icky and out of practice

Had no computer for almost a month'n a half, lost any and all chops with the tablet/digital in the interim. hooray. I'll get there eventually, right?

quick sketch

30-minute sketch before work. Haven't touched the tablet in a while, trying to keep things moving.

well, I'm calling it.

DONE. Or close enough that I don't care.

Attempting to figure how to paint tattoos without losing the skin shading/tone beneath. Never really found an answer. More attention to cast shadows as well.

Messing with the hair, glasses, & eyes.

This is me giving up on subtlety. Screw it, let's just paint the damn tattoo.

Some last-minute adjustments - more shine on glasses, etc. As done as it'll get - but I'm fairly pleased. It looks painted, not digital. Colors are getting better. All in all, I am pleased. Now if I can just jump the shark to "complacent", I'm set!

Total time: 5-6 hours?

more digital experiments in progress...

Initial stage - crappy sketch over random background. Just to get base shapes planned.

Marking big areas of color/shadow. This stage is absurdly sloppy, there's no real need to stay inside the lines, etc. (a.k.a. The Fun Part)

More work on color & shade. Trying to work in some reddish tones here & there. Laughing at how I flounder when it comes to color...base tones ripped straight from source photo.

Further refinement. Laying in glasses, eyes, highlighting the face, smoothing out the color transitions to give nose shape, etc. Whew. LONG way to go on this one...maybe 1 hr 45 minutes in thus far. More as it happens.

something other than SR Nerdery:

Okay, another experiment with digital. Took a base image, roughed in the base shapes, drew a super-rough linework version, then moved to refining shapes & color. Ditched the linework partway through and focused on making the shapes clear. This, at long last, is something resembling a painting. Not a particularly good painting, mind you, but a painting nevertheless.

Perhaps there's something to that whole "draw EVERY DAY" thing.

P.S. Please forgive the remarkably lame attire/pose. It's the reference I had available.

More SR nonsense....

More shadowrun characters, all digital. We decided to play an extra game on our regular off-week, so had a bit of a time crunch on these. Not happy with most of 'em, but I am getting a good chance to try new tricks. Feel like skin tones are at least beginning to approach something I will eventually be happy with.

Final 2 player characters...

Two more Shadowrun characters (all digital), and then two older drawings I added color to...trying to build a stockpile of characters for the guy running it to reference. Top left is my character, the Brit. Haveta say this is the best game I've played in a while. I am super geeked-out.

2 more...

Two more for Shadowrun. 1st up is "Masher" Thompson, disgraced boxer. Followed by some random NPC. NERD!
Both of these are all-digital. Think I need to do more work on the 1st one - colors seem way too flat. Oh well, will do more later.

A Convict, a Wanker, and a Priest walk into a bar...

Character sketches for a game of Shadowrun I'm partaking in. This is 1/2 the crew. Bunch of quick sketches(usually @ work), that are then photographed & photoshopped. It's a quick process, which is great given my minuscule attention span. More to come.

experiment (and an oldie)

I've been playing with the tablet more, trying to come to grips with color. Having a ridiculously difficult time of it. Not that I have any grasp of color to begin with, but the whole digital-color working differently than pigments is messin' with me as well.

Came across an old illo from a couple years ago. I love Elsa Lanchester.

1 done(?), 1 started

Finished (sort of) the one, started on another. Found this rad old photo of a very odd collection of people. Made me think of some top-secret 1920's adventurers' society. Complete with mad scientist, resourceful socialite, and brawny manservant. Awesome.

Jesus, I'm nerdy.

I love old photos

Specifically, old crime scene photos. I'm talking 1920's & '30s. I'm not sure what it is, but old b&w has always held a fascination for me. When that fascination is then paired with a love of the morbid, well, game over.

I've wanted to draw/paint something from an old crime scene shot for years. Just came across a great one recently and dove in. All done digital, still have no real idea what I'm doing with the tablet, so it's all over the place. That's what experimentation's all about I suppose. Putzing about until things start to fall into place.

So the top shot is the whole piece in-progress - tons of layers, scribbling, etc. 2nd shot is detail of the figures, and 3rd shot is detail without the base colors - I have long been obsessed with focus points of an illo being very clearly defined but the background/surroundings much more loosely marked. Still trying to find some kind of balance that makes me happy.

Hooray for Digital

I know, leave it to me to get a shiny new graphics tablet, and to then use it to do the exact same things I was doing without it. Thanks to DevilOnTheLeft for scoring the tablet. I promise, I'll try to actually make use of it's capabilities in the future.

And now for something different:

So these photos are from a project my friend Fwank did. Photos of different enviroments. Since Jen and I have pretty much made each room in our house into its own little world, it was a one-stop-shopping sorta deal. Thought I'd show someone else's art for a change.

Fwank had never seen the house before, so that was entertaining. And I got to stand there doing my best melancholy-indie-rocker shtick. Also entertaining. From the top, we have the library (which is supposed to be a dining room, but c'mon, who needs a dining room when you could have a place for your books?!), the kitchen (complete with newly tiled floors, because turqoise-y blue and charcoal grey are the best colors ever), exterior (which I like because it's a perspective on the house that I don't often have), my wreck of a workspace (complete with old unfinished paintings and a 6-inch layer of assorted crap on the worktable), and the last one is the doorway to our tiny downstairs bathroom (the walls of which are covered with repro pulp magazine covers and a shade of green we refer to as 'Toxic Zombie Green'). I do like me house.

1 year ago

Two more from last summer, right around the start of me trying really hard to accept that my artistic output will never be what I want it to be. Trying to embrace it for what it is.
I used to do the whole lightly sketched pencils/refine lines/pen & ink/erase pencils routine. It was a pain in my derriere, and I found it really difficult to maintain consistency between pencils & inks. So I ditched the pencil. Started using a light grey prismacolor marker for rough shapes, and straight to pen over the top. Mistakes are still visible, usually even after I try to hide them. This doesn't really bother me (certainly not like I thought it would). This is just how I draw. Sloppy & sketchy.

More from a couple years ago...

Looking back over my drawings from the last few years, I'm kind of troubled by how much it's changed. Consistency has always been an issue for me; some days everything works just as I want, other days nothing works at all. I was obsessed with having very strong lines, very graphic-style work for some time. Unfortunately, making that happen is a real struggle for me, considering that my most comfortable working method is sketching with a pen.
That being said, I'm pretty proud of these pieces. Each was something better than I though I was capable of at the time.
p.s. Top left is yet another shot of Zoetica Ebb, top right is Katie West, another source of inspiration.

Card-Deck Box

So this was the box art for my home-made deck of playing cards, handed out to a select few over Christmas '08.

Samurai-A-Go-Go

Spent a couple months last year obsessing over samurai, playing samurai games, running a samurai RPG, (L5R, for all you gaming nerds out there) etc. Just found these drawings, and the character sketches below.