More doodles for the week

Forced myself to sit down and do something. Of the scribbles for the week, these are the only four I didn't delete. No particular reason, these were just fun to do so I kept them.

Not putting in enough time currently.

Just Two Digital Doodles

First, an on/off evening with Autodesk's Sketchbook Pro:

Not a bad app by any means, but everything seems destined to resemble a sketchbook (the name is very literal) with markers and ballpoint pens. The paintbrush will probably resemble gouache when I get used to it since this app seems to rest between a random doodling app and something a designer/student would use to avoid spending hundreds of dollars on Prismacolor pens. Haven't spent much time with it so I'm on the fence about how much I like it.

Entry to a Halloween themed contest:

Won a $15 video game for a few hours of work last Friday when I realized the deadline was coming up fast (0100 PDT/1900 AEST, unless they do daylight savings). I still have major issues drawing curved lines that don't wobble (as in I can't) on my tablet, but that's just part of the game due to the mostly frictionless surface. Instead of blue shadows smudged, I wish I'd instead just mixed a darker color and done it with a hard edge since this method here isn't working out for me.

Springish Round-Up

As I was posting the last one Saturday night/Sunday morning, I remembered these scans I still hadn't posted. So, yea, I never could decide about whether or not I should make a group posting of the older drawings of single posts with some backstory over what I did. Now enough time has passed that I can't even recall what those drawings were without looking at my scans folder, and to make it worse I've posted a few times since. So, just gotta toss them out there and move on.

Just wanted to draw someone puking.

This was caused by reading either an article or diatribe (I forget which now) about anthropomorphic animals pre-dating the current furry culture.

Started as a salaryman who didn't care as the world broke around him, became a man frozen in time invincible to the influces, then became a frozen-time frame. I should have written down my ideas in a quick checklist first so they all could be integrated.

Quicky doodle with pencil and a Tombo calligraphy pen because all my drawings at the time had no sense of motion. Ended up really liking this due to how it compared to everything else I drew that night.

Really like these masks, and didn't use a source image. I need to double-check my pencil work more before jumping to ink.

Friend of mine has been requesting a drunken leprechaun for a while. Forgetting what one looks like, I drew a drunken, homeless dwarf and had to be reminded about the extra buckles, red hair, and mutton chops. Good warm-up though.

There you have it. A handful of drawings I did on the side I did mean to post, but for various reasons didn't think they deserved their own posting or flat-out forgot to.

Who's Hungry?

Had a large blank file open (1200x1000 or 1500x1500, forget which) and was just messing around with Painter's pencil tools as usual. This giant tablet is a sketchpad that I occasionally use for coloring. Point being that this spawned from one of my several tiny doodles I had kicking around.

As for the drawing, I'm still hazy about pen tools when it comes to digital works. The hard edge is always too much for me no matter what I do, though I'd like to think I'm getting better at it, maybe I'm just getting used to it. Didn't have a clear intent when I started this, not even a colorset in mind. Also, despite my love of reds, I'm red/green colorblind and have no idea what this actually looks like... I hope it's somewhat close to how I'm perceiving it.

Beanstalks

A friend looking over my sketchpad noted I was sorely lacking in drawing scenery and environment and challenged me to draw a sci-fi scene. Promptly I went over a mental checklist of sci-fi novel stereotypes and came up with the standard orbital elevator, which he informed me is more commonly known as a "beanstalk".

The drawing itself was a bit sloppy, and you can see the loose doodles behind it. But all the while I drew it, I kept imagining a bunch of blue. Dunno why, just seemed a a way to do it. The execution of digitally painting it blue however did necessarily go as planned on all fronts, but a stepping stone is a stepping stone.

I'm sure I could tweak it more, but I've spent enough hours re-re-repainting it to figure out what I had in mind as I moved along. It hit that point where one needs to take notes of what did and didn't work, and the project must be set aside.

Also, I'm not sure if it's my colorblindness or not, but goofing off with the overlay (a layer of pure orange to dim the intense blue) I found that I actually did like the inverting one, even if it wasn't what I had intended.

Sketchbooks...

Nothing like finding filled and discarded sketchbooks lying around, quickly flipping through them for shits 'n giggles and seeing drawings that you thought you scanned.

