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

Drawn just after that last Shaintar comic. A random bear, a sketch of Polly smoking, and a random cartoony chick who unfortunately doesn’t have a proper face. Poor girl.

A bit of a sketch page filled with little mice sketches, since a good friend of mine asked me for some. Unfortunately mice are terribly hard for me to draw (they don’t have boooones! Or… don’t look like they have bones…), so these aren’t all that nice. Still… mice. Oh, and some ladies too.

A close-up of the woman in the last page. I liked her a lot. Sometimes I have to remind myself that, yes, I can draw semi-human looking things. I still have to practice noses, though.

Aaaand some puppy sketches. There were done without any references (can’t you tell?), and are for that project I’m working on to do a series of dog/cat breeds on postcards with watercolour. That corgi is actually the next card and is all transferred and inked; I just have to finish painting it. Man, I need to start practising canines again… And cats. Yuck. My problem with cats is the same as with mice; they’re like bags of jelly or something, and for some reason that’s really hard for me to draw!

A quick sketch of a girl I saw… somewhere. Didn’t end up looking anything like her, but I liked the sketch.

Just a very small and silly little self-portrait.

And last but not least for now, some fanart of T.O.E. and Rice Boy from the comic Rice Boy. It’s such an absolutely excellent comic, one that I own in real life now thanks to my awesome sweetie. You won’t regret reading it, it’s one of the best webcomics I’ve read yet, and in such an interesting, original world…

Right, now some sketches for my illustrations for the Open Game Table project:

And:

These are illustrations for a couple articles in the up-coming book. I’m currently in the middle of inking them. The OGT is a really neat project, I’m glad I’ve had the chance to be a part of it; I just hope I can get these done on time, yargh!

Anyway, yes, that’s it for now. I haven’t really been drawing much, despite my best efforts; things have been rather hectic. As always, I hope to do some more drawing soon; we’ll see what happens. Thanks for reading!

EDIT: Oh gosh, I forgot to post this one!

Drawn at the local burger place (Moderne Burger; mmm) on their oh-so-handy blank white paper place mats. Suggested by Dennis, who has all the best suggestions. He also suggested a whole series of sketches of strange people with appropriate dog breeds as noses, which, who knows, may become a reality on future visits? Hehehe.

I love the weird stuff the most.

More Donald Duck because, hey, let’s face it, Donald duck is freaking awesome. What’s also awesome, is Michael Sporn, who’s been sharing a lot of gorgeous Donald Duck model sheets on his blog. Thank you so much Michael.

And this is trying to use what I’ve learned in designing/drawing my own old-timey animation character, Roy the Numbat. Of course, I’m using a lot of old Mickey Mouse in his design until I’m confidant enough to try something else. =)

His nemesis, Wilmer the Anteater, can be seen a few posts back. Roy’s a young orphan during the depression. Wilmer has a job as a construction worker. Hilarious (and rather sad) antics ensue as Roy tries to steal Wilmer’s lunch.

That’s the idea, anyway. =)

Edit: Oh crap! I just realized I’ve still been signing my work ‘09 instead of ‘10… darn! Will have to fix that.

Polly the clone, working on an information console. Hacking is what she does best. =)

A page showing some sketches of d7’s character, Mercy Junius. And a small sketch of Polly too. =)

Tali’Zorah nar Rayyah (damn, forgot the “h” in the picture) from Mass Effect. I’m currently addicted to that game. Drawn using references from Creative Uncut (specifically this one). I haven’t done a detailed ink picture in ages, so this was tonnes of fun to do.

I hadn’t drawn a dragon in a while. I love dragons. I also love muscles. Some day I’ll learn how to draw both properly. Inked with a brush pen.

Was going to be a picture of a Brinchie character from our Shaintar game, ended up turning into a referenceless body study. I really need to do more figure drawing, oi.

A page of Bambi deer (drawn from references on the official model sheets, with the bottom one being from my own head so-to-speak) and a southern belle. We were watching “Little Women” on Christmas, and the dresses were itching at me to be drawn.

And Dennis suggested “A person lying in snow” as a drawing prompt, and it turned into this. I’m planning on playing around with it in Photoshop to see what I can make of it. Rushed and crappy inking job ftw!

Right, that’s all I’ve got so far. Hope you all had a lovely holiday, and I wish you all the best for the coming New Year! Thanks for reading. =)

Anyway, if you have any opinions, feel free to drop them on me. =)

Today I have a lot of silly little sketches for you.

