WIP - A Shack

It's actually more challenging than you'd think to make a digital image that looks like non-digital media. Already lacking the surface texture, you need to tweak your tools and program(s) according to some approximate of what your eye think it's supposed to look like.


Wanting to do another quick animation, I needed a background. Then I realized I hadn't done any environmental drawing in too long, and never stressed it on myself in college--double whammy, so I got cracking at this. I probably drew 3 or 5 in my sketchbook before starting this, and this drawing has 6-8 layers for various generations, shading, and elements.

Yea, I'm that guy in your art class who re-did something to death, and might not have noticed a glaring problem while working on some minutia I wanted to get better at.

PS: To students of art: It's on your own shoulders to challenge yourself and vary your range of abilities. Especially since almost all upper-division art classes are "You have work due in 3-6 weeks, use your lab time to full effect, I'll be watching."

Quick Walk Cycle

It's been a while since I did one of these, so thinking about it I found for myself a quick project to do tonight. Wasn't as quick as it should have been, nor is it polished at all, but it had to be done, and it was fun to do it.

It started as the standard 4-frame walk (contact, down, pass, up) before adding two more frames to make a 6-frame walk. Never drawn one before since all the basic exercises are the 4-frame. Plus it now makes the step 50% longer to take the same step.

Good exercise. I might throw in a bit more time on it in a day or two just because I should for practice and cleanliness.

Moustache Dog in Ink

I was at a coffee shop reading a bit and trolling the intarwebs for something to draw from. I've gotta go somewhere once or twice a week to avoid the temptation of video games in my room. My scanning or Reddit's /r/pics found a mustachioed puppy that I added a few extra details to whilst I quickly doodled it out in pen and pencil. Had a lot of fun actually.

Link to original for as long as it lasts: http://imgur.com/gEC1V

Clay Head

First of all, you'll see the scale. All of the sculpting was done with the hard end of that paint brush in the first few pictures--which wasn't easy for someone who's never really done any sculpting to memory. The clay is "Klean Klay"; not sure i it's cheap stuff or not, but I got 2 pounds of it for $5 at Utrecht around a month ago.

Second of all you'll see a dramatic shift in facial construction and that the ears I spent large amounts of time toying with are suddenly gone. I was drinking here with two friends and one of them, a girl by the name of Laura, who has a rather skilled hand at art, looked at my block head and pronounced she "could do it better!" And then proceeded to make my square-jawed cartoon character more realistic and without ears. My focus was on facial expression, so I was both impressed and annoyed at the same time. Due to the ears and the hardness of the clay at room temperature being in conflict anyway, I was far from butt-hurt.

About a week and half later (last night) I was looking at the now egg-shaped head and realized how I was to cope with the lack of ears. The head's new right ear changes when the lighting changes because it did not last the night. It was half fallen off when I woke, and it tore itself free by the time I was ready to take pictures.

So, yea, in retaliation to her alterations I gave him bunny ears and buck teeth.

In the future I will play with this stuff much more, but I'll definitely need some sort of support underneath, meaning I need to figure out what wire I can safely use as a skeleton.

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.