The first is a gift for a good friend of mine, TheTazza, of her character Tex. Tazza is a friend of mine in my Fine Arts program, and she is an awesome person as well as a talented artist. This is her belated Christmas present.

It was drawn with nib/dip pens that my sweetie got me for Christmas. I’ve never used nib pens for inking before, so this was a real treat! I have used fountain pens before, but that was mostly playing around with caligraphy. This “dipping” thing was very new to me!

Here was a page of practice scribbles I did with it, trying out some of the dozen or so nibs that Dennis got me, before I started on the picture of Tex:

Tex himself was done with only one nib, and I only very rarely went back over a line with it. It’s amazing the amount of variation in line you can get with a nib pen, especially for someone like me who’s used to technical pens.

Right, onwards!

This is just a little unicorn I sketched back in October at the height of school insanity, just to make sure I still remembered how to sketch. I just liked some of the lines on it.

A weird Alien Dignitary or summat that I sketched a couple of months ago. I thought it looked rather neat. Originally done with blue mechanical pencil, but I tinted it in Photoshop.

This sketch was done over Christmas break at my mum’s place. I was trying to do something productive rather than just sitting around watching TV. I used a photo I found on the Flickr Commons for reference for the dress (it was over 100 years old and in the public domain; I can’t seem to find it again, hehe!). I loved the corset belt thing she was wearing; it looked so cool. I had fun inking her hair. I still need to work on noses, though.

This is a picture of Celes from FFVI that Dennis told me to draw when I was asking for ideas. I had a lot of fun with it, drawing in all the details and trying to get the pose/anatomy right. It’s still not perfect, but it’s better than I’ve done freehand for a while. F pencil, tinted again in Photoshop.

And that’s it! Hope you enjoyed. I hope to get another post up soon showcasing some of the work I did at school last semester; we’ll see how long it takes me to get around to that. Happy New Year!

So, I just recently uploaded a picture to deviantART. A picture I’ve been working on for three years, and was never fully satisfied with. I don’t think I can fully articulate how much it means to me to finally have it out of my hair and out in public where I don’t have to worry about it anymore!

It started as I said, three years ago, when I was going through a rough time and needed some extra cash. I decided to put out a plea for commissions, just quick $10 sketches and small digital drawings and the like. I don’t think I got any bites, except for one; Mia, aka. Losmios, told me she wanted a commission. But not a piddly little sketch, oh no. She wanted a fully painted digital picture she could make fancy prints of. I didn’t know whether or not I had the time or the energy to pull it off, but I accepted it anyway. How could I refuse?

Anyway, it did turn out to be a little more than I could handle. I was rather intimidated and vowed to do the best work I could do. I had an image in my head of how I wanted it to look, but it just wouldn’t turn out the way I wanted it to. As such, it sat on my hard drive for all this time, during which I would randomly open it up again every few months, put a couple more hours into it, then close it up again. It wasn’t until I started art school and wanted to start fresh that I decided to bite the bit and just set it free.

So I have. But it seems so anti-climactic after so much work that went into it. So I’m going to post a series of WIP images to show you just how many iterations it went through before I finally came up with what I’ve uploaded today.

So yes, Mia gave me a commission to draw a picture of her pegasus persona. I opened up Photoshop and freehand painted, without references, a couple different equine poses, but I settled on the one you see below.

This really shows how sketchy the first pass on the pose was. I used one of Photoshop CS’s default brushes and just went to town. For the wings I used a photo I took of some seagulls as a reference. There’s no way in hell I could do that freehand!

So, after I settled on the pose I switched to the regular hard-edged round brush and started airbrushing, smoothing it out, adding shading, and a few more details. The entire pegasus was painted on one layer, something I had never done before. I had a lot of fun with it. Oh, right, and I decided to do it all in greyscale first, thinking later I could use one of Mia’s own techniques and colourize it. This eventually caused a lot of problems. But anyway, onwards!

Right! Here I added the mane and tail. I did those by painting in a semi-opaque, flat coloured mane shape. I used the smudge tool a bit to tease out some finer strands. After that, I just went in and traced out a bunch of locks from the main shape, adding light and shadow. It was almost like sculpting. At the very end I went in with a small round brush and added a bunch of small, straggly white hairs just to make it seem a little less plastic. You can see some of those in the detail picture I uploaded to DA.

