Not Quite Goya's Ghost

Originally I had just wanted to draw the face of this based on a love of circular white eyes and a scene from the old Evangelion series where one of the giant not-really-a-robots was drawn as a carnivorous silhouette with some color and two wild white circles for eyes.

As I sketched in the head and eyes, I progressed to the hands and then doodled in the body as quickly as I could... which probably called on my love of Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Son" from my subconscious. Most of the anatomy issues were done on purpose, but a few happened because I blocked in shapes too quickly and didn't think about how they should fit together or contract and bunch up. It was an exercise in speed at first, then shadows second.

Also needing to play more with shadow, you can see spots where I simply wasn't sure what to block in and what to leave as white.

Loosely drawn in erasable red, then in 2B, loosely/wildly traced over in ballpoint, and finally blacked in with a felt Tombo calligraphy pen. It's done on cheap sketchpad paper, so I opted not to erase all of the pencil lines and cause a bunch of greyish areas where the paper always lifts up from vigorous erasing.

Drawing The Turtles

Webcam on 10-second delay, played back at 30FPS.



The actual drawing. Photographed with my D40 on the same tripod.

Not the optimal setup and it seems prone to leaving parts not in the center out of focus as I don't quite match up the angles of the camera and drafting table as closely as it looks in the viewfinder.

Turtle. Yes, a Turtle.

Source image

This guy takes up around half of another 18"x24" sheet of paper.

Vowing to draw something tonight, and someone randomly having mentioned turtles, I realized I hadn't tried drawing an at least semi-accurate turtle in... well probably ever. I hit up yonder Google image search and found many, many pictures of turtles. This one caught my eye though, which is unsurprising since it was National Geographic--love their photography I do, so much so I picked up that DVD set of everything of theirs until the early 2000s... and I never use it.

The reason there's no background to the image is that the photographer, or someone else in the publishing chain, digitally removed all of the environment. If you zoom in close enough you can see that the very outside pixels are transparent, and that it was probably cut/masked out with vectors in Photoshop or the like.

So I took some liberties with the drawing since my monitor and my drafting table face different walls, and I can only rotate the screen so much. Also I wanted to do a more desert-style of reptile scales because of a giant lizard in Geoff Darrow's Shaolin Cowboy series.

Photographed and color-dropped again. My scanner can't handle stuff this size, and the lamp by my table is on the left side, always blowing out the left side of the photos.

40# (I think) sketch paper, 2B and 6B pencil, various erasers.

A Bad Rip-Off

The idea sort of came to me from a collection of photographs I picked up at a used book store a year or so ago, "Century" by Phaidon Press. It's 1,000+ pages (or photos, I forget) of photos from 1900-2000, mostly in black and white. On Page 414 is a woman in a gas mask and shall wandering what I think is a downtown area in a bombed-out Germany during WWI. No flames, just contrasty, eerie, and probably would give a hard-on to anyone big into industrial music and dress.

Anyway, the drawing has lots and lots of issues. This is what happens when you take a loose idea you're not sure how to just blatantly copy and end up sticking to one of the loose doodles. It didn't look all that good, so I turned it into a personal challenge to render the whole sheet of 18"x24" paper into a drawing with a background that made some sense as it had been since college that I tried that--also my backgrounds are still ignored more than a red-headed step-child, and that needs to stop. My indecisive nature didn't help, and I took way too long in it as well since every 30-60 minutes I'd utter a string of expletives and walk away to play video games for a few. Then return and change my mind about another aspect.

It was photographed with a tripod while it was still on my drafting table, which is part of why the lighting is off and why I greyscaled it since the halogen and the fluorescent lamps were fighting over the ambient color of the paper.

Biggie (tm) 40# paper pad, 2B, 4B, 5B, 6B pencils, a smudge stick, and some erasers.

Facebook to Panel

This is based on a Facebook post that was much simpler and just involved yelling "I'm pooping" at some Jehova's Witnesses from wherever he lived in whatever room he was in. It wasn't a very long post obviously.

Anyway, I haven't been trying panel work as much as I want to, if at all. And ultimately it's one of the things I want to do. The art work is horribly inconsistent as I tried several different things to see which ones I liked, and working like this on 8.5"x11" paper meant working really small and that was aggravating in its own right.

Posted for posterity. And to mark me trying this shit out some more.

Cthulu Creates God

Yea, yea, it's not perfect. I'm getting there...

Well, here's is my Cthulu drawing drawn back over in pen. Not much has changed here, and I'm considering painting over/under it digitally with dramatic light and shadow, maybe tenebrism, maybe less dramatic than that.

