Smokemon

My sister and her husband and I have been exchanging japanese lucky kitties (Maneki Neko) on holidays. I think it's hilarious. The lucky kitty in the corner is one I got Claire.

Anyways - I had fun with the depth on this drawing but I regret not following it more. I wish I would have drawn a neon sign following the same angle as the hip bone - then I could have drawn perpendicular lines coming out from under the sign.

Oh well - the next sketch should have some more depth.

Pachyderm

I drew this around 6 years ago I think. I gave it to my dad, who has always had a fascination with elephants. I suppose I recently inherited it. It's nice to have on my shelf.

Skull Tablature

Here's a drawing I've been meaning to complete for a while now. This was meant as an exercise to help me get comfortable with the Wacom tablet.
I could probably spend more time darkening and refining this but i got anxious to throw some color in there and play with texture.

I wish my sketchbook had layers.

If anyone wants to color it - I can upload the psd.

Over the Hills

Another night in the groupboard. When things are chaotic enough, subjects start to emerge. My friend Sam used to play this game in highschool called "Find the Piggies". He would make sheets of paper covered with dots and hand them out early in the day - the idea being, you find pigs in the midst of the dots - like constellations. It was interesting how the pigs always bore the stylistic traits of the artists.

Drip

I did this really quickly, like..10 minutes tops. I used the Wacom tablet and a photo a snaked from Flickr. It's so fun using a tablet in photoshop - it's as if my sketchbook has layers. My girl has been borrowing a very fine violin and passionately fawning over the qualities of it - so when I was drawing this I was expressing the exact same thing.

Figure studies

I finally got around to posting the figure studies from the class Scott and I have been going to. Every class goes the same, an hour or so of hating art and not being able to draw at all, followed by an hour of being bored and finally like 20 minutes of decent work, or something like that.The first here was really stressful because he started shaking after around 5 or 10 minutes and after that it was a white knuckle, sweat drenched, bomb-defusion ordeal. I like how the back turned out though. I am trying to get my contour lines to merge better with my shading - right now they seem like 2 different styles stuck in an unhappy marriage.


I'm moderately happy with the way this one turned out. I really like the knees - I live for little areas like that. I also got lucky on the hand - even though it looks a little wooden and small - I still like the structure of it. I also really like the way the shading and contours came together, especially on the leg.





Check out that hair clip and hair texture! It looks like a real illustrator did that part.
The rest is pretty dull and uniform. I am constantly getting stuck in these angles with no discernable tonal variation - why is it that figure drawing classes always insist on turning on ALL the spotlights, ALL the way around the model??? Why not leave a few off on one side so we can get some cool shadows and gradients.

This one is pretty decent. I may go back and watercolor it. The little shading contours didn't come out so well in the pic here but they give the figure a neat wet shiny look. The foot looks too small - I dunno. I spent a lot of time working out the proportions on this one.


Well, Overall I like the studies and I could feel myself getting incrementally better a few times but overall it's more humbling than anything. I would love critiques on any of these and sorry for the poor photo skillz.

Canyon

I drew this at a pseudo mexican retaurent called qDoba. I think I got a southwestern influence sitting in there. I seem to be getting a little better with rocks. Some foreground rocks would have been interesting but that requires planning or layers or something.

I'm going to go back and color this tonight.

Fish

I've been going to figure drawing classes lately (I'll probably post some of those later) and it seems to be making my mental images more vivid. The other day I kept seeing all these cartoons in my head and they all had this dead fish eyed look.

So here's one - it has elephant feet. Notice the recurring halo / aura / ten thousand burning buddha thing above the fish.

Claire loves the sea horse.

cloth study

This is a study for a painting I would like to attempt. Scott (who never posts) and I found a collection of shelves that we decided would make a great base for a collection of paintings. If you look with a careful and heartless eye you can see the errors in proportion when I went from the thumbnail to the full size sketch. Hopefully these are the kinds of issues I can now avoid when i go to the 11 x 40 shelf.

