Snow Monster

Another one for the Avalanche blog. Someone just asked me where I got the idea from, and I told him it just came to me. What I didn't tell him that I breathed, slept, ate and drank Calvin and Hobbes throughout my entire childhood.

Something different, but why?

I tried to abstract the figure in the drawing session on Friday, resulting in this sort of strange hybrid between cartoony and real. Even with all the things I changed, I was still sticking too close to the model.

I used to have teachers that would emphasize, "Draw what you SEE." But I can't help but feel like I need to break from that and draw what I percieve instead. Maybe that's what they were talking about? But when I just draw what I see, I end up with a cold, dead sculpture (sort of like this picture). What I feel like I ought to be doing is capturing the action and essence of what I see---not the literal measurements and forms, but the image that is alive in my brain. I keep trying to reinterpret the figure in these drawing sessions, but I'm just changing the forms and facts. What am I missing? Is it just in the pose? Magic?

I may not get it yet, but at least now I have a goal to accomplish.

Ice Cream

My wife tells me that for a blog named "Tasty Art," there are far too few tasty tidbits of actual food. So, I redirect my faithful readers to a recipe she made for homemade ice cream. It's very good, I think you should all try it.

So there you have it.

In honor of this actual-food-inspired post, I started a new picture. I was thinking of the Illustration Friday topic for this week,"Detach," so I might enter it there when I'm done.

*Edit*: Finished the picture and replaced it.

Cover, declared done

I'll probably make a few minor changes to this in a few days when it starts to bother me, but for now I've hit that wall of "I'm tired of working on this."

Yippy

Only had about 15 minutes to dedicate to the drawing session this morning, so this is what you get. Usually when I do these things I use col-erase pencils, and I've noticed that different colors have different ways of interacting with the paper. Vermillion is my current favorite (no, I'm not joking), because of the way you can layer it on top of itself almost endlessly to get darker and darker lines. Awful for shading, though.

Part 4: Recomposition and the Muddy Stage

I always hit this ugly point in a painting. All of my careful planning and thought appears to start unraveling at this point: I start seeing all sorts of new flaws in the image, like the problematic transition area between the ninjas and the pirates, and I begin to question my judgement.

Fortunately, experience tells me that the best way to get through this stage is to ignore the voices of discouragement and keep pressing forward. Sometimes the best thing to do is avoid the problem areas and continue with your favorite parts, waiting for inspiration to strike. Other times the best thing is to ask for help. This time, I'm going to do both. Help, anyone? What's bothering you and how should I fix it?

On a positive note, one decision I'm sure of now. That's whether the scene should be day or night. I started this out as a night scene, and I knew within about 15 minutes that it wouldn't work out. I initially agreed with everyone that said it should be night, but when I started painting it that way, I started to see all sorts of distracting problems caused by a relatively close spot light---particularly in how it spread the shadows over the figures. I think I'd have to start over and rethink the scene if I wanted the night thing to work. I'm glad people suggested night though, because I probably would have started with the day otherwise, but then always had a nagging doubt that maybe night would be better. Now I can move forward, knowing day is best.

That is, until Adam or someone else does a paintover and proves me embarrassingly wrong.

Part 3, Prancing Pirates

A very early progress shot of my revisions to the pirates.

I brought them closer together so they read as a unit and re-posed them so their limbs would create a sort of sunburst shape out from the Captain's head (but only as far as it felt natural).

I tried to make the characters feel stronger and more able, but also accentuated their differences in face and body type. I went a bit further with the caricature, so people hopefully won't be confused about whether the picture is supposed to be serious or not. I also think this will just make the image more fun, (even if it's just more fun for me to work on, you have to consider that as a factor too). I might find ways to simplify them more as I put color into them---just get them more streamlined so people aren't distracted by unnecessary details.

I'll talk about what I'm doing with the background and the ninjas in a later post. Right now, I'm tired and I'm going back to bed.

Also, you should stop typing without punctuation and capitalization. It makes you sound like a robot in my head when I read your sentences.

Part 2, or "What the crud is going on here?"

I'm starting to realize that I shouldn't have picked such a complex picture to start with. But like I said, I'm committed, so I'll stick with it and take it as far as I can.

