I’ve moved to the next stage of painting. Not finished, but getting there. Right now I’m not happy with the focus so I may try to spotlight the foreground a little more with some lighting effects. Also the colors are a little to bright so I’ll need to do something about that. Even though I started with an overall cool underlying hue (blue), I want to make the image visually consistent with the first image that had a yellow underpainting.
I’ll admit that I’m bitter towards football. My deep-seated frustration stems mostly from the incosiderate co-opting of the television by my older brother and dad. My precious Saturday Morning cartoons instantly replaced by tiny, helmeted figures inexplicable ramming into each other, punctuated by long moments of inactivity and faceless voices discussing who-knows-what. Not nearly as important as the Orbots, Thundercats, Looney Tunes, heck, even Scooby-Doo reruns.
That said, I’m involved in a project that necessitated some research into the murky world of football. It’s actually a little more interesting than I thought. The history of the game is fascinating and demonstrates how any good and enjoyable activity can be run into the ground once politicians, adviertisers, and bottom lines get involved.
I’m still upset about the cartoons though.
Several months ago I posted a digital illustration of a fox in a henhouse. A civic-minded citizen in Durham, NC thought it would be a great image to help protest the environmentally questionable actions of a developer in her county. Happy for my illustration to be put to good use, I gave Melissa the thumbs up and she had some t-shirts printed up (one of which I now proudly posess).
So far the count is Civic-minded citizens 1, wascally weal-estate wodents nil.
Keep up the good work Melissa and crew.
I’m working on a stop motion projcct for a friend of mine. Right now we’re working on set and character designs. Before I started to sketching character concepts I wanted to do a little research sketching. I went down to my local library and got a stack of books on American and European costumes from the 19th to the mid-20th century.This is a collection of some of the clothing samples I sketched (ink, watercolor, pencil, water-soluble stabilo-marker, and a little bit of Photoshop).
Scanning pencil doesn’t always produce good results (especially when I’m rushing just to get the pages scanned), but while working on this collection I had one of those epiphanies: the humble pencil is the rock star of drawing tools. The range of values and marks that it can create, it’s portability, economy, and reception by most drawing surfaces make it the most versatile in the artistic arsenal. But one thing I really appreciate about the pencil in the context of a sketch is its power of conveying possibility—several lines can be lightly roughed in to imply a nearly infinite number of directions the drawing or idea could take without necessarily committing to, or singling one out.
This ability is certainly able to be mimicked in the digital realm by adjusting the opacity of a drawn line. Over on her blog, Emma posted a drawing that combines her strong sense of story and motion with a loose sketch style (if you haven’t visited her site, go take a peek).
Mike Kunkel actually just scans and darkens his pencil work rather than ink it, retaining his organic, animation-influenced line.
It’s cheap. It’s versatile. It can hold your hair in a bun*. THE PENCIL.
*Hair not included.
I scanned some Kirby art that I had in the Jack Kirby Collector #46 published by TwoMorrows. I wanted to give Illustrator CS4’s new blob brush tool a test and I thought Kirby’s art, with it’s bold lines and chunky blacks would be a good fit.
My less-than-accomplished inking skills notwithstanding. The blob tool lent a bold line to the King’s work. With few exceptions, all of the foreground art was accomplished with the Blob brush and Eraser tools. I use a Wacom Graphire3 tablet which doesn’t have the range of sensitivity that it’s Intuos siblings possess.
If someone out there in the blogosphere has a more sensitive tablet and the time, I’d like to hear your thoughts on digital inking with the blob brush. Photoshop is a favorite of many, but the razor edge and scalability of vectors calls like a siren.
I popped Braveheart into my computer and began sketching. Initially I was just going to knock out some quick gestural and shape sketches, but when I started drawing the goat and then the young William’s face, I began working with value.
I used HB and 2B pencils, just what was within arms length at the time, though I wish now I would have gotten up to get a 4 or 6B. The king (bottom left) and burial scene (bottom) were excercises with subtractive drawing with my Magic Rub eraser (again, a kneaded would have been handy for some of the spot highlights that the dulled corners of the ‘Rub couldn’t make).
I gave it a conté crayon tint photoshop when I scanned it.
One thing I’m proud of, the right eye of the princess was initially misdrawn. The face looked horrible. I was about to just shrug it off since the eye looked nice by itself. Instead, I gulped, erased the eye and redrew it. The result is much better. Personal quality control is the best kind.
. . . but as it turns out, I’m actually doing the impossible: getting my first live content on the interweb in about 2 years. Hello to my new SketchCrawl comrades. This art blog is mostly due to seeing your amazing stuff and thinking, “hey, nifty”.
I’m committing to at least one weekly update with at least one image (baby steps). I’m looking forward to it.
—Nate
