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.

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

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. =)