I drew these two about a month ago when visiting at a friend’s place. I didn’t have any of my usual drawing stuff with me, so I just sketched in a small notebook I had on me with a blue ballpoint pen. You’ll actually see a lot of ballpoint pen in this post; I seem to have reached a bit of a renaissance with it. =)

Anyway, I decided to sketch a really scary looking stereotypical 80’s/90’s girl, complete with the sideways pigtail, crazy bead necklaces/earrings/bracelets, too-big lavender (always lavender!) kitten with yarn t-shirt (preferably with sparkles on it), and baggy sweatsocks. Oh, and some weird missing teeth. I thought she was great. As you can see, I also drew her invisible friend Ashley next to her; every little girl had an invisible friend in the 80’s/90’s! (And don’t you dare call them “imaginary” friends!!!)

The boy was an afterthought after I finished drawing the girl, but I still think he turned out cute. =) I’m not so hip with little boy 80’s/90’s fashion, having no brothers or male friends when I was a little kid…

Right, next!

Dennis said I should draw a “man with a turban”. So I did! And I had tonnes of fun drawing him! I started with the big pointy nose and everything went from there. Blue pencil with micron pen over top. I still think I should have drawn him smiling and showing some big crooked teeth… man, stereotypes are so much fun!

Another one!

Sorry for the dirty looking scan. It’s so hard to scan that blue pencil stuff and have it still be legible. Anyway, this is a WWI doughboy, that is, soldier. Also suggested by Dennis. I used references for this one, though not really any directly. I really am interested in this era in history, so I wanted to show his enthusiasm for being a soldier; the whole “Look ma, I’m goin’ t’war!!” mindset which turned out to be a horrid mistake. Oh, WWI… you taught us so much, and yet we didn’t seem to learn.

Aaaaaaand, for our next number…

I’m actually really not that fond of this one… I still wanted to include it though, for continuity’s sake, and to contrast it with the next picture. Anyway, another image of Polly, my soon-to-be Diaspora roleplaying character if all goes well. I just wanted to point out that this is often the fate of a lot of drawings I try to do, especially of humans of this variety. I sit down with a pencil and try to draw without anything really clear in mind, without a huge drive for much, and it turns out boring, tame, and really… ugh, boring. And bad. It doesn’t even look like her, even though I did have the ability to erase and could make her look like anything I wanted. I was just lazy.

And here’s what happens when I have an idea that’s driving my drawing, and I’m using a ballpoint pen that means I can’t erase and go over things, honing and re-honing until it’s boring as hell:

Yes the anatomy is weirder, but on the whole the pose is much more interesting, it’s filled with energy, and it’s just so much more interesting. I draw with ballpoint pen a lot when I don’t have my drawing stuff around me (hence the kid pictures at the beginning of this post) but I’ve never deliberately used it in one of my sketchbooks when I had my actual supplies. This time I tried it, for just this reason; to force myself to clearly visualize what I’m drawing and get it down quickly, without restraint. I think I’m on a ballpoint pen kick now.

KLINGON!

K, now that the obligatory Star Trek fan art is done…

More Polly! And Dennis’ Diaspora character Miles Tessevel, a galactic merchant. Dennis sat down with me and described his character and I sketched it out for him, asking him at odd intervals “Okay, so what do you want his nose to be like? Large, straight, hooked…?”, “What shape is his jaw? Round? Square?”, “Does he have noticeable cheekbones?” and others like that. It was a lot of fun, and Dennis was rather satisfied with the result. I hope to do at least one sketch like this for everyone’s character in the game. =)

Right! I think that’s all I have to show you for now. Not much, since the last few weeks I’ve been inundated by school assignments and final exams. But now that’s done! I’m free! So here’s hoping I’ll use some of that free time to draw, and not simply watch Star Trek and be boring as hell.

Here I’ve done some more Donald sketches. I hadn’t seen the references for a while, had just watched a couple Donald Duck shorts, and felt like drawing him. He’s hard. That beak keeps changing, agh! Surely more practice and study is needed.

Next:

I wanted to draw a quick picture of the Last Unicorn of “The Last Unicorn” fame, so I did, sans reference. I keep trying to give her proper anatomy, what’s wrong with me? One of these days, I’ll be able to grasp that grace that I’ve never been able to capture.

The bottom sketch is just a cute one suggested by my sweetie. He suggested “A person building a humanoid robot,” and this is the scene that came to my head. =) I’m trying to think of a way to skew this into a Christmas card…

Here’s a bigger version of those two:

They’re just pencil with micron ink over top, size .05 and .01. =)

Next!