The first question to ask yourself when doing a picture like this is, "Why am I doing it?" In my case, an art forum was having a drawing activity titled, "Pirates vs. Ninjas." Not a good enough reason to spend a lot of time on a picture, especially now that I'm going to spend MORE time on the it. I don't think I can get away from the fundamentally odd idea going on here without destroying the purpose of the "fix bad art" thingy, but I can try to make an image that has enough appeal to make people like looking at it even if they don't really understand it.

The second question is, what am I trying to communicate? At the time I only had a vague idea of something funny with singing pirates and confused ninjas, which is probably why the image is neither that funny, or really, all that clear either. So my new goal is, show why pirates are better than ninjas: musicality.

Now that I've got an answer to important question #2, it's time to figure out how to pull it off. I have a few ideas: 1-Emphasize the pirates, de-emphasize the ninjas. 2-Make the pirates look like they are having fun, and the ninjas are not. 3-Make the pirates look cooler, instead of a bunch of drama pansies (sorry to all drama pansies out there).

Third "question" (Not a question. More of an "issue."): Appropriate format and composition. This is the biggest problem with my original piece. I created a composition that would look great for a full-color image, but went with a completely wrong format. And since nobody who is not named Eric Canete should tackle a subject this complex in just black and white ink, I think I'll convert the image into a painting.

This has a lot of compositional problems to fix if I'm going to do a painting, but the first is value and lighting scheme (this will affect how I compose and design the characters and background, as you will see later). I did a few thumbnails to test a couple ideas.





Full daylight: pretty good, but the pirates really get lost against the bright background. Making the sky a darker blue might fix that problem, maybe.






Sunset: Very dramatic. But totally wrong for what I want to accomplish.








Night: Better than the other two, might work.








Day with modified background: Also good.




I'm having a hard time deciding between the last two. I even did a quick color pass for each to see if that sorted anything out:

The night scene is very theatrical, but the day scene allows for nice color. Chime in if you think I should go with one over the other.




Next post: Revising the character designs, and how writing sentences without capitalization or punctuation makes you sound like a robot.

Fixing Old Art, Part 1

I keep resolving to post more, but the resolution barely survives past the post where I make the resolution. So, this time I'm going to commit myself to a series where I show how I would improve the cruddy art I did years ago.




Here's the image I'll start with, something weak from years, and years, and years ago. Or, 2003.

















I know, some of you will look at this and think "What's wrong with it?" Others may be thinking, "Only five years ago you were doing this garbage?" To both parties I say, it's not really that bad, and some parts are working well, but it's both planned and finished poorly. We'll see in time whether my improvements will be actual improvements.


There, now I'm committed.

In other news, a couple months ago I got whooping cough. It's not as fun as it sounds, I haven't whooped once (I'm a little sad about that). I didn't go to the doctor until it was obvious something was really wrong with me, and although he gave me antibiotics, the damage was already done. Apparently, the coughing part of whooping cough can sometimes last for up to a year after the bacteria is dead. Unfortunately, the coughing part is a lot worse than you'd imagine---constant coughing fits, difficulty breathing, and in my case, a runny nose that makes the coughing worse. So when you're wooing your love interest over a plate of manicotti at Olive Garden, and some guy is coughing constantly in the next booth, messing up the romantic ambiance? Yeah, that's me. Sorry. Maybe it will help to think about how good my wife is for putting up with it all.

On a positive note: These days, two hours of uninterrupted sleep feels awesome, and I'm ecstatic every time the doctor finds a medication that gets my throat to relax, even if it means I have to use some kind of strange drug paraphanelia while I'm at work, closing my door and crouching in a corner with a guilty look on my face if anyone comes in to sate their curiosity. Anyway, it's nice how perspective can help your attitude, making you grateful for things like being able to breathe. And I can use the time I'm awake at night to work on posts for this blog.


The moral of the story: Get your booster shots. I think the Tetanus booster has a vaccine for whooping cough in it, and it lasts for about ten years.

Work in Progress, Just for fun

It's been a week, so I figured I'd better post something. This isn't done yet, but at least it's something to look at.

