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.