This Week's Coffee Doodles

Dug out my Android tablet again for some quick black and white doodles of varying effort.  No true cohesion between them other than I stuck to fan art so the character designs were done for me and I could suppress my inner neuroses and just do a bunch of fairly quick drawings.

The results are here before you at full 1x resolution despite my insistence that anything drawn on this tablet should be reduced in resolution before publishing due to the so-so dot pitch in the screen.

Muddah Fuggin' MONKEY!

After a floundering drawing session on Monday at the cafe haunt, a friend made some sideways comment about a monkey with a crank organ.  One fairly relaxed and anatomically warped doodle later I had the majority of the linework done in a shorter time frame than my messy frustrated scribbles featured in the rest of the night.

Now Thursday night and unsure what to do, I finished reading a short story before giving in to temptation and going back to this.  Cleaned up the lines, reworked the simple background to at least pretend I cared about the perspective, and toned it.

Then my friends demanded rain while I professed disinterest in adding umbrellas.  I was resistant, but gave in just to see what it would look like when both said to not add umbrellas to make it even gloomier.   Well played you two.

Done in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro on my Note 10.1.
First drawing was slightly larger and in several layers.  Those were merged down, saved as a copy and scaled down so I had room for the environment around them.  Unlike on a desktop I have a layer cap due to memory restraints on the tablet.  I think I mention that as lot in posts involving this tablet...

A big catch-up

Someone at La Scalla, the cafe I spend too much time at, offered to me the actual method people use for digital speed painting, which happens to be rather far removed from the physical medium.  Layers; immense amounts of layers with varying opacity and usually specific details in a giant vertical stack.

Now my Galaxy Note has only 2GB of RAM so my layer limit is actually rather low compared to what one would do in Photoshop on a PC or Windows tablet.  Regardless the technique still works out at its base level and just means I have to smoosh more work per layer and lower my expectations.  Also I have far less brushes at my disposal and need to dick around with what brushes Artflow and Sketchbook Pro do have for quick texture or to just keeping things from being too uniformed.

The following posts are reverse chronological order (new to old) as I continue my fight to get the technique down.  Though I'm still rather slow and meticulous at this as with most things I do.

And a bonus because I like the one with construction lines on it:

Ker-PUNCH!

Finally poked around Sketchbook Pro long enough to figure out how to use the paint tools more effectively.  Well slightly more effectively anyway.  Figured I needed to sort out something to draw/paint as a result.  The lack of tiny screaming people was due to scale.  I tried drawing a few tiny Lego men, but due to the scale they would have to have been tiny specs almost.  Then when I changed the image to have the building be smashed I reasoned to myself the area would have been evacuated.

Should I change my mind on this one and look for a way to rework the buildings and add some color I'll add some sort of tiny military defense force on the ground too.  Nothing too detailed if at all, the scale of the drawing itself is just too small overall to do much and I've have to scale it way up, do tons of work cleaning up the edges, and then scale it back down again.

This one comes in two flavors because I can't decide which one I prefer.

With lines on top.

 Straight up painting.

And, yea, the perspective on the buildings is totally weird, but it's an improvement for the year so I just need to take mental notes on that one as usual.

Update: Touched up the lizard-beast, not the buildings though

Rock Giant

A few weeks ago I got it in my head to do some sort of rock creature.  Sourced by a photo of a gorila I found on Google image search.  Just tinkered with it a bit more and decided it was best to move on.

Not claiming victory or defeat on this one, just posting it.

Trying backgrounds again

My history with art and doodling sources back to elementary school when I'd get bored and want to draw little characters over any exposed paper and later on on notes in jr. high and high school.  Nothing fancy, but the point is I've never done much work on backgrounds, and that fact shows up to this day and irks me to the point that (finally) this year I've actively been trying to focus on expanding my abilities there.

A month or two back I started trying to create a tiny universe to write short stories in, maybe as that web comic I've been telling myself to do for a decade.  The way this ties in is that my concept art went from character sketches to, you guessed it, environments... from there I ended up going back to revisiting the basics of perspective and greyscale painting environments that can be colored later on.

This one started out as a simple 1-point perspective line drawing that I colored right off without any underpainting.  It didn't work out and my colorblindness handicap had me selecting some colors that I was told were a little too odd.  So I duplicated the layer, converted it to grey (or saturation to 0 if you prefer), and used that as a baseline for bringing up the light values accordingly, eventually adding more details with great ease comparably.