This was my first pass at a background. I envisioned a bunch of mountains poking through a veil-like misty cloud layer, which the sun was just sitting on top of. In my mind it was very pretty and dramatic, but it’s the background I ended up struggling with for three years. Urgh.

I tried many times to paint the clouds in, but I could never get them looking anywhere near to my satisfaction. I went to another friend of mine, Katy Rewston, and she sent me her own little sketchy paint-over to try and show me how I might go about the clouds. I tried her suggestions…

… but yeah, they didn’t really turn out how I liked. (I also added some shading to the pegasus here, trying to make the lighting a smidgen more believable.)

Either way, the picture stayed like this for months. I just couldn’t get the clouds right. On top of that, I knew the mountains were terribly painted. I knew they were simply placeholders just to figure out the look of the background, but I didn’t realize how much of a pain they’d actually be when I tried to paint them properly. Anyway, I took a stab at repainting the mountains.

Well! They certainly looked like the best mountains I had ever painted. But right, they were in the wrong positions. So what do I do? I cut them up and try to fit them in the same places the old mountains were:

Okay, getting closer… but there’s still something off about it. I also added a bit more detail to the mountain in the foreground there.

So I was left with this. And there was something wrong about it. I didn’t have the same dramatic presence to it as the one with the crappy mountains did. I was so frustrated, I went to a digital painting forum for some constructive criticism.

And oh man, did they oblige. They certainly reamed me out for the background, and everything else too, but I learned a lot. They told me about a grid method often used to help with composition, so I stuck that on and went about reordering. After applying their feedback (and making another half-hearted attempt at clouds) I came up with this:

You can barely see the faint gridmarks in there. Anyway, this was a huge help, and I certainly loved the composition much more. But what about those clouds? And wasn’t I supposed to colour this eventually?

Here I started trying to experiment with the colour. The background simply has an orangy-color layer over top of it; the pegasus I actually went in, following the instructions on Mia’s tutorials, and made my first few attempts at colourizing it. And it really didn’t turn out so well.

No, it doesn’t look terrible, but it certainly wasn’t turning out how I wanted it to. The brown on the knees just looked dirty, and whenever I tried to make the socks white I just lost detail. And don’t even get me started on the spots on the wings; I never saved any pictures of my attempts with that, because holy crap, it just looked so bad.

So… it stagnated. I felt I couldn’t deliver a product if I couldn’t even make the subject look like the character it was supposed to be. And on top of that, I just couldn’t get the damn clouds right. It didn’t stop me from opening it up and trying it again and again though, over successive months.

I even experimented with using my own reference pictures for the clouds. Yeah, it looked super cool… but I’m not that great a photomanipulator. I also couldn’t find the type of clouds I wanted for around the mountains… and all sorts of other problems.

Then, using a simpler technique, I came up with this. And it didn’t look so bad! Basically I took the soft-edged round brush and added a bunch of opacity/size pressure settings and scatter effects, then went to town on the clouds. There are two layers here; a black cloud layer, and a white cloud layer underneath the black. The varying opacity in the black clouds made it look like the white showing through were highlights. I liked the effect a lot, but I sat on it for a hell of a long time.

At some point I opened it up and sketched out those misty clouds around the mountains, exactly what you see in the finished picture at the top of this post, but I can’t remember when. Obviously I didn’t think it looked that great at the time, because I closed it and forgot about it. But when I opened the file back up a couple days ago, I suddenly realized, hey; it doesn’t look that bad. Presentable, in fact.

Then I came up with the crazy idea: could I call this finished?

Well, even if I couldn’t or not I decided to anyway. I finally added a small colour overlay layer to give it some character and uploaded it. Now… it’s free.

Can I go now? Hehe!

Well, that’s it. I hope this was interesting for you! I hope you like the picture; I sure do. Hopefully it’ll stop haunting me now.

Oh, yes. School happened. But really, it’s okay! It’s art school! It’s a very good thing! It just means that I’m extra busy nowadays, and I have less time and less drive to actually work on any of my own stuff outside of class. But, it does mean I have some in-school assignments and things I can show off. That’s always nice, huh?

I have already uploaded some of these to my LJ, so I apologize for cross posting for those who read both. Probably not many of you.

Read below the cut to see them. Be warned; there are lots and lots of images under here, some of them Not Safe For Work (NSFW).

Okay! We’ll start with some drawing class drawings. Self-portrait:

Contour-line drawings:

Gesture Drawing:

More contour-line:

A free-form exercise (I drew the tree shape, then this was passed around to about five other artists. This is what was given back to me!):

Negative/positive space drawings:

Contour line using negative space principles:

Right, now onto the ceramics work!

