Sketchbook

I'm just a few pages away from finishing my very first sketchbook. It's lasted me about one semester -- I started it at the end of March, and it is now the end of July. It's been a good haul! It took me a while to suck it down and stop drawing on both sides of the paper. The ink and marker pieces really helped that since all the colour bleeds through.

I've got a different little sketchbook waiting in the wings for its chance, but I'm going to miss this one.

I was thinking about the stacks of paper I've been filling with art for the past 15 years. I go through my old sketches sometimes, looking for inspiration, and I seldom find it. It's a little cool and a little scary to realize that the work that I am doing right now is the most innovative and exciting stuff I've done for a long time. It's scary because I'm not sure that what I'm doing right now IS all that exciting or cool! But I guess it's hopeful in that in five years, when I look back at my first little sketchbook, I'll probably think that its contents are boring -- which will mean that whatever I am doing then will be that much more exciting! And I can't wait to get there!

I will post moar art later in the week -- I'm raiding tonight and I have no scanner at work (just as well, really). I have a couple more life sketches from my journal to post, another caricature or two and a couple silly WoW one-panels. But in the meantime, I've got to get cracking -- those last few sketchbook pages are eager to be filled!

Asian Girl

I feel as though my art output has decreased in the past week or two. I'm not sure that's really the case, but I think that the WoW comics have required a bit more polishing on my part, which slows the rate at which I can post them, and also many of the other sketches I've been doing in the little sketchbook have been very rough and uninteresting. I have also had a busy week at work, though, so maybe there really are fewer sketches to post. I've forgotten to date many of them lately, so it's hard to tell.

I have been doing a bit more marker art, though, mostly because my markers now live beside my computer at home and it's easy to do a bit of colouring with them while I'm waiting for something to load or flying my character somewhere in WoW. This is another random photo girl I distorted and then coloured. She had an interesting face shape and very prominent cheekbones, which ended up making my picture of her look very masculine.



I mostly like the way the markers turned out, except that I accidentally used the darked shade of purply-pink rather than the lighter, and while the cheeks look all right, I definitely think it was the wrong shade to use on her chin. I've bought a few more peach-coloured markers on the weekend, though, so I should be able to get a nicer effect next time.

Silly People

Still distorting poor buggers I find on the web. This poor girl had a cool nose and that hard to draw you-can-take-my-picture-but-I-won't-like-it expression.

This is All I Do Now...

Okay, yeah. It's not all I do now, but I've been working on finishing up some of my WoW comics, so it feels like that's all I'm doing this week.

Here's the world-infamous Gnomish Aggro Magnet:



My favourite part is that I'm not sure whether the device or the gnome holding it is more of an aggro magnet.

I think this is one of my favourite fan-comics that I've drawn for WoW. I was going to enter it in Blizzard's comic contest, but it is only open to residents of the US. It's probably some legal thing, but in my crazy brain, I imagine it's because the iPods explode if shipped outside the US or to Florida or Rhode Island. Maybe they even sprout tentacles and eat their new owner's pets! That would be cool. Awful, but cool.

WoW Comics

I've been doing a few little World of Warcraft one-panels. I think these two might need captions before I submit them anywhere.

This one came out of a guild discussion, where one of the people said that no monster wants a gnome warlock running around between its legs because all the warlock hats have horns on them.



And this one was a little comic of the characters my husband and I play:



He plays a mage, and isn't a very cautious player (but with good reason -- his gnome is a tiny little blizzard of destruction) and me... I like to be careful. It feels like I'm always hiding behind his character. Which is quite a feat, since Wixxit only comes up to Laevis's thighs.

Laevis is a shadow priest, though, so she's slowly starting to come into her own. She's never going to do the big damage (Wixxit puts the "mage" in "damage", ya know!) but she can hold her own in a fight.

More Goofy People

A really silly caricature of someone I found on DeviantArt. I wish I'd written her name down before Mozilla crashed!



And the first caricature I was reasonably happy with, from a picture of a caricaturist on the Drawing Board forum:



Lumpy people ARE easier to caricaturize!

Mystery Author

More pencil crayons == a slightly-sinister mystery author.

Butterfly Girl

I don't know why I don't use pencil crayons all that often any more. The last few times I dragged them out I got really nice results with them.

I especially liked this picture -- I took 14 semi-randomly selected pencil crayons to work and that's all I had to work with. I have a tin that came with 12 pencil crayons, but I decided I didn't like the standard selection, so I started filling it with several random groups of related colours from my big crayon collection. This drawing had a couple reddish-browns, a couple greys, a couple greens... you get the picture. I can fit 14 crayons in there because several of my crayons are nothing but wee little stubs and I can fit two of them where one would normally go.

Tomorrow I'll fill my tin with completely different colours. We'll see where that takes me!

Rubber Chicken Prop

Ladies and gentlebadgers, Ms. Harley Quinn and a Rubber Chicken:



A simple Harley Quinn pinup done in Illustrator. Took me about four hours from sketch to post. I'll probably have to redo her left hand at some point, it doesn't look very good at all.

Oh, yeah: if you want to see a larger version (or larger versions of most things I post up) check out my Deviant Art Gallery.

Uma Unblobbed

Okay, here's Uma again without the blobby white bits:

Goofiness

I'm going to check my cleanup of Uma at work. In the meantime, here's an ink and marker sketch of some random photo reference I cartoonified.