Now, these are generally ones I never liked all that much or didn't think I'd finished, but they were still post-worthy. Will have to bring out the scanner later tonight or tomorrow when I'm done straightening up my room into a state I can work in.

How a Damn Rookie Builds a MAME Cabinet

This is another post that doesn't really belong here, but I'm not sure where else to put it. I'll stick to mostly posting the pictures and keeping the text short.

First pic, 2001.05.12 @0159

This is after I removed all of the buttons it came with. Later I wiped them down and checked all the microswitches. One needed replacement and another I broke while moving things around. As of yesterday (2011.07.12) the move-right microswitch on P1 is starting to act up too and may need replacement as well. The rest all came with it.


The loose wires and microswitches. All Cherry D-somethings and nice, so I'll need to find a source for them since the generic $2 ones from Fry's are stiff and not good for SMHUP games. Also note the chunk of damage on the right side.







Masking tape, paper towel, denatured alcohol. Trying to find out what's behind it.



At the time I had no idea what this was, though a few images down you'll be able to tell.




It's an old Dig Dug cabinet. But the decals are damaged and there's water damage here and there, so as you can see I already gave up saving it and started scraping off two layers of crappy plastic enamel/acrylic (not sure which actually), a black on top and a blue underneath.


Nearly done stripping off the paint and damaged decal. You might not be able to tell, but the particle board didn't take to scraping well and some chunks and gougesjust came out of it as I removed everything. While I blame the weak, old, and water damaged particle board, it's just as likely a rookie mistake.


Spackle and watercolor so it wouldn't have white marks underneath the black paint. While this wasn't a bad idea, I relied too much on spackle and am paying for it now. Later on in Something Awful thread on MAME/arcade cabs I learned that I should have used Bondo. So more rookie mistakes are ahead.



Damaged this part moving it around. Spackle and marine grade epoxy from Tap Plastic. When picking up the cabinet from a guy in Napa, both were suggested soaking the damaged parts in epoxy, using the loose wood fibers in the stead of fiberglass or the like that would normally be used. This worked really well as far as I'm aware to far. Only thing keeping the spackle I used from blowing away in the wind... *sigh*


The original major damage before I banged it up moving it around and further damaged weak parts that didn't look as weak as they actually were.

Last production pic, 2011.05.27 @1726

More spackle, and on top of dry paint?! Yea... the pock marks were just bloody awful and showed up several times worse with a coat of "satin" black polyurethane on top. Next time I do this (yes, there will be a next time) I'll be coating that one with absurd amounts of thickly coated primer before I paint, and after I spackle any gouges/dents.


Today, over a month later.

That's just old watercolor paper underneath the sheet of acrylic. It rested a bit cockeyed too, so there's some sticking out of front of the plate, but only by like 1/16".


Cable management, though you can't see the plastic tubes and tie wraps, and my I-Pac2 VE keyboard encoder over pegs and screwed into the cab. A microswitch wired to the power button pins on the motherboard and a power strip aren't visible from here, and I didn't want to rotate the cab around to take pics.


The actual computer:
Intel E8500
2GB PC6400
1TB SATA HD
Radeon HD 5770
Biostar G31D-M7 (motherboard)
Apex TX-381-C (case)
XPx32 SP2/Vistax64 SP1
500W PSU (Antec I think...)

Bit much for a MAME cab? Yea, well, I knocked a glass of water on most of these components and later found out I only fried the motherboard after replacing everything. My main computer isn't on the floor near my desk anymore I'll have you know! Lesson learned in $400 or so of idiot tax.


The speakers are in the marquee area now, though the glass does dampen the audio more than the speaker grill in the top center of the screen area alone can compensate for. I need to ask around for where to get a replacement sheet of metal or even fabric speaker grill to both hide the speakers and let more sound through.


I just added this 1"x2" wood piece tonight; it's simply pinched in place by pressure, no glue, nails, or anything. While the pics don't show it at all, the arms are pinched inward and the control panel is made of metal and just thrashes and scratches at the paint on the sides. In fact, on double-triple inspect, I figured out that before the sides of the cab were stapled together (if screwed, I'd have fully dismantled it, but it wasn't) it was wall papered. I thought it was paint at first, but it scraped off wrong and the wood behind it had a shiny hardened glue which at this point I figure to be wallpaper glue and black wallpaper--more rookie mistakes. Lesson to anyone else: that stuff Atari used is damn strong and way more resilient than any paint. When I do another one I'll be sure looking into that as an option if it's financially feasible.


