Pencil Lines

Here are a couple more pages of Bambi sketches done last night.

All except the faces with numbers next to them were direct copies/look offs from the model sheets on Michael Sporn’s Blog. I think I’ll have to do them a couple more times before I start to get the look down exactly.

I think all of these bodies except for the small one in the bottom left corner were from my head, using the model sheets as reference.

Some problems I’m noticing already after giving myself a day or so to come back to them: I draw the eyes a little small, and I try to draw the head as a sphere, when it isn’t one. It’s slightly elongated/pointed; shall have to work on that. Proportions are also rather screwy, which is understandable, since he’s such an outrageously proportioned character!

Also; my drawings are very flat; there isn’t enough roundness/form in them. I really have to work on construction and making sure I understand the character in 3D, not just as lines on a page.

More practice. =)

Agh, sorry it’s been a bit of a while since my last post. I suppose school/work has taken up more time than I thought it would!

I’ve been doing a few fun things here and there throughout the last couple of weeks. Been doing school stuff, which is fun, been doing some silly web-building/designing projects at home wherin I make a complete fool of myself and multiple others for the glory of another (you’ll hear about that shortly!), been helping a friend move, and watching numerous silly Disney shorts (mostly Donald Duck because he’s mah faaavee) on Youtube around also trying to keep up with my blogroll on Google Reader and devART to boot.

But really, it’s mostly school and working on the weekends that’s been taking up all of my time. I get, if I’m lucky, one day a week to myself that doesn’t involve either of the two, and usually I try to spend it socializing, which leaves little room for anything else!

But, I have been getting a couple little art-y things done, so I thought I’d share them. First, the ones that are a part of that website project I was hinting at…

So I was chatting a couple weeks ago with Losmios, aka. Mia and one silly comment lead to another until I was in the midst of coding up an ultra silly fan page for her (Beware!! That link is poison for the eyes!). I ended up working on it for about three or four days straight over my weekend until I was literally being kept awake at night due to crazy coding dreams. I decided to take a bit of a break from it, which I am still in just because I haven’t found the chance to get back to it. I hope everyone that wanted to contribute hasn’t grown bored of it too in my absence…

Anyway, other than doing the website and all the coding and everything I also wanted to contribute some Mia fan art, so I sketched up a couple of things. Here’s the first:

This intellectual piece of work was sketched directly in Photoshop CS and coloured in about an hour and a half. Because I’m all slow and out of practice with Photoshop stuff, hehe! Also, I was having issues with the pressure sensitivity on my tablet, which I still have to go and fix…

Anyway, yes, that was one of my oh-so awesome tributes to Mia. Here’s the second, which is in decidedly worse taste:

Oh joy. The quality is overwhelming me.

This one was done with markers and watercolour. Yes. and I deliberately tried to make it look bad, though I’m sure I could have done a worse job if I tried. I did too good a job of staying in the lines. It’s a hard habit to break!!

Yes. So those were done last week. Since then I haven’t done much by way of drawing, usually just the odd scribble here and there that I don’t like and don’t really want to share. =) But today the awe-inspiring Michael Sporn uploaded some original Bambi storyboards and model sheets and I just about died from happiness. I have previously attempted to draw Bambi on a few occasions in the past, but never have I had such beautiful references. So tonight I sat down and tried my hand at drawing baby Bambi.

These sketches are a mixture of direct reference to get the form figured out, and attempting my own poses. I’m sure you can tell which are which.

I could use more practice, and even now I’m feeling an urge to get back to it. I just wish I had more creativity in terms of poses to draw from! I’m seeing even now that the urge to make his legs shorter/more proportional in real world terms is great, I really have to fight that and stick to the proportions on the model sheet. Also, I tend to make him too stiff; I need to loosen up, though that’s been the trend in my artwork for a while. Always too stiff! Hehe!

Sketching Bambi is a delight, though. Not only is he outrageously cute, but he also has those beautiful, long, thin legs that I absolutely adore. The rhythm, angles and negative spaces made by thin and spindly legs has always been like crack to me, which I love to explore. Hmm, maybe I should get back to sketching. One page is hardly enough!

They were drawn with blue pencil, by the way, but I tinted them in Photoshop in order to make them more visible. I’ll have to experiment with drawing him in other media. Maybe a darker, softer lead might be fun to try… or even brush pen when I get a little more confidant!

