First of eight

Due to setting up an Instagram profile in January I stopped posting scans of images here for about two months.

Now I present to the universe, those same photos, only without the mostly-useless filters!  I incorrectly used different filters!  On a serious note, I dug up photos of 8 drawings I liked and am cross-posting them here since this isn't Instagram and is therefore better for this sort of thing.

A Scud doodle done mostly from memory.  I eventually looked for images of what he really looks like before I took a pen and waterbrush to it.

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.

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.

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.