We had to make a coil pot. This is made usually by starting out with a flat base, then rolling out coils made out of clay and wrapping them around the edge and stacking more coils on top of that one. This creates the wall of the pot. Here was my pot after about 20 hour’s work:

When we were done coiling/finishing the pot, we let it harden to a rather stiff leather-hard stage, then took a metal spoon to it and polished it up, what is called “burnishing”. This closes up the pores in the clay and makes it shine. We also carved designs into it at leatherhard stage, if that’s what we wanted to do; I chose a pseudo-mesoamerican pattern. This was mine after about two to three hours of burnishing (the dark marks came from the metal rubbing off the spoon; the clay was rather hard!):

After that the pots were thrown into a kiln to bisque; or, get hot enough to harden up a little, but not fully fire. This makes them a little more resilient for the the eventual pit firing. Bone-dry clay is extremely brittle, so we usually bisque before going on with glazing or any other post construction work to minimize the chance of damage. This is what it looked like after bisque-ing:

After that came the fun part! We all traipsed down to the parking lot where there were a couple old, metal oil drums set up. We loaded the pots inside, all stacked one on top of the other, then filled the drums with sawdust. This was set on fire and let to smolder for about twelve hours; the resulting heat and smoke further hardened the pots and also gave them some absolutely amazing smoke textures, which were all different depending on its position in the drum in relation to other pots. Here is my finished pot after the pit firing:

Isn’t it perdy? I can’t wait to take it home!

The next ceramics assignment is a slab project that we haven’t finished yet. The idea was to make a geometric vessel of some sort (though it certainly doesn’t have to be functional). The few restrictions were it had to have 6 sides, an opening that could be closed, and some sort of foot. We constructed these using leather-hard clay slabs, out of which we cut out the shapes of the pieces we need and fit them together to form our vessel. Once formed we used different coloured slips (very watered down clay of different makes, almost like glazes) to add colour and design to our forms. Here was mine with the slip added:

Can’t wait to see what this looks like after it’s bisqued, varnished, then fired. So excited.

Next: Painting class! First up: Self-portrait. Here’s a bunch of successive WIP pictures:

And then the finished product (or close to it, anyway):And let me just get this out of my system now: Painting is hard. Holy crap. This is one of the most frustrating classes I’ve ever had to take, no joke. I think I’m improving, but I still can’t understand how people would work with such and unwilling and unwieldy medium out of choice!

There. Now I can move on.

The next painting was the one I did today in painting class, a total of 4 hour’s work. We had a few restrictions; the subject matter had to be a combination of interior x exterior; that is, something from inside ourselves, with something from the outside world. We were told to go out into the school, find something to paint, and then add a fantastical element to it from our own imagination. We had to limit ourselves to a certain colour scheme (whether it was analagous, complimentary, triads, etc.) and a certain composition (triangular, spiral, L-shaped, cruciform, etc.).

I chose to paint a door in the hallway and added trees and bunnies. I used an analagous-complimentary colour scheme (green/yellow/orange and purple) with an L-shaped composition. Here’s what I came up with:
Considering this is the first time I’ve ever painted in that class without gnashing my teeth and seething in frustration, I think it’s a winner. Bunnies!

Right, so that’s all I have to show for now! I’ll try to keep up with adding more as it develops. I hope you enjoyed this little foray into my schoolwork; I’m certainly having fun doing it. Thanks for looking, and let me know what you think!

Since I was fairly bored one afternoon and procrastinating heavily on studying for final exams, I had enough drive and motivation to create a new page and customized layout for my comics:

Allegro: Random comics by Rheall

I had a lot of fun working on the CSS and uploading my comics and such. It’s so satisfying to see them all laid out with “next” and “previous” buttons. Sometimes I am very easily pleased.

Like it says on the main page, this doesn’t mean I’m taking those comics seriously or anything. I’m not going to have a specific update schedule for them, and they aren’t meant to be any kind of serious foray into the webcomics world, not by a long shot. It’s just for fun. I draw comics now and again, and it’s fun to have someplace to show them off once in a while!

So yes, that’s that! As for art stuff, I haven’t really been drawing much this month, or even this summer. However, I did sit down and bang out a couple sketches tonight, so I’ll see about scanning those in the morning. I now have two weeks free of any sort of schedule or responsibility, so maybe I can make myself churn out some art. Or at least get sketching again!

