November Girl

Got some new brush pens a few weeks ago and I've been experimenting with them.



I think I like them a lot better than just straight-out brushes. They're easier to control because (I think) the bristles are stiffer. I think I also like them better than dip-pens because they have a steady ink flow.

Anyway, that was just a quickie sketch of a girl.

Bok Choi!

I finally got a chance to try out my birthday present today (the watercolour travel set... not the bok choi).



I haven't really ever worked with watercolours before, and I don't normally paint, but this was a fun way to start. I set up the baby bok choi in the sunroom, which faces north, sketched out an outline and went to it. I'm not sure it turned out all that well, but I'm not sure it turned out all that poorly either. I guess I'll have to work with the watercolours a bit more to get the feel of them.

I guess it was interesting to work with something so predominantly... green. I can see myself having to buy a lot more green in the future.

Roughs

This is just a rough colour block-in of the Stabbity sketch I posted back in April. I do a lot of sketches I later intend to colour, but few of them ever get past this stage. I generally finish the face and hair and halfway through the clothes I end up with 20 other sketches that I'd like to colour. Photoshop gives one the potential for a great deal of detail, which makes it attractive to try and make parts of my work smoother and smoother, while avoiding other parts of the drawing. Pen and ink are fairly immediate, though. At some point the drawing is just done and you walk away from it.

I'm posting some of my roughs because a). I haven't had a chance to scan in some of the newer sketches and b). hopefully this will prompt me to finish colouring a few of these. I think they could be really good if I just got them done.

This Post is Too Boring to Have a Title

Still stuck in bi-weekly meetings. I don't know what this meeting fetish that people seem to have is all about, I'm just glad I don't have to go to more of them. I may have to start bringing toys or odd objects I can draw, because meeting rooms have got to be the most boring places on Earth.

If I ran the world, meeting rooms would have Lego. And Scrabble sets. Of course, if I ran the world everything would be done through e-mail and no one would need to meet unless they wanted to play Scrabble.

So out of the unending excitement of meetings comes...



...a coffee cup.

At least someone had the good grace to bring one so that I could draw it.

Vacation Leftovers

So there's a few vacation sketches that are sitting in my journal half-inked. I've been finishing them up very slowly. (Very... very... sloooowlyyy....) But hey -- they'll all end up here sooner or later!

This is a balcony I drew in Rome. It was across the street from our hotel window.



I wish I'd taken some time to get a reference photo. In fact, I wish I'd taken photos of all sorts of things in Italy, like sandwiches and the guy herding sheep on a motorcycle. Heck, I often sit on the bus and wish that I had a little camera in my head, like the skull gun in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. I'd love to record all sorts of odd little things about people that I don't feel comfortable just taking photos of outright. There was a girl on the bus a couple of weeks ago that had a purse made out of ties. There's wall climbers at the gym that occasionally do cool things as I jog by (the yoga-climbing lady comes to mind). There's even normal stuff I ride by on the bus that I know I won't come back to because it's halfway between stations and it's winter outside.

The best pictures are the ones you never get a chance to take, hey?

Something from the Vaults

Actually, it's something from the desk drawers at work. My desk is FULL of half-baked pictures going all the way back to 1999, when I started working here. This was one of several pictures I drew at around the time I was playing Baldur's Gate 2 or possibly Neverwinter Nights. I was going to colour them up and use them as player character pictures.



I think this one was a Mage or Cleric. I also had a rather cute Bard which I had just begun to colour, another Mage I didn't like as much, and a very evil-looking Dark Paladin that never got beyond pencils.

I should go through the vaults again, scan all the stuff that doesn't look like crap and rework all the stuff that does. My body of work, while not particularly great, is stupidly large. I should make some attempt to organize it.