Character sheets

Basically around the winter/spring transition of last year some friends wanted to start an iPhone app development house. I've got a fancy-shmancy degree in studio art, and I'll totally work on the cheap to pro bono if it pads my portfolio. I didn't intern in college and I need/want professional degrading at hands of demanding management.

While the animation for the elephant was completed late in the game due to project mishandling and mismanagement at the fault of multiple hands and my laziness, the project itself was 90%+ completed, and then abandoned for various reasons that aren't the fault of one, but of the many. Anyway, these are two character sheets, one of which isn't completed as one can identify by Toast Man not having a shaded or colored 3/4 angle.

Done purely digitally back and forth between Painter and Photoshop.

The South Shall Rise Again!

This actually started out on a picnic table at Bullards Bar Reservoir around 10 days ago. I was trying to think of what to draw and possibly having an early afternoon beer at the time. A buddy of mine started listing off random things and the ones that stuck somehow built the image of the Great Southern Uprising on dinosaurs and with lasers. If I was in fact drinking a beer, I was less than half of a bottle in to the day, so it wasn't drunken stupidity/genius that inspired me.

I wasn't sure where I was going with this outside of wanting a drab brown landscape with some colors on top in watercolor, so I kept adding elements of an environment to the drawing as I went. That's also why I scanned it three times, so I could always take a step back and finish it off purely digitally if I fucked it up too much. So far I like the results that I can see... but I'm red/green colorblind, so I honestly have no idea what it truly looks like.

The anatomy needs work, as usual, but as a whole I see it as a step in the right direction for myself. Especially since I used no photo sources for anything until late in the re-penciling stage to see what a velociraptor actually (sort of) looked like. The errors with the rider are my own damn fault and that I didn't want to go back and re-draw half of him. His left hand also contains some inking errors that looked better when it was pencil. Lessons learned the hard way...

Usual process: erasable red pencil, 2B graphite sketch finalizing, 02 black Micron lines, detail in 005, 05, and 08. Real watercolors NOT with the pencils this time, screw those things if I'm not on the road. I dug up my actual watercolor tubes and an old mixing tray I've had since about 2001.

Following his advice!

Okay, Monday of this week started out with at least 3 Cthulhu references, and then someone made a crack about whether I had desires to depict him, as he called out to artists. I've yet to read the book--oh, but I will soon I hope--so I assumed this was part of the mythos. Well I hadn't any desire at the time, but later that night while hanging out with a buddy I finally got an idea for how to depict the Great Old One. Anatomy is far from perfect, but it's good practice to tinker with classical themes. So you should too.

Red eraseable pencil followed by 2B, scanned with the red dropped out. Will likely ink it, or try to, after a few more changes to the two touching hands and the area around that.

Week of 2010.06.25

My first pencil/pen/watercolor tests on the watercolor pad. While being pre-posted before the completed robot, it's actually being written after.

So, these are my first attempts to play with the watercolor pencils, and they didn't at all work how I expected in a relation of amount:intensity ratio. The blurry grey smudges on the one with the eye-flare are the result of a non-waterproof ink to see if/how it would work as an inkwash. I wasn't put off by the results, but I thought it would bleed a lot more and not leave lines behind like that.

Overall I like the not-really-complete doodles, but dislike most traits of the watercolor pencils. So not much changed after I did the play-doh colored robot, though I did get a mildly better grasp on controlling it.

The Monster

Was hanging out at a friend's place and I think Young Frankenstein was mentioned somewhere along the evening. Doing what I usually do, bucking social standards, I grabbed my sketch pad and went to town drawing the old guy in trusty 'ol red erasable pencil. Proceeded to add the monster with a head in hand and draw an environment around them. So, yes, this was a poorly planned scribble. Along the way I realized I needed more blood and Eyegor somewhere in it. Again, poorly planned. No line width variance because the pen I used is, as I've mentioned before, an extra fine .5MM ballpoint that doesn't bleed. It's steady like a large inanimate object or someone still on the wagon.

Then the usual 2B followed by ball point black, non-waterproof.

I am aware that the doctor wasn't that old in either the original or parody, I just really wanted to draw a cane and monocle.

Play-Doh colored robot

Well, the watercolor pencils I wanted to tinker with ended up like this.

Mixing them is a complete pain the ass, and so is sharpening them on the go. The best way to do it is with a cylindrical cutter/planetary sharpener with two conical gears that shave off the material. If you're old enough, you'll recall them having hand cranks in elementary school and being about mid-thigh height compared to the adults.