Anyways, the big cloth drawing took about 5 hours to do. Typically when i draw tight things I need to get up like every 15 minutes and go do something else, but this time i was really driven to keep with it till it was finished. (street fighter 3 matches not-withstanding)

Oh also - adding the white was amazingly fun.

Unfinished Scultpure

On the left side of the face, even with the nose/mouth, there is a wonderful little shape. It looks like a drip. I'm proud of that mark.

Not much

If you look at the little lines in the glasses extrusion you can see this stupid mistake i often make. when going around a shape i often forget wich angle i am supposed to be extruding on and the angle kinda slides....looks stupid.
i like the look of the glass despite that though.

I also struggle with the part of the bottom eyelid that touches the top eyelid when the eye closes..but i love drawing tear ducts.

I think the scratchy nature of the groupoard actually lends something to the drawing.

Sermon on Mount Crab

Here's the Crab Lord rallying troops or something.
I wish the groupboard had a watercolor brush and layers...

I heard about a program called opencanvas that might have what i want but for some reason i haven't checked it out yet.

Tree

Here's an Ent.
Merry Christmas.

Bug lord

Here's another one fomr the board. This time i've included some of the insightful chat wisdom so oyu can see what i mean.

oh and i have this habit of putting big flowery backdrops on my pseudo deities..i got that from buddhist paintings where they have like a thousand flaming lotuses behind buddha's head.

Meteors sent to impale Anime

Again with the groupBoard.
i have a confession. i go to this thing more than i should...looking for someone interesting to collaborate with - but what really happens is that i start mouthing off to 14 year old girls who write like "dis and dat" and scrawl the worst Anime humanity has ever witnessed.
so this is one of my reactions.. a radioactive apocolypse from above.
i think this is the best color scheme i've ever come up with - wich is funny because i tihnk it's actually drawn from a subset of the web safe pallete. i could never come up with this in photoshop.

anyways - nathan has been messing with a tablet and corel paint and has done a really cool self portrait but he is procrastinating with the publish.

Pond

A silly drawing done at a groupboard site. i sorta developed a different style when i work with a mouse...like...the shading feels like chopping down a tree...tiny little hacks.

tommy, nathan and some other guy helped too.

I forgot what these are called

I drew these really fast. Ball point pen and printer paper.
I was waiting for Claire to get done with her work so we could go home.
The shading on the hummingbird's head was so fun. I always mess up that type of thing....a shaded pattern..with a pen. I can't believe how well it turned out.
Claire seems to identify with the top bird...nice and humble...and naturally i identify with death from above hummingbird.

EDIT: I forgot to mention how this was a direct product of Scott urging me to spend more time blocking out the shapes before diving into the details. If I were left to my own devices these birds would be living tragic lives with disproportionate heads and eyes too far apart.

Bird skull

Here is a drawing of a bird skull i did while my family was playing cards. I can't stand cards...i hate the way they look and the whole world of gambling just leaves me uninterested.

Anyways...if it runs slow you can turn up the speed and right click and select quality: low.

Bird Skull

web-slinging action

I drew this while claire was out of town and spiderman 2 was on tv. I always try to get this particular effect with smoke and i always miss it. It's like a straight vertical line...rising and then a quick series of curves at the top like a sudden change in air density. It looks fluid in my head but i just can't make it work. If the pen hadn't died i think i would have made the shading encroach into the center shape a bit more....like near the name.

Hippo

Underneath the billowing textures of things like hippos, there are really solid and interesting shapes. Imagine a program that would render images based on photographs. The user would set a slider somwhere between form and texture - i guess haf way would be pretty unchanged....but far right would be ferocious fields of differing strokes and the far left would be a dull collection of lifeless geometries.

For the intrepid connoisseur of layered girly drinks there is a sacred recipe for the legendary "Pousse Cafe". A drink with 6 types of alcohol, all layered according to their specific gravity. My mom told me a story once about a lady ordering one at a bar and after 5-10 minutes of tense liquid surgery performed over the back of a coctail spoon - the woman grabbed a straw and stirred it. what a meaningless legacy to leave.