蟹

I've been getting more and more fascinated with watercolor...possibly since playing Okami. This is the closest I'll get to a Japanese fishing village for a while at least.

Tufted Swamp Grackle

Scott had been working on a bird series so the bird book was out. Can you believe he had been putting in all that effort on Lanar Falcons and Red Hawks when he could have been getting chicks with this specimen!

Opium

Nothing special here, just some scribbles. Try to find Claire in it.

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.