You might not be able to see any pock marks, but some are still there. Room is dark and it's late, so I had to crank the ISO on my camera and the grain might be hiding the detail I wanted shown.

Not art, but art related

So I was at my usual coffee haunt last night, doing my doodle thing in my sketchbook. I was at an elevated counter on a stool facing a window to the street and some outside seating generally for smokers more than weather permitting--this is important at the end, take notes, kids. Anyway, I was mostly trying to panel out a 2-page idea and a 3-panel idea (that I can't seem to get lower than 4 panels) I had that sounded like good practice since my visual narrative skills are sub-par (read: not where I want them to be at my age) and I was being painfully scatterbrained and indecisive about it all night.

At the end of the night an older white guy with a shaved head (sure he could have been cue-ball bald...) walked up to the two people next to me, a darker-skinned guy with a short tightly-haired beard in what looked like a faux-military jacket that I forget the country of leaning against the counter, and the girl sitting at the end of the counter, a lean brunette with short hair and a few of those rings that cover the middle segment of the finger--these were particularly noteworthy because whenever she'd plop a hand down I'd hear a clank of her metal against the roofing copper that's used to cover the counters, and the nearly 3 hours I was there added up to a lot of clanking. The two guys had a brief chat, she was half in half out of it, and then the guy who had walked up noticed me doodling and asked to see what I'd just scribbled. I told him I'd just erased that disaster, but here, flip through the whole sketchbook, but be warned the first half is from 2005 (2006 actually, but I remembered wrong) which is why things change drastically mid-way. He liked that I was "boarding" a lot in the most recent pages, continually pleaded with me to stop being self-deprecatory, asked me about my goals and concerns: visual narrative, which I'm "wonky" at, to which he again pleaded with me to stop being self-deprecatory, then told me to learn through emulation (oddly the same thing my art and animation teachers have all told me) and told me to simply keep at it and be positive before walking off.

Despite now feeling bad that I'd used words he deemed too negative and self-defeating to the point he had to insist I stop (his brow even furrowed), having just a short chat like that sort of made my night better as a whole. Then a moment later his friend next to me (dark skinned, faux[?] military jacket) asks if I thought it was weird or odd for a guy to just walk up give me feedback like that, and I said something to the effect of "Nah, any critical feedback after college, let alone good? Do you know how hard that is to come by?", to which he and the girl both grinned at. It was interesting that a guy would walk up, flip through it, notice a few pages ask questions. Quite awesome really. So then he motions out the window and points to the guy who I'd just been talking to who was now sitting just on the other side of the window I'm facing and next to another regular, an older short Asian guy with salt and pepper hair and goatee who's always nose-deep into his large-screened laptop doing something that takes all of his focus at all times, and says "...[T]hose two are ex-Dreamworks and Pixar," though not saying which one was which. I think I was able to keep my shock down to my eyes only half bugging out of my face. The third guy's background is Hollywood, and the lot of them are looking to use their experience to get into working as an animation house for video game cinematics. Which makes sense since almost all games have both miserable dialogue and worse directing for non-interactive sequences. Cheers to them whoever they actually are... well I think the guy in the noteworthy jacket flirting/mingling with the girl next to me said his name, but I had 5 horrible hours of sleep that day, so I barely remember anything but what's written down here.

---

This post was originally about 1/5th this length. But then I got an itch to write it out in length because I can and I don't have an editor--if I did, all my "-ed" and "-ing" would be consistent.

MS Paint contests

"MS Paint what you'd do if you had a Jetpack"


"MS Paint your OWN PERSONAL COUNTRIES [sic] CURRENCY"


Sometimes you don't want to take "art" seriously and doodle in MS Paint. And sometimes you've spent too goddamn much money on a fancy drawing tablet.

Both of these doodles were for web forum quick contests. "You have 1-hour to draw..." and the prizes were Steam games that were on sale for sub-$10. Sometimes you churn out a quick crappy cartoon just because it's fun and because not everything needs to be a masterpiece. Also it's good practice to slam out a quick composition.

