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.

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.

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. =)

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.

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. =)

Anyway, in this first page you can see the naked chick is very much inspired by him.

Though I’m also really fond of the random heads I have up there too. I love the Inuit-esque dude, with his cute round face and pudgy cheeks! drawing him was a lot of fun. Then just to contrast I had to draw the elongated, pointy-eared elf guy. Haha, so much fun.

The inked chick with the pointy hair was done first, and Dennis said he liked her so I slapped some colour on her in photoshop:

The hair isn’t blue, by the way, it’s black; I was just remembering Archie comics and their tendency to colour the highlights in Veronica’s hair blue. Well, I guess using grey would make her look like an old lady…

And yes, the colouring is horrible, and yes, I did use the dodge/burn tool like a rabid ten-year old. What can I say, I’m lazy. I really have to kick that up and stop being such a flake. Maybe I’ll try colouring it again sometime, make it look a little less elementary.

The next page is really just a bunch of random scribbles, not much to share.

Yeah, some random people, a bad drawing of Mickey Mouse, and… omigod, the lolwut pear!!

Haha… no, I don’t know what I was on. And the biting pear (or lolwut pear) is actually the original creation of Ursula Vernon. It was originally called The Biting pear of Salamanca and was a part of her Weird Fruit series. It was just taken (or “borrowed” if you like!) by people like those from 4chan, and now it has a crazy internet life and is used for protesting scientology and all other crazy things… wow.

Anyway, I wanted to draw round, cartoony blobby things, and the biting pear was the first thing that popped into my head. I like the one of it lounging on the piano; I was going to give it a feather boa, but thought that would just look too silly. But yeah, all credit for those go to Ursula, not to me. They are stupidly fun to draw.

Right. That’s all I have to share. I do have a few other rather failed sketches of creature and stuff; trying to come up with a pose I could use on The Totem Lands. I haven’t spent much time there yet, but it looks like a lot of fun. We’ll see what happens.

I was playing around with shapes and trying to make some interesting stereotypical characters from them. They were very small; these guys are only a couple inches high. I really have to do more fooling around with shape and style. I love the results. =)

A nice looking character I sketched one day, then inked. She has the tentative name of “Candice”. I really like this style, putting the emphasis on the nose and the large eyes. I used it once before on a quick character I named “Donny”. The only problem is that I’m not exactly sure how it would work in other views; so far the profile view is the only one I’ve got to work. I did a few sketches in different orientations, but they didn’t work out so well.

I did a quick sketch of the Candice character in a full-body shot, to play around with clothes. Instead, it turned into playing around with body proportions and blue and purple pencil. I also drew another profile shot of a generic head in that same big-nose style to use as a template and just to cement it in my head a little more. I need to draw more cartoony stuff, it’s a lot of fun. =) You can also see in the bottom right-hand corner a picture of a flan, from one of those Final Fantasy games, as the dessert it’s named from.

And last but not least:

A lady I spotted from the window of a bus the other day. I’d like to sketch her again and do her better justice, she had such a wonderful smile. I was planning on working on this sketch a little more than inking it experimentally to see how it turns out. Maybe I’ll still do that!

That’s it for now… just a bunch of sketches from the past couple of months.

In non-art news, I was accepted to college for this Summer, so I’m hoping that hanging around on campus and doing a lot of random sketching like I used to will mean I’ll have more to submit and on a more regular basis. Let’s hope so anyway! I’m so darn excited about it. =)

Needless to say we watched a lot of “The Red Green Show”, “Royal Canadian Air Farce”, “This Hour Has 22 Minutes”, the morning children’s cartoons, reruns of “Star Trek: The Next Generation”… oh, and “Just For Laughs”.

That was my favourite. The Just For Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal… we saw so many episodes it wasn’t even funny. Anyway, a few times we were lucky enough to catch the episode that had Jeff Dunham as a performer, and he was one of our absolute favourites. After watching his show my sister and I would go around claiming everything was “on a steek!”

Anyway, I found this excellent website, MoviesFoundOnline.com (They have “The Plague Dogs” on there!!!), and along with numerous other awesome movies, they had both of Jeff Dunham’s videos which I watched the other day and laughed my ass off.

I also brought out my sketchbook and drew a couple pictures of the puppets.

I always thought his puppets were some of the ugliest things I’ve ever seen, but after looking at them from an artistic point of view they’re oddly charming. They’re wonderful caricatures, representations of stereotypes, and like I said in my last post I love that sort of thing. Bubba J. reminded me a lot of that old Howdy Doody puppet that used to terrify me. But I loved the shape of his nose and his teeth, and just had to give him a quick sketch.

Of course, Peanut had to follow. And then Jose Jalapeno on a Steek. I’m still wanting to sit down and draw a picture of Walter, hehe!

My drawings are always too safe. I never “stretch” things or exaggerate things enough. Which is why drawing these sorts of things are so much fun; it forces me to think outside of my comfort zone and draw crazy and whacky things. I still need a lot of work, but I thought I’d share anyway. =)

Next!

I’m also a huge sucker for animated movies. My sister and I both are absolutely obsessed with Disney, and pretty much any animated movie released in the late 80’s or 90’s we’ve probably seen and obsessed over. Anyway, we were also huge fans of The Chipmunks, and the movie “The Chipmunk Adventure”.

I still watch it a lot to this day; it’s one of my feel good movies. I rediscovered it on DVD a couple of years ago and I’m so glad I did! Every time I watch it I have to make a sketch or two of one of the characters, and watching it tonight was no exception.

I actually paused the movie and drew the frame as I saw it, just for practice, so I lay no claim to the pose or anything awesome like that. It’s just a reproduction. Already I know of a lot of things wrong with it, especially looking at the original frame. It was more exaggerated, and I messed up the proportions somewhat… but it was still a tonne of fun to do.

Here’s an old sketch I made of Jeanette (My favourite ‘munk!) about a year ago:

That time was drawing with just the moving movie in front of me, without a direct reference like I did tonight. You can see my own style come through a lot more in this one. And it’s not so much on model either.

Anyway, they’re a hell of a lot of fun, and the songs are so catchy, even so many years later. Here’s the cult favourite from the film, if you’re curious (also, it’s just plain awesome):

I’m not sure I have much else to say, except yay, second art post!! Woo! Sorry I’m so slow… this is seriously the only things I’ve drawn since my last post. Yeah, I’m that slow with this stuff. But that’s what I’m trying to work at, so… go me?

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!