Hope y’all have been having a wonderful summer!

So, remember in my last post (on LJ) where I was whining about feeling guilty because I only had a dozen pairs of foot jewelry made for my step-sister Linda to sell for me at an Art Festival down in Point Roberts? Well, I did try last week before this weekend to make some more for mum to pick up on the way down, but I found I was running severely low on wire, chain, and cord coils, all of which make up the foundation of my jewelry. I made one more pair and was forced to stop, since I was all out of wire.

I also found that, oh shit, I was incredibly low on funds, otherwise I would have totally gone out and bought more supplies to make more. It’s hard, though, to make dozens upon dozens of these things when you’re constantly having to replenish your supplies for them, which leaches away money you haven’t yet made because you haven’t sold any. Umm… not sure if I’m making much sense. Anyway, yes, so I felt bad, and only had one more pair made,and felt terrible for only providing a dozen when Linda wanted fifty to sell for me.

Anyway, so Mum went off to Point Roberts for the weekend, and I heard nothing until I gave her a call today. And guess what? They were a bug success!

They only sold six pairs out of the dozen I gave them, but mum said that was mostly because of a lack of variety. People loved them, and wanted them in certain colours but of course there were only the ones I made. Apparently green and blue were all very popular, as well as gold, which was pretty much what I expected!

_{That’s Linda in the pink dress in the foreground, sitting next to the little table with my jewelry on it. Eee! Major squeeing moment!}

The biggest thing that shocked me, though, was the unending generosity and awesomeness of my step-sister Linda in all of this. She went out there with a table and sat around in the hot sun, singing my praises and modelling/showing off her own pair, and- get this- refused to sell them for $20 CAD/pair. She upped the price on them to $25 USD/pair, and that’s how they sold. And she also refused to accept any sort of commission on them, and made sure the entirety of the money went to me. Oh gosh, what an absolute sweetie.

_{The table of my foot jewelry after they had already sold a few. They look so pretty on that gorgeous beige scarf Linda used to cover the table!}

Mum said they sold a lot more of them at the Farmer’s Market they went to in the morning as opposed to the Art Festival, and many people were asking, apparently, whether Linda would be back in subsequent weeks so they could buy some later. And Linda assured them she would be, which means agh, I’ve got to get to work!

_{Linda told mum she wanted to get a couple glamour shots done, so she took this gorgeous photo of Linda wearing her pair out at the beach in Point Roberts. This is going on my website/Etsy store once I get it up and running!}

Also; when I was back in Mission a few weeks ago and got my hair cut, I showed them to my awesome hairdresser Cie, and she wanted me to make her a white pair. I did so, and mum gave it to her last week when she went to have her hair cut, and Cie gave the hair cut to her for free in exchange for the foot jewelry. She liked it so much! She also wanted me to make her around ten or so pairs for her to have for sale at the hair salon too. Oh geeze!

Mum’s right, it seems I’ve got a little business going on here! I think I’m actually going to have to get serious about recording inventory and costs and such when I buy these supplies so I know exactly how much money I’m making versus the supplies I’ve bought. I’ll probably have to research cheaper alternatives to Michael’s, DeSerres and the Beadworks store in Granville Island for supplies…

Gosh, I’m just so amazed, I never would have thought they’d be this successful. Indeed, they definitely wouldn’t be if I hadn’t had the help of my mum and Linda to spread the word about them! I’m not entirely sure what to do next, haha, except perhaps replenish my supplies and get back to making them, now that I’d made some more money off of them!

Right, I’m done squeeing about that now. =D Hope all you British Columbians had a great long weekend!

EDIT: Mum also told me about this lady that Linda knew, who owned a ladybug farm somewhere in Point Roberts. This lady is obsessed with ladybugs, was wearing a ladybug t-shirt, and apparently wore nothing but red. She saw them and thought they were lovely, so Mum immediately showed her the red pair I had made with the ladybug beads, and that was it, she was sold. I’m so glad they went to someone who liked them so much!

She also said how Linda would tell people that I was making the jewelry to sell to finance going to Art School (which is pretty true!), and that was enough for some people to get in on it for a want to support me. People are so nice!

_{(X-Posted to my LiveJournal.)}

So I chose to draw some Disney girls. Here they are.

This one I drew last night. The next one I drew after dinner today while listening to my awesome new roommates say silly things (which were also awesome). This is also the first time I’ve ever drawn Snow White.