AYYYYYYYYYYYYYYBRAH "MOTHERFUCKIN'" LINCOLN

Do you think he'd still get elected?

I had that weird zombie-Lincoln face on my mind when I sat down with my coffee and sketchpad tonight. Took way too long to make this, but it was entertaining to do. The time was overspent guessworking the pose... a photo source would have been handy for speeding it up.

Usual method of red pencil, 2B, black smooth ballpoint, did a little blacking with a calligraphy pen (that's starting to dry out sadly), scanned it, tweaked the levels, filled in the rest of the black, and realized I outta digitally "inkwash" it just a touch with a transparent layer of grey. Sorta wish I'd used Painter's digital watercolor layer instead, but I didn't think of it till I started writing this.

Hobos

Sketch I did at my usual cafe Wednesday last week. As with most doodles where I'm leaning back and getting jittery with a cup of coffee, it shifts between controlled and chaotic, and I screw up foot placement.

Key note to fellow people who like it kick back and doodle carelessly: remember to do depth checks to make sure the right limbs are in the front.

WIP - A Shack

It's actually more challenging than you'd think to make a digital image that looks like non-digital media. Already lacking the surface texture, you need to tweak your tools and program(s) according to some approximate of what your eye think it's supposed to look like.


Wanting to do another quick animation, I needed a background. Then I realized I hadn't done any environmental drawing in too long, and never stressed it on myself in college--double whammy, so I got cracking at this. I probably drew 3 or 5 in my sketchbook before starting this, and this drawing has 6-8 layers for various generations, shading, and elements.

Yea, I'm that guy in your art class who re-did something to death, and might not have noticed a glaring problem while working on some minutia I wanted to get better at.

PS: To students of art: It's on your own shoulders to challenge yourself and vary your range of abilities. Especially since almost all upper-division art classes are "You have work due in 3-6 weeks, use your lab time to full effect, I'll be watching."

Quick Walk Cycle

It's been a while since I did one of these, so thinking about it I found for myself a quick project to do tonight. Wasn't as quick as it should have been, nor is it polished at all, but it had to be done, and it was fun to do it.

It started as the standard 4-frame walk (contact, down, pass, up) before adding two more frames to make a 6-frame walk. Never drawn one before since all the basic exercises are the 4-frame. Plus it now makes the step 50% longer to take the same step.

Good exercise. I might throw in a bit more time on it in a day or two just because I should for practice and cleanliness.

Moustache Dog in Ink

I was at a coffee shop reading a bit and trolling the intarwebs for something to draw from. I've gotta go somewhere once or twice a week to avoid the temptation of video games in my room. My scanning or Reddit's /r/pics found a mustachioed puppy that I added a few extra details to whilst I quickly doodled it out in pen and pencil. Had a lot of fun actually.

Link to original for as long as it lasts: http://imgur.com/gEC1V

Clay Head

First of all, you'll see the scale. All of the sculpting was done with the hard end of that paint brush in the first few pictures--which wasn't easy for someone who's never really done any sculpting to memory. The clay is "Klean Klay"; not sure i it's cheap stuff or not, but I got 2 pounds of it for $5 at Utrecht around a month ago.

Second of all you'll see a dramatic shift in facial construction and that the ears I spent large amounts of time toying with are suddenly gone. I was drinking here with two friends and one of them, a girl by the name of Laura, who has a rather skilled hand at art, looked at my block head and pronounced she "could do it better!" And then proceeded to make my square-jawed cartoon character more realistic and without ears. My focus was on facial expression, so I was both impressed and annoyed at the same time. Due to the ears and the hardness of the clay at room temperature being in conflict anyway, I was far from butt-hurt.

About a week and half later (last night) I was looking at the now egg-shaped head and realized how I was to cope with the lack of ears. The head's new right ear changes when the lighting changes because it did not last the night. It was half fallen off when I woke, and it tore itself free by the time I was ready to take pictures.

So, yea, in retaliation to her alterations I gave him bunny ears and buck teeth.

In the future I will play with this stuff much more, but I'll definitely need some sort of support underneath, meaning I need to figure out what wire I can safely use as a skeleton.