretty interesting challenge. Oh, and Jesse hasn't actually seen them done, so they may change a bit.

Finally, these are tremendously late because like the day after I agreed to draw them, I got this fluffy dog. 

Look at that face! But, to the cooks, sorry for the delay!