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.