Pencil Lines

I know it’s been a while since I’ve updated, and that I probably should give some excuse, but you all know it already. School, busy, lazy, blah-blah… but I have done some drawing the last little while, so here are some sketches. Enjoy!

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!

Well, all finished!

I’d like to say thanks to the awesome Teresa of Lost In Wonder for the wonderful advice she gave me on DA. Of course this is just a small practice painting, but I am new at this, and her advice really helped me decide what my next step was going to be. Please give her blog a visit, she’s insanely talented, and I absolutely adore her paintings. You won’t regret it!

For sale, if anyone’s interested! Originally offering for $5, but feel free to make an offer if you’d rather pay less. It’s 6″x4″, postcard sized, has a postcard address/stamp layout on the back. Front is pretty much just as you see here, except without the website watermark.

Keep reading to hear me ramble about the process and what I learned. =)

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Right, so I’ve been trying to think of ways I could practice my watercolours without ruining too many things, and thought up the idea of making a series of small illustrations of dog breeds and/or cat breeds or something and painting them. So excited of this prospect was I that I ran out at the first available chance and bought an awesome post-card sized pad of watercolour paper just for this occasion!

I actually defied my law of procrastination and sat down and started one on Tuesday. Here’s how far I got:

Now I’m looking for suggestions/critiques/advice/what-have-you. I know very little about watercolours, really only the very basics of how to use them, and I still have a long way to go.

What I’d like some advice on if you’ve got any:

Shadows: Should I add another layer of shadows, possibly in a purple colour? What areas do you think would benefit the most from this? How stingy/generous should I be with this to really make it pop?

Background: Simple gradient, simple shadow on the ground, something more elaborate…? What colours do you think would work well in a background? Should it fill up the whole rest of the paper, or form a smaller rectangle/oval around the subject? Should it have hard edges or fade into the white of the paper? I’m pretty stumped here, actually!

Pom detail: Is there enough detail on the pom? Too much? Should I attempt to do more, and if so, what would you suggest? It’s kind of hard to see from the crappy photo I provide, but I did try to lift some of that yellow off the edges of the fur and in certain places to make it seem lighter. I also went in once with a darker orange colour and added some little swipes with that; blah blah.

Right. So, basically, I suck at colouring things. I have very little practice, and a lot of the time my coloured pictures turn out looking very preschool-ish. Since colour in watercolour paintings is so important, I thought I’d ask for advice; and any technical advice/critique you have to give for now, and for the next one would be so welcome!

Thank you in advance for any help you’re able to give; and if not, I hope you like the look of this (poorly drawn) pom. =) My internet was down when I started drawing it so I couldn’t look up refernces; I hope it’s recognizable. If not, I’ll do better on the next one!

Anyone interested in purchasing this for $5 when it’s done, or others in a series like this?

It’s my sister’s birthday soon. I bought her a scarf I’ve been meaning to mail out to her, but didn’t think that was enough of a present, so I pulled out my stash of Super Sculpy and got to work on a little present for her.

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!

Well… maybe not “back”. I should, um, be very frightened if the 30’s were back, actually.

Was sitting around with Dennis, was thinking about some of the things John K. have said in his blog posts, and suddenly got this urge to sketch one of those old-timey, spaghetti-legged characters with the pac-man pupils.

And, I dunno, an anteater seemed like the obvious choice. Isn’t it?

So here are some sketches.

This was the initial character sketch, where I just drew everything down using broad shapes and trying to keep things simple. But I’m sure John K. would say that there isn’t enough construction; he’s just a bunch of lines floating in space, there’s no meat behind him. Ah well, I’m still learnin’ here!

Asking Dennis what I should draw him doing next, Dennis replied an action pose, throwing something. So, next sketch:

I can already tell there’re a lot of things about him I have to work out, but it was fun to try and figure out how his body would work from a different perspective. Maybe I should try a turn-around and see how well I can reproduce him from other angles?

Then I figured, where’s an anteater without their long tongues?

Now this one looks the least like the original character, but I think it has the most construction. Ah well, practice… I should have drawn his tongue straight for the most part and flipping back and forth only at the end; maybe I’ll do that the next time I draw him. =)

Anyway, it was a fun learning experience. I liked him so much I brought him into Painter, inked him up using the scratchboard tool, than dragged him over to Photoshop CS to “colour” him up:

I used only the basic web colours for his shades; only six different shades of grey, including black and white. I figured that would simplify it and give me the best tonal range. Maybe not… I’m not as satisfied with the tones, but I’m not as certain what is wrong with them so I can fix them. Added a couple paper textures from mayang.com to finish the old-timey look.

It was only after I finished this up, saved it, and uploaded it to DeviantART that I realized I forgot his ears. D’oh! Ah well, that’s something to remember for next time.

There’s something I really like about the weight of him; he’s big and bulky, yet he has that adorably droopy nose and long arms that makes it look like he’s almost melting. I love that. I’ll have to try some more oldie cartoon characters, this was a lot of fun to do!

If you were to make an old-timey, 1930’s style cartoon character, what would you do? I’d love to see anything anyone else comes up with. =D