Students Inked

Yarrrgh! Getting back to doing a weekly comic means more drawing with fewer results. Yeesh.

I ended up inking my students, because the pencil smears badly in my journal.






Plus, a simple sketch of a lady I drew up earlier in the week and inked today:



I'll post a link up to my comics next month, assuming I have continued being productive. There's nothing worse than advertising a comeback, only to do a couple strips and then lose interest for another year.

Obsessive-Compulsive

Here's a little comic inspired by my DeviantArt gallery:



Ever get the feeling that a large chunk of your pageview count is you hitting the reload button again and again? To see if someone's replied to/commented on something? I think the Internet makes me obsessive-compulsive. :D

To people who read my old comics: #58 is on the drawing table. That is all.

Students

I did some sketching in the Student Union Building on campus a few weeks ago. A couple pencil sketches:





and a more stylized guy in ink:



I think I'm definitely a bigger fan of pencil than ink. It took me a long time to not have my inks look completely terrible. On the other hand, pencil just doesn't scan well... so what can one do?

Keep Your Tusks Clean!

I think this might be it for the orc:



And I finished her up just in time for my dental appointment tomorrow! Yay!

Of course, once I took the picture into the bathroom I noticed I'd completely screwed up her jaw. /sigh. And now I'll have to look at it forever, thinking "curse you stupid jaw!"

The moral of this story is -- look at your art in a mirror BEFORE you ink it! Yet more good advice I never actually follow myself.

Orc Flats

Orc, flatted with markers:



And now, for some pencil crayons.

Preview

Stupid comic. How can 4 panels take me 4 months to do? I mean, seriously! I'm like a cautionary tale against perfectionism.

In the meantime, for your enjoyment, here's... panel #2!



Also, it is Angst Thursday again. And I am sad. :(

Zug Zug!

Here's the start of my next masterpizza:



At some point (probably around the time of my last dental appointment), I was thinking "what I need in the bathroom is one of those kid-friendly dental posters, with monkeys reminding me to floss my teeth." But because I'm a big geek, what I am actually making is a little orc to put in my bathroom.

The Horde says: keep your tusks clean! Zug zug! :D

Girls and Dragons

Here's a few rough sketches I've done this year that I haven't had a chance to upload before.

A charming exotic dancer (pardon the super-sketchy hands -- I plan to finish her sometime):



A not-so-charming naga fortune-teller:



Little Red Riding Hoodie, carrying groceries to her grandma across the wild urban landscape:



And a couple of dragons in ballpoint pen that I sketched out at work today:



This one still makes me laugh:



Neil says "You'd think dragons would have gotten used to 'incidents' in bathrooms."

Figure Studies

I managed to make it out to my first life-drawing session last night. The weather had turned nasty -- we were in the midst of a minor snowstorm. The person running the session hadn't expected many people to show, but there were about 10 of us there.

I'm not sure what I was expecting. Nude people, certainly. While I've drawn nudes before, they have always been of people I knew and felt comfortable with. This was my first time working in a more professional setting. I wondered whether I'd feel comfortable with it. I shouldn't have worried. I was far too busy working my ass off for the next three hours to notice anything. I did worry about whether all the other people in the class were awesome artists and I was just some jumped-up, self-taught art monkey. But of course people varied in skill level, style, and even what skill they were concentrating on (one guy was only working on faces). So I fit right in. I'll feel a lot better about going to the next class, I think.

I tend to work with pencils (charcoal -- so! messy!), and I tend towards the harder end of the pencil spectrum.

But anyway, here's a few scans from yesterday's session. We had two models, so the gestures were a bit longer than they would usually be, I think.

3-minute poses:



5-minute pose:



15-minute pose:



The better of the two 30-minute poses:



And the last pose of the evening, a 10-minute pose:



I think that last one turned out much more lively than the first few sets. I found the faces to be quite difficult to draw in general because of the way the light fell on them. All in all, though, I was quite pleased with my work once I got warmed up. I'm sorta looking forward to the next class... in that way that one looks forward to a rewarding but challenging workout.