I'm also working on a digital painting caricature of John Goodman for this month's Caricature Jam. I got a blue-pencil sketch done but ended up not liking it, so I used it as a base for a better caricature.

The rough colours:



and the photo reference I was working from:



I admit I cheated on the colours again. I do so well when it comes time to pick the right pencil crayons or markers but sit me down at a white Photoshop screen and I freeze. There are too many colours, and it's just so easy to go back to the photo and select one. I'm going to have to wean myself off the colour picker.

Of course if I don't have a photo I find it reasonably easy to just pick any old skin tone and go with that. Photo reference makes me lazy. :P

The Last of the Meeting Doodles

Here it is, the last of the meeting doodles that I am going to post:



There's a couple more, but some are concepts for a departmental logo while others are just me getting all sketchy after a LONG day.

And now, for something completely different: another go at Uma Thurman.



I still can't get the deformation of the face right, but I've started trying to caricature more ordinary people, and I'm having better luck with that. Yesterday I tried doing goofy pictures of people based on photos found on DeviantART and in the Caricatures forum on the Drawing Board and it worked out much better. Which means that my next few posts will probably be filled with goofy people! Yaaay!

I'm thinking of going to a friend's barbecue this Sunday and drawing all the goofy people I find there. We'll see how many goofy people I can get from real life.

Addendum

Apparently, my LCD monitor at home will not catch big white blobs on a pale cream background, while my monitor at work will. How embarassing! I'll have to fix Uma Thurman up when I'm done raiding tonight.

From Life

I've tried taking the journal/sketchbook out to various locations to get some drawing done. I've discovered that I'm not actually all that great at capturing things like buildings and scenery -- but that's all right, because the whole point of this is to work on my weak spots.

The chimneys on top of the old Arts Building/Convocation Hall at the University (as seen from the 5th floor of the Business Building):



Otherwise known as "the sunburn sketch", since that's what I got in return for my efforts.

This is a picture of the east side of the University campus, as drawn from Victoria Hill across the river valley. The big stripy building is Tory.



The trees proved stupidly difficult to draw. I sketched this out while we sat around on Victoria Hill waiting for the Canada Day fireworks to start.

This was when I tried taking the journal out to dinner. Neil wasn't very happy about that. He thinks I get distracted when I draw, and that it's boring for him. All I managed to sketch out were a few people across the street from the restaurant: a couple ladies smoking, and a street performer who played two flutes using his nostrils.



Actually, I caught the street performer the next day when I was out shopping on Whyte. He also had a whistle in his mouth, and he played quite well!

Last of all, here are a couple things from the following day, when I went out to the Farmers' Market and discovered a medieval re-enactment society there holding a joust or exhibition or something.

First I tried drawing a suit of armour they had on display:



Unfortunately, the girls guarding it decided to move it around so I couldn't complete the sketch to my satisfaction. I sketched one of them out quickly while she wasn't looking:



She was wearing the best hat ever. It looked like a football with lilac flowers liberally glued to it.

The Bride of Meeting Doodles

There's only a few more left, I swear! Then I can get on with... posting doodles that *don't* come from meetings. Although actually, the ones from meetings are always weirder and more doodly, if you know what I mean. So they're probably a bit more interesting than my usual run-of-the-mill World of Warcraft doodles.

Here is an odd little version of Superman. He started with the nose and chin, actually. I'm not sure if it's an odd perspective or if he's just deformed.



And here is Harley Quinn, for the superhero Drawing Jam (actually, they are both jammy characters). I love the pose, but I can't get the perspective of the bed right to save my life.



I must have redrawn that bed a bazjillion times. The paper is starting to get thin from all the erasing (well, not really... but it would be if I were still drawing on inkjet paper like I did in my days as a cheap student). Tomorrow, I'm going to have Neil take a reference picture of me on the bed so that I can get this stupid, stupid background right. It's going to look good even if it kills me!

Meeting Doodles, the Sequel

Still on the all-day meeting pictures. There's a few more pages to go through, too. I guess I could just post them all at once... but then I'd have to clean them up all at once, and what would be the fun in that?

I started with a diamond-shaped face and it turned into this ugly mug:



And a plump lady turned out to have very Roman-esque taste in clothing. It's all those wrapped sandals I see on people -- they're giving me ideas.



Hopefully I will soon finish some of those digital paintings I've been working on -- I'm on the terrifically boring parts, and I'd really like to get them posted and move on to some of the other Drawing Jams. Illustration Friday has a theme up this week that I have a sketch for, I've got a couple more sad caricature attempts to share and I'm still working on World of Warcraft comics. Good thing I've got 2 months of vacation saved up, eh?

More Meeting Doodles

A couple more doodles from the all-day meeting.

Here's Gamer Girl and her cousin engaged in primal rivalry. She was kinda fun by herself but I always wondered what she'd look like in action. Well, "action" anyway:



And this is cartoon-me, contemplating my stomach-ache post-sunburn:

Meeting Doodles

Here is the first set of doodles from the all-day meeting.

This girl started off with a sketch of a hat, similar to one I own. I'm not sure where the rest of her came from, but here she is:



I don't like the way I did that drop-waisted dress, but I might fix it if/when I colour her.

This vapid lady came out of a departmental pep talk. I think she's just the sort of flat character that would look great done up in vector shapes:



And these are a couple random faces loosely based on some people who were at the meeting:



I changed the hairstyles and a few other features. I doubt they would be recognizeable as actual people.