Pick Your Battles

Drawing I did in or just under an hour while "watching" (listening) a dialogue heavy movie.

Mato!!!

I got my new tablet finally. Replaced by Wacom 12WX with a superior model.

Anyway, I had absolutely no idea what to draw on it. So, this was my get-used-to-the-new-toy! drawing.

Not Quite Goya's Ghost

Originally I had just wanted to draw the face of this based on a love of circular white eyes and a scene from the old Evangelion series where one of the giant not-really-a-robots was drawn as a carnivorous silhouette with some color and two wild white circles for eyes.

As I sketched in the head and eyes, I progressed to the hands and then doodled in the body as quickly as I could... which probably called on my love of Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Son" from my subconscious. Most of the anatomy issues were done on purpose, but a few happened because I blocked in shapes too quickly and didn't think about how they should fit together or contract and bunch up. It was an exercise in speed at first, then shadows second.

Also needing to play more with shadow, you can see spots where I simply wasn't sure what to block in and what to leave as white.

Loosely drawn in erasable red, then in 2B, loosely/wildly traced over in ballpoint, and finally blacked in with a felt Tombo calligraphy pen. It's done on cheap sketchpad paper, so I opted not to erase all of the pencil lines and cause a bunch of greyish areas where the paper always lifts up from vigorous erasing.

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.

Facebook to Panel

This is based on a Facebook post that was much simpler and just involved yelling "I'm pooping" at some Jehova's Witnesses from wherever he lived in whatever room he was in. It wasn't a very long post obviously.

Anyway, I haven't been trying panel work as much as I want to, if at all. And ultimately it's one of the things I want to do. The art work is horribly inconsistent as I tried several different things to see which ones I liked, and working like this on 8.5"x11" paper meant working really small and that was aggravating in its own right.

Posted for posterity. And to mark me trying this shit out some more.

Cthulu Creates God

Yea, yea, it's not perfect. I'm getting there...

Well, here's is my Cthulu drawing drawn back over in pen. Not much has changed here, and I'm considering painting over/under it digitally with dramatic light and shadow, maybe tenebrism, maybe less dramatic than that.

Character sheets

Basically around the winter/spring transition of last year some friends wanted to start an iPhone app development house. I've got a fancy-shmancy degree in studio art, and I'll totally work on the cheap to pro bono if it pads my portfolio. I didn't intern in college and I need/want professional degrading at hands of demanding management.

While the animation for the elephant was completed late in the game due to project mishandling and mismanagement at the fault of multiple hands and my laziness, the project itself was 90%+ completed, and then abandoned for various reasons that aren't the fault of one, but of the many. Anyway, these are two character sheets, one of which isn't completed as one can identify by Toast Man not having a shaded or colored 3/4 angle.

Done purely digitally back and forth between Painter and Photoshop.

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.