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.