Pub Sketches

Some people waiting for a table:

Pub Sketches

Girls at the Sugarbowl:

Pub Sketches

Technically not from the pub. I sketched these at the food court where I was killing some time before meeting up with Neil and heading to Friday Pub Night:

Sketches

I'm trying to make it a habit to go up to bed a half hour early and sketch in bed while warming up the covers. Then I can sleep without footwarmers and I get to exercise my sketching muscles like I used to in staff meetings.

Still Life

Trying to do more sketching to keep my pencil skills from completely withering away. My coffee table:

Sketches

Sketching: it's good for what ails you.

Colour Study

Bounce - Lagomorphosis

This became a splash image for my dA portfolio:

Barcelona Sketches - Pruning

Another sketch from my Barcelona journal:

I was sitting near the forum, watching this little landscaping truck creep along and two men ruthlessly prune these little trees. I assume that it being Spain, if you don't leave them looking like sticks you end up with a jungle in two weeks.

Life Sketches 21

Life Sketches 20

Life Sketches 19

Life Sketches 18

Life drawing from last week:

Life Sketches 17

Life drawing from last week:

Life Sketches 16

Last week's life drawing:

As an aside, I don't go to life drawing very often. In fact it's usually been much like people's New Year's resolution gym visits. You go twice in January and then don't show up for the next 11 months. But I recognized this pair of models from the first life drawing session I ever went to some years ago. I even posted the sketches to this very blog way back in 2007. I'm sure I'll see a lot more of the same models now that I'm going more regularly, but it's kinda nice to have this unexpected continuity five years later.

In other news, for someone who draws or paints every day I am seriously out of practice with the pencils. I never did much large-scale drawing on the newsprint and all but I feel like I ought to be able to move the dang pencil around with a little more control than this!

I guess I'll have to slot in an after-lunch sketching session a few days a week.

The Band - Rough

Looking at the places I want to send portfolios to, it occurs to me that I have too many fantasy images. A lot of children's magazines and books have to do with school, history, science or travel, not wizards or werewolves...

Bounce WIP

I'm working on a front page for my porkfolio:

Wink

A preliminary painted sketch for a pet portrait commission:

Scheherezade

An older Scheherezade holds her grandchildren spellbound with her tales:

Finally finished this one up!

University Sheep

My usual commuting route took me through the University experimental farm every day, and if I rode through at just the right time the sheep would be out and about.

The farm is slowly being developed so I guess I'll have to get my daily sheep fix elsewhere.

This painting started out as a total failure at palette knife technique, but I managed to fix it up a bit with my trusty bristle filbert.

Valentine Rose

His Neilyness bought me surprise roses on V-day! I usually celebrate Love My Bike day on the 14th because Valentine's is about two weeks after out anniversary and there's only so much romance I can take. Also, by mid-February I pine for my bicycles.

Still, one does not look a gift rose in the spines, and these lasted long enough for me to have a stab at painting them.

This was attempt #2. Attempt #1 lies underneath all that paint. After the utter fiddly failure of Attempt #1 I laid this out in Payne's Gray with my fat bristle filbert and glazed it afterwards with quinacridone red and a bit of yellow ochre.

Painting flowers is, oddly enough, not my favourite thing to do. I could do a right lovely job on it with pencil crayons but for some reason the paints just never seem to work out. Considering all that, though, I rather like how it turned out.

Barcelona Sketches - Boat

A little sailboat just off Rambla del Mar.

Life Sketches 15

And that's it for this week. See you again in another two.

Life Sketches 14

Life Sketches 13

Life Sketches 12

I think this sketch might be the best of this week's lot:

Life Sketches 11

Life Sketches 10

Life Sketches 9

Life Sketches 8

I'm planning to go to life drawing every two weeks for the next little while so there's going to be rather a lot of naked people here for a while.

Sabotage

Just a weird digital sketch. I took a photo of these odd swirly streetlamps in Montreal and wondered what they'd look like if they were giant glowing electronic eyes.

Sketches

Sketches

Sketches

Some very fast sketches using Pixelovely (a reference photo tool):

Montreal Sketches - Lotus Pond

Montreal's Botanical Garden is one of the best I've seen. My only regrets were that we didn't go early enough in the morning to see everything properly, and that my camera ran out of batteries so that I had to bug Neil to take all my reference photos.

This was a contemplative wooden footbridge in the Japanese garden, which was gorgeous.

Montreal Sketches - Square St. Louis

I've got all sorts of random sketches in varying states of finish wandering around my sketchbooks. Here's one from my Montral vacation back in 2010:

There were trees growing in my line of sight so I ended up having to improvise a few things. I also didn't have the time to finish most of the inking on-site so I did most of the inking from a reference photo I took (trees and all). Today I looked up the location of this house on Google Maps and you can see the whole thing clearly on Street View. I'll have to remember that the next time I drag a sketch back to the hotel room to finish inking!

Scheherezade - WIP

I did the rough sketch for this for a past CHOW. Scheherezade, now an older woman, can still keep a crowd of grandchildren spellbound with her stories.

Life Sketches 7

And that's it for last week's Life Drawing. I'm hoping to go again next week.

Life Sketches 6

I think this one might have been the best of the lot.

Life Sketches 5

Life Sketches 4

Life Sketches 3

Life Sketches 2

Life Sketches 1

Next up some pages from last week's life drawing.

Hourly Comic Day 2012 - Part 3

The last installment:

(Click for bigger)

And there it is! I guess I'll be doing the next one in 2014.

Hourly Comic Day 2012 - Part 2

The next installment.

(Click for bigger)

Hourly Comic Day 2012 - Part 1

Hey, it was Hourly Comic Day yesterday (as it is every year). And I did hourly comics as I seem to do on even-numbered years.

(Click for slightly bigger)

I'm going to try and finish up the rest of these by the end of today, you can continue stalking me here tomorrow and the next day. But it's been a busy couple of days -- I've been priming panels and baking bread and going to life-drawing... I feel like I've hardly sat down (although of course most of this was accomplished while sitting firmly on my butt.) There will be lots to post, but it may take me a while to prep it all.