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.

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.

I need a lot of work with sculpting, hehe! I took a ceramics class in grade nine of highschool and loved it, but haven’t done any since; well, except for this little guy who I sculpted earlier this year.

I figure it would be easier if I had a proper space to use to sculpt (right now I’ve been doing it on my bed on top of a piece of cardboard), if I actually used tinfoil and armatures (haven’t tried that yet!), and if I had the proper tools (I used an old 3H pencil to detail this one, since I had nothing else pointy enough to use). Tools are expensive though, and I don’t really have the time (or, like I said, the space!) to give sculpting a real go.

Instead, I just have time for sculpting little things like this:

Sorry for any poor quality, I’m experimenting with The Gimp on my laptop. Still not that proficient. =)

Anyway, it went through a couple permutations. I started it thinking I’d just make something extremely small and simple, something more lego-esque, made out of simple shapes. But the more I fooled around the more detailed it got until it was too big to support itself on its own legs and had to be lying down instead. That’s when I decided to make it cute and sleeping. I don’t know, maybe my sister will use it as a paper weight!

I think it turned out really cute, despite the dirtiness of the clay by the end of everything (thanks to that freaking pencil I used to detail, especially around the face). I wish I had some kind of paint, any kind, to cover it up, but all I have are watercolours, and somehow I doubt those will work.

I hope it actually looks like the pony is sleeping and not, you know, dead. It was a bit of a fear as I was sculpting it, and only half way through it did look a little morbid.

Right, just a quick update. I have some sketches lying around, I just haven’t gotten around to scanning them. Soon!

So when I pulled out one of my pens the other week and started randomly sketching on a whim, I was very excited when I actually managed to draw something. Something other than a mess of confused and irritated scribbles! Yay!

So here is the result of that sketch fest that lasted about a half-hour:

No references, and certainly no ideas. Just random sketching. Had some issues with the character in the lower left corner, as you can see; I have a tendency to deface the sketches I immediately hate. The horse at the bottom of the page and the figure with it’s back towards the viewer on the right were contour line drawings; drawn with a single line, without lifting my pen. I thought it would be fun!

Here’s my favourite part:

Creature. =)

A day later I did a second page:

I used a reference picture from DeviantART for that eye there, but I have since lost the link to it and my searches are turning up nothing. How unprofessional of me.

The mermaid was a remix from an old design of mermaid I used to draw constantly when I was fourteen. I must say, they’ve gotten a lot creepier since then!

My favourite part:

I really do enjoy drawing with ink. There’s something so beautiful about a single line, and being forced to use what you put down without the ability to erase. The drawings seem so much purer somehow, and it’s always fun to add more and more detail. They come out looking so delicate, and it really helps to teach you how to steady your hands.

Next we have a drawing of a horse I sketched with blue col-erase pencil a couple months ago. I inlcude this because I am known for drawing horses, and I thought I’d show people the fruits of my labour in all things equine from the past year or so:

‘Eh. Could be better. I’ve fallen behind a lot in my quest to be better at drawing equines, though I hope to try and pick it back up again! I have done better than this, and I want to get back to that.

Next is what I came up with yesterday, after watching “Enchanted” and “Mary Poppins” and being inspired by memories from my youth spent incessantly rewinding VHS tapes in front of the TV. Didn’t draw anything reminiscent of my youth, or anything really pertaining to the movies (except for a bad cartoony bust of Mary Poppins), but I’m glad I had the drive and the patience to draw anything at all!

I apologise for the vulgar language- er, actually, no I don’t. I’m actually quite proud of that there derierre, I’ve been trying for the longest time to catch those curves and I think I might have acheived it this time.

I love caricatures and stereotypes, and love drawing them. The lady in the center is one of my attempts at depicting a stereotype, and I’m quite proud of her. I imagine her name is Mabel, and she works in the office of an elementary school. Perhaps she brings in home-made cookies every Friday for the staff and her favourite students to munch on. I imagine she’d be the kind to play favourites, while doggedly asserting her fair nature. Hey, everyone has to have faults!

That’s it for my first sketch-dump. I promise, future entries will be smaller; at least, I hope they will be. I just wanted to share all these things at once, and see what happens.

Thanks for reading. =) We’ll see what I come up with next!