So, the drawing didn't change too much from my previous scan, but the color from the pencils only had the option of intense. The yellow went from faint yellow stain to yellow overwhelming blob while the red and browns mostly stayed as lines on the paper and barely bled out or even moved. The blues were more forgiving and probably were inbetween the other colors in terms of the pigment's hardness. So are they worthless? Not really. Are they useful? Barely, but yes. Good for an experiment in the middle of nowhere, or at a coffee shop, where I like to do my drawing.

Another Unfinished Robot

I've been playing with a pad of 90# cold press watercolor paper for the sake of mixed media work. Nothing against my beloved (and cheapo) 50# sketchpad, that's 10# lighter than most sketchpads, but it doesn't handle liquid at all. In fact 90# barely does either. I argue that 150# is a very nice baseline for any watercolor/ink wash, and that still buckles if you do any full-page washes.

The point of this new pad is also to convince myself to do more complete drawings so I can finally move closer to work I'd merrily put into a portfolio. So far it's not really working, but we'll see.

The evolution of this drawing was a loose idea hacked in with my trust erasable red pencil that became my sidekick in animation, my staple 2B graphite, and then black Micron 03 with 02 and 05 to touch up after. For the record, Microns are amazing pens with two problems: 1) no line width; these babies are consistent and stalwartly the size they're marked as, and 2) if you fail to get that last little click on the pen, that baby's gonna draw out dead right quick. #1 can be your ally actually, but I'm a big fan of line width variation within a single line, and they don't bleed at all, which makes up for any problems I might have with them.

Anyway, as you can see I ran into some issues with my drawing. Downside of not using any photo reference at all is that sometimes you don't take enough time to consider the mass of an object and have elements clip through each other or not match perspective. In this case, the left knee joint is sort of impossibly wrong and even the white out isn't helping much. Oh well, still gonna finish it up the ink later today and play with my watercolor pencils for some color testing and to inch closer to a decision if I like watercolor pencils or if they're a joke and a waste of my money.

There are a few more drawings from the past 1.5 weeks that haven't been scanned yet, but this one needed to be archived before anything else got fucked up in process of completion.

Week of 2010.06.18

The week in doodles for me. Only 3-pages worth of scribbles, and another 1-page drawing that's only very roughly laid out as an idea, in fact so lightly laid out that I didn't bother scanning it.

The first image is one I want to play with more, while the rest are loose ideas to relax the fingers and wrist so that I might get to the point with my pencil instead of spending too long trying to salvage a bad idea. I started the 2nd image with the handlebar mustached fellow, and spent far too long scribbling on and around the idea. Bad warm up practice, as those should always be fast and loose, like that Motorhead song.

As a fun note, the top of the 3rd page has an issue where I forgot which leg was which and, well, it's obviously fucked up; you can see where I noticed something wrong and just lifted my pencil away from it and moved on.

Unfinished Robot

See that faint image behind the black lines? That was a rather fun pencil doodle to make. Ignored most perspective cues as a whole to focus on the giant robot in the middle, and then on the one to the right. The rest of it was loosely guided by where the vanishing point had sort of started, but was done freehand and with very little consistency.

So why is it incomplete? Took a photo of it, dragged it into Painter and couldn't decide what to do with it once I got all the angles and everything where I wanted them. The whole idea just fell apart over the course of a day or two and got tossed aside for better-planned ideas. Or maybe to try again someday.

Dragon

Drawing of a dragon I was doodling in my sketchbook a week or two ago. Erasable red pencil, 2B graphite, and black ball point.

The intentional was to try and return to a more cartoony style since as of late I've been trying to make stuff realistic without much or any photo reference, which is really bloody hard for me and has resulted in some iffy drawings and oddball anatomy screw-ups where some stuff looks fine and others are just wrong.

Also I was wasn't really thinking about it and totally screwed up a few things on the dragon, most notably the stomach. I'm going to attempt a touch-up of that area on my tablet later today.

Got a new scanner, an Epson V500, and I finally tried it out. Normal scans are damn quick to me since I'm used to a 10-year-old Canon 1240U. This one is advertised as being for photo scanning first, but of that I only care about this awesome option for dropping a single color spectrum. The scan takes twice as long, but I will almost completely ignore the red erasable pencil I've started drawings with since my last animation class. It's a silly thing to enjoy, but it's awesome compared to what I'm used to.

Pow.

Oh wait, two more. I'll post this now, the other later on.

