Pencil Lines

I’ve been doing a little bit more sketching, mostly thanks to the prodding of my friends. I’ve been focusing on the fun cartoony stuff, because I just can’t stop being amazed by these people that are so damn good at it. The one I’ve been fawning over recently is Chris Sanders, the guy who came up with the style and story for Lilo & Stitch. He has an adorable little webcomic called Kiskaloo, and the cute is just about killing me!

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 have a couple random sketches for you.

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. =)

When I was about ten, we moved onto a farm in the middle of nowhere (which happened to be the most beautiful place I’ve ever lived) and suddenly we were forced to make due with one single channel via antenna. That channel? CBC. We came from a home with full cable to a house with only CBC.

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?

As I mentioned in my introductory post, I’ve been in a bit of a slump creativity-wise for the past couple of years. I’ve had many urges and wants to draw, write and otherwise create, but my brain would be empty of ideas to actually put down, and anything I did come up with would be ruined by my impatience and frustration.

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!