Good drawing session

I'm pretty happy with how this one turned out, considering it only took an hour.

Coloring

From Joe Olson's lines.

Grayscale

Thank goodness for the Avalanche drawing session---it's the only thing keeping me drawing things outside of regular work these days. This one is about an hour of work. I did a body too, but I thought the image worked better cropped.

Friday Painting

I wish I could post more, but I'm so busy at work right now. But here's something I did in our figure drawing session. It was meant to be a caricature, but I think I ended up normalizing him too much as I painted over the drawing.

Another quick caricature

From our figure drawing session. This one look closer to 15 minutes, then I spent a few adding in the highlights after I scanned it in.

Meager offering

Sorry for so few posts lately. I've been extremely busy at work, and we've been in the process of moving at home (we've actually been in the new house for a couple weeks now, but there are always so many projects after you move).

I could only dedicate ten minutes to the figure drawing session this morning, but the model had such an awesome face I just had to exaggerate it a little.

A tribute. . .

. . .to my favorite faces on our local NBA team. I wanted to spend more time refining the likenesses, but I decided I'd better finish it quick since the Jazz aren't looking so great against the Lakers right now. The players depicted here are (left to right) Carlos Boozer, Mehmet Okur, Andrei Kirilenko, and Deron Williams. I thought Deron's likeness would be easier to capture because he looks like a baby monkey, but he ended up being the hardest one---I'm still not happy with how he turned out.

War Machine

A quick image for the Avalanche blog. I would like to spend more time on this, maybe later.

Choo-choo-chrain

A collaboration with my five-year-old son, Abraham.

Friday drawing session

This one was turning out pretty good, I just ran out of time. This was about 90 minutes, all digital.

Drawing session and Ace in Action concept

I was experimenting with color in this morning's drawing session, but I could never get the skin tones to work quite right. I feel okay about the picture anyway, but just in case it's not enough I'll include some conceptual development from Chicken Little: Ace in Action. This was the original design for Abby's fighter, before they changed it to a hovercraft. I wanted her ship to mix the trendy feminine Volkswagon Beetle-esque look with the military purpose of her fighter.

Friday drawing session doodlery

Some drawing session paintings just work, and others I decide aren't worth posting by themselves. The smart part of my brain says that means I shouldn't be posting them now either, but the stupid part of my brain hopes that nobody will notice even though I'm drawing attention to their deficiencies. I do like lots of things about these though, despite their various problems.

Cinderella's father

For those who were guessing, the version I'm noodling around with is Prokofiev's Cinderella. My wife and I went to see the ballet here a while back, and I've been obsessed with the idea of fleshing out a storybook or animated version ever since. What I find most interesting about Prokofiev's version is not only its unique variation on the story, but the sort of wistful tension that exists throughout the music, even in the playful and happy parts. I haven't found an appropriate style to match the mood of the music, but I'm working on it.

In Prokofiev's Cinderella, her father is still alive, but he's too old and broken in spirit to prevent the abuse she suffers. I like to picture that his weakness comes only partly because of age---so my idea is that he never quite recovered from the grief of his first wife's death, and the oppressive nature of his second marriage has worn him down completely. I wanted him to look like a lord or duke of some sort, someone whose family would be invited to the Prince's ball, and whose moderate wealth would attract the attention of an ambitious lady with spoiled daughters. I tried to reflect all these ideas in the design of his face.

Sorry the colors are so muddy, but I did it quickly (and figured it worked for someone who had lost the will to live anyway).

Character design doodles

I wanted to give people a peek at how I develop my character designs---lots of drawings, writing ideas in the margins, thinking about how to tie the look of the character to his/her personality and purpose, developing the costume designs, etc.

This is for a personal project I'm working on (mostly for fun). 5 points for anyone who guesses the project, 100 points for guessing which version I'm doing.

Avalanche drawing session

I went to the drawing session this morning and tried to apply some of the things I've been learning lately from the tutorial sessions by Adam Ford and Dave McClellan. I painted this almost entirely with Painter's "Loaded Palette Knife," because I wanted a different effect than in my usual paintings.