Okay, so my all-time favorite hyper-detailed artist is Geof Darrow. There are lots of amazing comic artists and animators out there with all sorts of amazing styles. But when I want to read a hyper-detail comic without the art feeling cluttered and without focus, he is a god among peons.

The result is that every so often I take another shot at drawing what I imagine a high-speed camera would capture in whatever situation is crossing my mind at the time. And for this drawing, started around 2 weeks ago, I had zombies, proper anatomy, and Darrow's Shaolin Cowboy on my mind. Specifically the 3rd panel of this page is what I was thinking of.

So I went about free-handing the drawing, going back and forth between two anatomy books and cursing to myself for a few days on and off while trying to remember how to draw. It's amazing how much one can forget. Or has to re-learn when working on a drawing tablet. In my case a nasty mess of both.

Lessons learned:
- I still can't do hair very well and try to draw everyone bald
- There are a lot of muscles I forget about
- Freehanding everything is a lot harder than I recall. I should use more photo references
- It's hard to imagine gore in 3D when drawing. I spent way too long just imagining the result of and thinking "If this part is shot off, and these muscles are exposed, and these bones are shattered... would it be skull, vertebrae, or brains exposed here. And where would the jugular go?"

That last one is a paraphrase of a real thought.

Random Panda

These have all been cross-posted to my Deviant Art account too. But I don't bother to write as much there.

Out of ideas just a week ago from today I went about sifting through my gigantic folder of random images I've collected from Ye Olde Internet. It's a giant folder of random source images I've found via Google Image Search (GIS), memes from 4chan, links from Reddit, so on and so forth. It runs the gamut of horribly inappropriate humor to endearing to pics pilfered from National Geographic and The Boston Globe. You'd be amazed what can be a handy source image or inspirational in a rut.

Strangely, of all those to flip though a drawing of a panda in basically a split of a Shinto monk's clothing and Usagi Yojimbo's outfit stood out to me. But so did the sumi-e calligraphy tools in Painter, of which I simply could not get a fine painterly line from. Also, being a simulated art tool set and not real, I couldn't just let it dry and then angle it on a table and gently go over with a very wet watercolor brush to get runs and blooms of ink on it. Instead I settled for a water color layer in black and looked back over my shoulder to my drafting table and considered returning to it.

This was never meant to be an intricate drawing, but the digital tools don't work quite in line with my on/off watercoloring for the past decade, so I eventually gave up making it look how I imagined it (which, honestly, involved the crinkling sound of thin paper, so I was doomed from the start) and spent more time adjust layer transparencies and brush settings than I did actually drawing it. In fact it was meant to be a a minimalist ink drawing more in line with... [randomly searches GIS] this than what it came out as. Oh well, live and learn to manipulate the software for another day.

That's it for now. I'm not sure what else is on hand for publishing here at the moment.

Evening Goo... or something

Anyone else's opinion aside, my take on this is as follows: A mix of a watercolor layer, a layer with a pencil/pen tool, and disaster.

Overall it's a take on a pencil/pen drawing I did in my sketchbook. One of a very few I finished in my sketchbook over the most recent long period of inactivity present in this blog. The original drawing was my personal favorite combination of black ink over pencil layout. Problem was the sense of perspective was non-existent and it fell flat and looked dull.

While I feel I did a better job with the composition and the brick walls, I honestly can't stand anything else about this. Lessons learned about color theory and getting used to working completely digital I hope. Also digital coloring is hard to tone down with complimentary colors; everything is still coming out as a high-intensity blob of color. Nevermind my red/green colorblindness kicking me in the pants... I'll find a way to at least partially overcome it yet.

On to more backlog posting...

Arid

Returning to this blog since it's been too long. The point of this was for it to function as both a portfolio and a way for me to keep myself drawing. That both has and hasn't been the case. Also helps that my last post was from right before I took my last job as a night-shift forklift driver.


My gradual return to Painter

While I carried my sketchpad with me to work for the 19 or so weeks I was at the forklifting job, I never really finished anything I started. Nothing but loose doodles as I got rustier and rustier over time. This drawing is one of the few I've taken to what I felt was a completion or stopping point for what it was. Originally it was just a loose scribble in a stack of unrelated layers to chronicle the day's drawing, but the forced perspective turned out to be a real pain in the backside for me since I hadn't done it in a while. That alone caused me to casually spend a handful of days staring at it and eventually taking it to where it is as a forced exercise to just stop the universe and troubleshoot my drawing memory.

While I wouldn't call it a resounding success or anything, it did feel good to work on it regardless of how long it took.