Pencil Lines

Right, so, my life turned a little upside down for a moment there. I got pretty sick for about a week, and at the exact same time my room flooded and I was forced to stay with a friend for a while. =) But thankfully I’m finally back in my room again, and I’m slowly trying to get back to normal!

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*

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!

I have a few drawings to share with you today.

The other day Dennis and I went back for another Hackmaster Basic session with d7. It was very eventful! Most importantly, Alan Wrench, the character I illustrated with Turdrick Wankersmith in that picture I drew in the last session, kicked the bucket. The first character fatality I’ve ever experienced in a roleplaying game!

Well, that left poor Turdrick all on his own, and us realizing that running a Hackmaster game with a two-person party was a bit of a suicide mission. So, Dennis and I rolled up new characters, two for him and one for me, to up the party count to four. Taking advantage of all the extended family/background info we rolled for Turdrick during character creation, I decided to make a second fighter using one of Turdrick’s sisters. I figured she was a good fighter and taught Turdrick all he knows, but was still very girly. I drew a quick drawing of her.

Yes, her name is “Chloe-Midya Wankersmith”. I was trying to come up with something suitably snarky and adolescent to match “Turdrick” and thought her name was close enough to “chlamydia” to pass. Hurr hurr. The drawing isn’t all that great, since I drew it really quickly and while I was distracted by the actual game (stupid game, can’t you see I was there to draw? =P) , so the quality is reeeeaaaally bad. Still, I have little enough to show you guys in the first place, I might as well show you the bad stuff too to make up for it.

Last night Dennis and I were hanging out and having some art-ing time. I sketched through quite a few things before I actually settled on something and came up with a drawing that wasn’t a bunch of random circles or smiley faces.

Aaaah, one of those silly self-portraits with a silly made up animal. Hehe! Yes, it is a silly drawing of me and Creature, I imagine on top of a hill-top somewhere looking out over… something. Haven’t gotten that far, haha.

It has a lot of issues, but I like it anyway. It’s been a long time since I last seriously tried to draw Creature, I feel as though I’ve been neglecting him. Poor puppy. I actually sat down for the first time in… four years?… and tried to come up with a better idea for how his horns look. I usually just half-ass them and draw whatever and hope it looks passable, which is funny because his horns are basically what make him special. But after hemming and hawwing over which horn looked right for him (trying many different kinds from oryx horns to eland horns, the latter of which looks really cool but just looks silly when drawn) I think I’ve finally settled on bushbuck horns. They’re just about the right length I want his horns to be, they have just the right amount of texture, and they curve in a way I’d love his horns to curve. Now I just have to learn how to draw them, oi.

Right. Next!

Found a link to Michael Sporn’s Animation “Splog” via John K., and I think I’m in love. The sheer amount of information and resources in his blog completely overwhelms me. I found his post featuring images on “How to Draw Donald Duck” and I just HAD to try it.

Donald Duck has been one of my absolute favourite cartoon characters ever since I was a little kid. My parents used to tape hours’ worth of Disney shorts from the Family/Disney channel when I was a kid, and I used to devour them regularly, playing them until the tapes were all ragged. I found them exceedingly entertaining, and Donald was always my absolute favourite (If you like, go take a moment to watch “Donald’s Tire Trouble (1943)”, or “A Good Time for a Dime (1941)”!). I’ve made attempts to draw him over the years, but never with such helpful references.

Many of my sketches were done following the steps and copying the poses it gives you, but I did elaborate and try my own poses, especially on the full-body ones. I think I need to work on those a little. Even so, I think these are some of the most on-model cartoon character sketches I’ve ever done. Go me!!

I love how Donald’s eyes bulge when he’s angry or sad. =D

Well, that’s all I’ve got right now. The more I explore Michael Sporn’s blog the more inspired I get. Man, I love Disney… let’s hope I’ll have more to show you soon!