Anyway, go explore Michael Sporn’s splog; he has tags for his stuff, here’s the one for his model sheets. They make me squee with joy! Oh, if only I could draw like the Disney animators of old…

Right, I’m off to sketch. =) Turrah!

Got a few sketches here.

The first were some sketches I drew while waiting for a recent The Gruff concert to start (check them out; they rock. Seriously). The starting time for the concert advertised on all their posters turned out to be a little optimistic; they started about an hour and a half later than they said. I finished reading a book and sketched these in that time.

This was a day or two after I drew those Donald Duck sketches in my last post, so the ones on this page are a couple I sketched up from memory. I should have done more people drawing; the one of the girl in the hat and striped shirt was interesting. A guy sitting in a table behind me tapped me on the shoulder between songs, saying he had watched me draw it and thought it was awesome. At the end of the show the girl got up and left, but a couple minutes later came back and said “Hey, I heard you drew a picture of me!” Word gets around… haha! I showed her the picture and she really liked it. She told me her name was Melissa. So there you go. =)

Next we’ve got… urm… a couple portrait-y pictures of me. I stumbled across Thundercake’s Time Warp Art Meme and thought it would be fun to try! I’m still not pleased with my drawings/portraits of me, though, even if these were the results after a couple failed attempts… anyway, here’s the one of me from highschool:

Like everybody on devART it seems, I wore baggy clothes and tried to look as inconspicuous as possible. Well, half the people on DA looked like this when they were teens; the other half were goth. Hahaha, I kid. No, seriously, take a look for yourselves, it’s rather scary.

Anyway, this is a pretty accurate representation of me from the middle of highschool; my ugly fleece “Reckless” hat, my old, threadbare thrice hand-me-down’ed Adidas jacket, a baggy sweatshirt, hand-me-down’ed jeans with holes in the knees, an old backpack filled with freaking EVERYTHING and weighed seriously about twenty-odd pounds or more, my poor old clarinet, my cheap Saan-store bought boots that were the most comfortable things on the planet… yeah. I look rather… high or something in this sketch, but I just wanted to illustrate how sleep deprived I was, spending all hours of the early morning online rather than getting the much needed sleep a 15-year old needs.

Anyway, this isn’t the first time I’ve revisited my old self, but it could be called either a) the most honest, or b) the most pessimistic/critical. Not too fond of the drawing or the style, but I really found it difficult to loosen up and do anything more cartoony. I want to tackle it again soon.

Right, now for present day (aka. 21 years):

Skinny as all hell (like I was in highschool, but it’s more noticeable now due to not-so-baggy clothes), my Union Jack hat, black zip-up sweater (I seriously wear this thing EVERYWHERE), my brown cargo pants (sadly now nearing the end of their lifespan, though I wish to replace them), sandals, geeky t-shirts, my little hand bag that was made in Thailand (fair trade, ftw)… yeah. I’m more boring now, I think, haha. You can tell my hair hasn’t changed a bit. Still trying to pluck up the courage to do something more interesting with it.

Like I said, I’m not all that pleased with these two drawings; I’d like them to be more stylized, more positive and silly. I need to work on that. For now, though, my best model is myself, so I’ll probably be doing more of these sketches until I come up with something I like well enough to post.

Now for some watercolour ACTION!

Warning: The following image will completely kill the souls to anyone who has any affinity or love for watercolour whatsoever. It is not good, it’s not even interesting in that “Huh, that’s, um… interesting” kind of way. It’s terrible. But it’s “art”, so I am obliged to post it…

Using my cheap watercolours, cheap watercolour paper, and cheap brushes I came up with this!! Ta-daaa! Yay, giraffes! I just figured, you know, I have all these watercolour things sitting around, but I never use them, even though I keep telling myself to. So how do I fix that? I use them, of course! Even if it’s with terrible things like this!

Still… he’s kind of grown on me. He kills the eyes, but…. maybe he’s cute?

Did a wet “wash” for the background, completely soaked the not-stretched paper, hence the buckling. Used salt and paper towels to add texture; not sure why I needed to add texture to the freaking sky, but there you go. Did a “shadow” layer in blue on the giraffe; should have chosen a different colour, like purple, so he didn’t melt into the background so much. Went over the shadows with a yellow-y wash which made him look rather green, then went over him again with a wet-on-dry technique for the brown spots and details. I have no idea what the heck I’m doing, but it was fun.

Right, I have school tomorrow (yippee!) so I must head to bed. Thanks for looking!