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.