Well I went ahead and coloured that Picard sketch I posted a while ago. I’m still really fond of it, there’s just something so appealing about that man’s face… that, and I’ve been watching a lot of ST:TNG lately. Anyway, I coloured this on my Erlkonig, my laptop, using my poor, ancient and huge Intuos 2 12×12 Wacom tablet. I don’t think I’ve mentioned which tablet I own on here yet, so I thought I would. =)

That’s all for that, really! Next…

This is a picture of a boy monk, also suggested by my sweetie. I was complaining, as I often do, about not doing enough art, so he kicked my ass and told me to draw something in the hour I had before bed. So I opened up photoshop and asked him for a prompt, so he told me “a monk in orange and yellow robes.” I came up with this in just under an hour.

I made a fun little animated .gif to go with it. =)

You might just see a big blank box; if you click on it, it will open the full .gif file and it will animate for you. It basically just cycles through the layers I used to make the picture. Not a real walkthrough, but close enough, since it shows you my initial sketch layers and how I refined them over time. I might have made them cycle a bit fast, though, so you might have to open it up and step through it to see the layers more clearly.

Animated .gifs are fun as hell. I can stare at them for hours.

What else do I have… Ah, right!

Sorry for the horrid scan. I had the urge to draw Ariel the other night for some strange reason. Strange because I really don’t like her very much at all as a character and always found her to be rather bratty, childish, and simply a bad role-model for kids to begin with (I thought so when I was a kid, too, so I haven’t just grown up to be a prude, I promise! I’ve always been one. . So to satisfy my urge and to also placate my gut, I tried to draw her looking all bratty and pouty, using model sheets found at the Disney Animation Archive. Clicking through more model sheets I found the ones for “The Emperor’s New Groove”, one of my favourite Disney movies, so I had a go at quickly sketching Kuzco as well. I figured, he being such a sleaze, he’d totally be one to hit on an overly sexualized 16 year old mermaid-girl (but hell, since I was the antithesis of sexuality when I was 16, perhaps I’m just jealous =P). So I came up with this.

K, enough rambling about that.

Hmm, you know, I think I might have run out of things to show off. No, wait! I have some sketches in a ratty notebook in my schoolbag, but I haven’t scanned those yet. Another entry, then. =)

The final few weeks of school are hell. Thanks for putting up with me! I hope you like what you see.

Later on in the night I started looking up corsets on Wikipedia, which lead to hours of fascinated clicking through a couple centuries of historical fashion. SO RAD.

Anyway, here are the sketches I came up with last night.w00t! Look at that dashing character… with his goatee and his tights. Mraow.

I had SOMUCHFUN with the little fashion sketches. Bwahahaha!! Women used to dress so silly… yet for some reason it’s still so compelling.

I love my little black permanent marker pens. Whee!

That’s all for me right now… off to do some homework. *sigh*

I don’t know if it did any good to look at art all day, since I didn’t do any art myself, I didn’t get any grandiose ideas for my own artistic projects, I wasn’t driven off my lap-top by the urge to sketch, I didn’t spend any money to support any of the wonderful art I was looking at, and my headache has slowly gotten bigger over the evening even after taking tylenol. So perhaps that should be a lesson to me.

But seriously, I couldn’t look away. It started with me going through my list of watched accounts on DA and cleaning it up; meaning, removing the watch of any accounts that are old or inactive or otherwise not in my interest anymore. I only got from A – K, but hey, that’s better than nothing. Through the Daily Deviations I found this one, a so-called Luisa M. Kelle, and I was held utterly rapt. I spent hours moseying through her gallery, admiring her beautiful linework, her whimsical subjects, her fanciful perception of life. Her artwork is like candy for my inner seven year old, who used to love Beatrix Potter, the Wind in the Willows, and thought that Rupert the Bear would be the very best friend ever. (Oh, and we can’t forget Babar either!) Anyway, she reminds me a lot of another of my favourite artists, Luve (aka. Lauren Henderson), who may be a little more cartoony and wholesome, but still full of awesome in the anthro animal respect. Le sigh.

So then my inner critic (his name is Joe) starts arguing, saying that this is real art, this is where the money is; look at how talented this person is, with her beautiful characters, stunning backgrounds and moving scenes, and where am I getting off in drawing all those funny-faced big-eyed ugly people? And ponies? Anthro animals in humanoid settings is where it’s at, people! Whimsy! Charm! Children’s stories! There’s money, story, and fun in that!

