Pencil Lines

Well, almost taking requests anyway, hehe.

I’ve been wanting to do some sketching, but because of a lack of ideas it’s resulted in pretty much nothing. That’s where you guys come in!

I have the day and evening to myself, so I thought I’d put this up now and come back to it this evening and see if I’ve gotten anything; if not, I’ll wait another day or two and see if there’s anything then. =)

Give me some suggestions! Anything! My wonderful sweetie suggested a “monkey riding a goat that has an apple in its mouth that’s dripping acid”, and surprisingly, I really liked the sketch I came up with (and be aware this was done without any references, and I wasn’t going for anything particularly breathtaking here):

So, fire away! Leave a comment with your suggestion/request. I won’t draw everything (depending on how many suggestions I get), and they’ll all be very quick and scribbly sketches like the one above, but seriously, be creative, and even a little silly! I like silly. =)

Please refrain from suggesting personal characters or anything like that; I’m hoping for some random and creative suggestions that I can go rather silly with. =) You will be credited if I end up drawing yours!

Thank you so much in advance. =)

The requests are now closed. Thanks for participating!

Well… maybe not “back”. I should, um, be very frightened if the 30’s were back, actually.

Was sitting around with Dennis, was thinking about some of the things John K. have said in his blog posts, and suddenly got this urge to sketch one of those old-timey, spaghetti-legged characters with the pac-man pupils.

And, I dunno, an anteater seemed like the obvious choice. Isn’t it?

So here are some sketches.

This was the initial character sketch, where I just drew everything down using broad shapes and trying to keep things simple. But I’m sure John K. would say that there isn’t enough construction; he’s just a bunch of lines floating in space, there’s no meat behind him. Ah well, I’m still learnin’ here!

Asking Dennis what I should draw him doing next, Dennis replied an action pose, throwing something. So, next sketch:

I can already tell there’re a lot of things about him I have to work out, but it was fun to try and figure out how his body would work from a different perspective. Maybe I should try a turn-around and see how well I can reproduce him from other angles?

Then I figured, where’s an anteater without their long tongues?

Now this one looks the least like the original character, but I think it has the most construction. Ah well, practice… I should have drawn his tongue straight for the most part and flipping back and forth only at the end; maybe I’ll do that the next time I draw him. =)

Anyway, it was a fun learning experience. I liked him so much I brought him into Painter, inked him up using the scratchboard tool, than dragged him over to Photoshop CS to “colour” him up:

I used only the basic web colours for his shades; only six different shades of grey, including black and white. I figured that would simplify it and give me the best tonal range. Maybe not… I’m not as satisfied with the tones, but I’m not as certain what is wrong with them so I can fix them. Added a couple paper textures from mayang.com to finish the old-timey look.

It was only after I finished this up, saved it, and uploaded it to DeviantART that I realized I forgot his ears. D’oh! Ah well, that’s something to remember for next time.

There’s something I really like about the weight of him; he’s big and bulky, yet he has that adorably droopy nose and long arms that makes it look like he’s almost melting. I love that. I’ll have to try some more oldie cartoon characters, this was a lot of fun to do!

If you were to make an old-timey, 1930’s style cartoon character, what would you do? I’d love to see anything anyone else comes up with. =D