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.

Random Painting #1

While I'd rather title this "NUCLEAR CHICKEN/COCK", it's a random digital painting I did back in March of this year for a draw daily thread on a forum. Not sure how long I spent on it, but the legs make me think I was watching a lot of Futurama at the time.

Minimal as it is, the background still shows more purpose than some of my earlier works, an ongoing struggle of mine caused by being a character doodler first, painter/illustrator second.

That's it for tonight. This dilapidated blog has just been given a handful more updates, in burst form as usual, but hopefully I can start updating this thing weekly or bi-weekly.

A digital painting that's dated late September '08. The painting went through a series of problems and successes, as can be seen by the guy in front, who doesn't look half bad, and the guy behind him, who looks more like a rigid joke. This piece is important because it was my first post-college painting that really highlighted my need to think through my environments better. You'd think that this would be something I wouldn't want to show off, but really, I find the opposite effect.

Truth be told, even "Random Drawing #4"'s environment needs work, but that one, admittedly and sadly, wasn't an afterthought.

Pixel Monkey

A friend wanted a company logo for a side-project of his, and he was fixated on the following citeria: 1 monkey, 1 apple and 2 sandbags. Preferably with said monkey sitting on the sandbags. The bite taken out might not have been a requirement, but I ran with it from the get-go.

It took me a week or scribbling on my tablet and in my sketchbook to even angle myself towards putting the elements together into something cohesive. I even spent a few hours just searching over Google images for pictures of monkeys and chimps while trying to decide what to do.