Then I did some more clicking around, and stumbled on Loish’s (aka. Lois van Baarle) website again, which floored me with her beautiful girls in such amazing retro textured goodness. This is my generation’s thing, neon colours, girls with big hair, fashion, retro motifs and awesome animation. This stuff looks great, and it sells. Ooooh, it’s so good I can almost taste it, and I can’t look away! The urge to sketch up beautiful girls in interesting clothes in stylish poses is rising…

But then (oh snap!) I click another link, and stumble upon… yes!! Another favourite artist of mine! Erica Moen, of DAR, and I happily read through her comic archives again and marvel at her honesty and humourous lifestyle, squee over her romance with her (relatively) newlywed husband (Congrats!!), and once again just admire the sheer force of will it must have taken her to continue with her comic for so long. I also admire how unique a person she is, how unwilling she is to cowl away and hide her intricacies, and how proud she is to be herself. And she, being the awesome person she is connected with so many awesome people, swung me over to ANOTHER favourite artist (say it isn’t so!), the one and only Dylan Meconis!

Oh yeah, these are the people to idolize, these are the bread and butter winners not only for themselves, but for female cartoonists/artists of the world! They draw comics about issues that mean something, they speak their mind, and they further on the influence of their medium as they do it. They have dozens of friends within their faculty, they do it for a living, and by god, if only I was one of them who could also draw pictures and sell them and things for a living, even if it’s a not so glamourous a lifestyle…

That was about the time I looked at Joe (though not really, you know, him not existing and all) and said “Look, shut up, you. I’m going to make some pizza.” So I did. Now I’m here typing about these wonderful artists, for no real good reason. Oh! I do have art¹ though!

Drawn while watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus yesterday with Dennis! There’s Mr. Raymond Luxury Yacht (Pronounced Throat Warbler Mangrove) with his fake nose, some kind of crazy Amish dude (not a ninja), and some saucy minx who stole some fine gentleman’s hat. The wench.

Next is a picture I drew today (I lied, I didn’t spend the whole day looking at art, though very near it) after looking online for ages for some sort of acceptable drawing program to use with my tablet on my Macbook. The GIMP wasn’t accepting pressure sensitivity for some reason, so I went through a variety of so called free “alternatives” and stumbled upon Art Rage, which I downloaded and tried briefly by drawing this picture.

I don’t know what my deal is lately with the late 1800’s/early 1900’s and those cute little straw hats recently, but there you go. Didn’t like the program much, but that’s just me. Was still fun for half an hour or so. Look! It looks like pencil!

So that’s it for me… just wanted to share some of these wonderful artists and their works, and also do something other than just sit around all day. Hopefully tomorrow I can open my eyes without getting light-headed. Stupid flu.

^{1. This is open to debate, of course.}

Dennis has been bugging me to put these up, so now that my scanner’s hooked up again I finally can! Here goes.

First is one last page of Bambi sketches I did before the Great Flood which kind of destroyed my inspiration for it a bit… The only sketch I really like on this page is the one of Bambi sitting looking surprised. =) Still way too much of my own style in them, but ah well!

Some random chicas I drew a few days ago. The lady in the bottom left corner was sketched from a photo from LIFE Magazine’s website. =) Sometimes I need to remind myself that I can still draw from reference.

I was eating with Dennis at The Eatery two nights ago (Thanksgiving Monday, actually!), and since I had all my stuff with me (was moving back home) I pulled out my sketchbook and started to draw. I sketched the chick there first. The Eatery has some really awesome pop-culture-ish woodcuts on the wall, and one of them is a bust of Dick Tracy, and without knowing what else to draw I started to draw him. It looked like he was eyeing her up at a party, and things just lead from there…

The dialogue is: “How d’you like them gams, Dick?” He replies: “I like ‘em swell, Charlie.” Etc. I’m so silly.

Forgive the language in the writing there; I was giving an example of my cursive handwriting (first paragraph) versus my printing (last paragraph). The middle paragraph is Dennis’ usual scrawl. =) Dennis is the one that provided the passage. Heehee.

And the Shit-Bot 2000. Again, forgive the language! I think he’s quite cute, actually…

And now for something completely different:

A random map I drew in Geography class because I was bored and I love drawing maps. =) Drawn with a blue bic ballpoint pen. Ignore the pencil lines; I was trying to figure out tectonic forces, but that was way after drawing it, so it makes no sense whatsoever.

And Galactic Space Newfies. Long story. They’re wearing those big rubber rain hats, by the way, and wellies. The dialogue is: “But how can you tell he’s the captian?” Response: “Idiot, he has the biggest hat!”

Right. Now that I’ve proven my artistic genius, I’m going to go watch more Monty Python. *poofs*

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. =)