First time I’ve ever really drawn Belle, also. Belle is, of course, my favourite Disney “princess”. I can’t think of a better role model (in the Disney pantheon) for a young girl than her, and even when I was little “The Beauty and the Beast” was one of my favourites (second only to “Dumbo”). I used to love the idea that looks totally didn’t matter. I also love reading (though I’ve been slowing down on it a lot while doing the college thing, bad me). Right, that’s enough comments in parentheses (no, really, I know they’re annoying).

Anyway! Blah blah. Drew these with blue pencil, “inked” them with HB pencil. Dennis says I should colour them, so maybe I will. =) Hope you like!

I apologize for the terrible lighting. My mum wanted to see some pictures, so I had to work with what I had.

I got a package in the mail today with a bunch of bead supplies I ordered from a warehouse down in the states. Even though their selection and prices were excellent, I’m not sure if I can justify the extra $25 duty/customs fee at the border on top of shipping and everything else. I might have to find a different solution.

Anyway, I made the last two pairs, the white one and the brown one, tonight. The purple pair has amethyst beads as their centre-piece, the white pair is howlite, and the brown pair is tiger’s eye. The other two are just plain old glass.

Hope you like them!

Oh, and contrary to what I said in my last post, they are now being sold for $20 a pair as opposed to $15. I re-calculated the costs, and I’m sorry I had to raise the prices. Anyway, if you’d like a pair, don’t hesitate to get in touch!

Osama drew the first two panels plus the guy in the third, and I did the rest. So much fun.

This was the result of an experiment. The carousel horse on the right was drawn and inked with a brushpen a few weeks ago. I drew the dog back then too, but only just got around to inking it today; with an actual, honest to god bottle of india ink and a paint brush! (Can you tell any difference?)

I’m so excited about it. I’d love to do more with brush-inked lines. The dog was a fun experiment. Obviously I need to practice a bit with it, work on keeping a steady hand.

Here’s a sketch of Donald Duck I drew without reference, also a couple weeks ago. I think I’m getting better!

Watched “The Big Sleep”, which of course had me drawing 1940-style Private Dicks and saucy ladies.

More ladies. Film Noir ladies are hard, for some reason. Anyway, still had fun sketchin’.

That’s it!

Are you ready?

Comic!

Drawn while watching the amazing Evan Dahm of Rice Boy make some art one night on Ustream. What to do when you’re watching someone draw? Draw, of course!

True story! I still have a ways to go with these “comic” things, but I think I’m getting there. I think I’m only hindered by my own laziness, which is more than evident in this comic. Still, I think it came out pretty well, considering I’ve never drawn an inside of a bus like that before.

Oh, and the song is “Psycho Killer” by the Talking Heads, if it’s not immediately apparent. I apologize if I got the lyrics messed up, it was hard trying to fit it all in there. Man, sometimes I love the Vancouver transit system, especially the antics of the #99.

Hit the cut for more; I’m going to spam you with some thumbnails, hope you don’t mind!

Right! And then a little while ago I got together with Osama, am awesome guy who works at my local craft store, for some epic drawin’ times. We drew some comics together. Here’s a mash of thumbnails for you.

He drew most of the panels on those; the majority of what I drew was in his sketchbook. It shouldn’t be too hard to tell whose is whose, since he has such awesome expressions in his drawings (and a darker pencil). The basic premise was that we’d draw a character in each other’s sketchbook, and then we had to make a comic around the character given us. We ended up switching back and forth a lot though, adding more and more frames. It was so much fun.

I’m going to spam you now with more (yes, I’m sorry) thumbnails. These are random maps/landforms I’ve started drawing at school waiting for classes to start. It’s a fun and relaxing sort of stream-of-consciousness thing, where I just let my pen go and see what happens.

Some of them turned out neat, so I thought I’d scan them in case anybody needed a random map for a story or a roleplaying game or something and didn’t feel like drawing one themselves. Anyway, I’m going to stop yackin’ and just post them already.

I dunno, what do you think? Think I should keep making these and uploading them as a random map-ish resource for GM’s or writers? I figure people can mix and match different land forms that they like, or alter them how they see fit. I’m a big fan of wiggly coastlines and random islands and inlets and some people might not be into that so much.

Anyway! Stuff. Let me know what you think of all the latest comic-y goodness. The maps, too, I’m interested to know what people think about those. I love doing them, and it would be nice if perhaps others could make use of them too.