These colors are mostly the originals.  Not totally sure what the actual color names even are because I can tell from the red hints that I'm just unable to see some of it how most people do.  But the important part is that it looks many, many times better than it originally did and was easier too.  I still prefer someone else to help me with colors though, for the sake of humanity.

I had the urge to do more backgrounds after that one, but some other ideas I fiddled with didn't pan out.  Can't say why, but as I was skimming animation background archives on Google and Reddit's r/animation I was reminded that reality itself need not apply to the composition so I should go dick around.  Somehow from there I wound up looking up backgrounds for Ralph Bakshi's "Cool World".  Probably wanted to do a nighttime downtown scene and have blocked the rest of the movie from memory.

I had originally considered adding street lights.  But instead of going back and repainting a fairly large amount of it, I just made two quick layers and doodled a few lamps and light cones to see if I'd even like the look.  Here's that one for posterity.

Messing around with digital painting some more

First of all: one had multiple hours doodling, correcting, adjusting, redrawing.  The second one only just got past the initial stage for adjusting/correction.

Okay, now I can safely babble away merrily.

As of late I've only done line drawing, hatching, and non-shaded illustrations.  It's what I'm most interested in, but I'm inconsistent at it.  Getting better, I swear.  Anyway, last week I dusted off my memories of how to paint (what I did the most of in college oddly) and have returned to trying out grayscale digital painting. Still prefer achromatic and monochromatic painting to full color, and have since before I learned just how colorblind I really was (standard male, not one of the other two rare variants).

So I've been messing around lately with 1940s themed concept art for a personal project and line-only drawings weren't working out so well on their own for me to practice the style.  This was the impetus to make me go back to rendered digital paintings instead of just a bunch of loose doodles for my planning.  Oh, and I always liked lowrider magazine camera angles and wanted to goof around with that.

 This was actually drawn on my Android tablet and scaled down on my computer. The Galaxy Note 10.1 only has resolution of 1280x800 pixels, so the art always looks less refined on a PC and really needs to be scaled down after.  It's got a few goofy spots I can't stop staring at, but it still turned out better than I expected for my first real attempt at sitting down and painting a car in years... or possibly ever.  Not sure I ever seriously gave it a shot before.

This was done on my Wacom and 1/4 or less time has been spent shaping it up, fixing angles and trying to figure out what needs to be erased/redone.  I'm posting it not as a comparison but because I'm unsure I want to keep working on it.  Neither drawing is 1:1 to the source photo so I've had to do a lot of guessing of where parts are I honestly guessed wrong more than I'm gonna admit, even moreso on this one to the point that I think I'd rather start all over instead block in half of the car all over to figure out where I went wrong.

Generic Sci-Fi Guy

Was watching Game of Thrones S3 and feeling fidgety.  Ended up trying an attempt at exactly what it sounds like.

1) Add a bunch of black hoses.
2) Put some humanoid thing in a chair
3) For the love all that is sacred to you, put a respirator on it.  RIGHT NOW.
4) Goof off, act like you thought of it first.

I was messing around (read: lazy) and didn't look for any pose sources images, and mostly spent my time re-familiarizing myself with greyscale digital painting anyway.  Wound up getting bored with the pose as a direct result and messing around elsewhere, which was non-boring.

Cintiq's are apparently famous for having bad default colors, and the LCD TV I use for my main screen definitely has contrast issues.  I've got no idea how this will look for other people more than usual.

Vanilla

 Texture layer on divide

 Texture layer on multiply

Ants? Don't worry, I got this.

Digital doodle dragged between various programs and tinkered with for personal experiments.

I'm still not the most confident with coloring, though I did, whilst under duress from a friend, adjust some arm lengths and a few other things today after leaving it alone for a week or so.  Oh digital editing :swoon:

Few more randoms

Just some random doodles from recently.  Not all ideas pan out and others are just quick works for skill building.

Sci-fi mining operation I couldn't color in any way I liked.  Also I couldn't think up a fitting foreground element.  Might try something later tonight on it, might not.

 Buncha quick heads from r/redditgetsdrawn I did to practice female jawlines mostly--and two instances of boobs, though they were secondary this exercise.

 Early doodle on my Android tablet.

Possibly an even earlier doodle on the portable tablet...