Appliance World

Ballpont, rapidograph ink and watercolors. Color added at Panama Red.

Meanders with Oleanders

The oleander bush outside the window was the jumping off point for this one—ink and watercolor. I took it into PS and messed around with textures, layers, masks, and shadows/highlights.

Outdoor fun

Ink with Photoshop coloring and textures. IF the composition looks lopsided, it’s because I had to lop off a bunch of the scanned image since it was blurry. C’est la vie.

Academy Thumbs

A few years ago I was able to take a drawing class at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. It was a great experience for me. Even though my undergrad studies were in Graphic Design, I never got to do as much drawing as I would have liked. Taking a 10-hour-per-week, five-week course was a shot in my creative arm.

I was cleaning out some closets and found these marker exercises. I think the idea was to play with layering the marker grays and think of different scenes, perspectives and camer angles.

Green Ghost Classic

Looking through old sketchbooks I ran across several 1-page Green Ghost stories I drew 4 or 5 years ago. I wrote out the script and then did some thumbnails before doing the full-sized pages. All the inking was done with sharpie markers. Not archival I know. I was going for clear storytelling and speed rather than perfection of line. Usually it’s the idea of a story that is most appealing and too much artistic pressure can kill some of the joy of drawing.

It was a good decision. I was able to crank the pages fairly quickly for a self-imposed deadline. There are a few things that I notice construction-wise that are a little nutty, some odd tangents, but the gags are pretty straightforward (except for the last one, the punchline of which is mysteriously absent—where’s the ON button?).

Which one do you like best (or hate the least)?

Action Sketch 1

A few years ago I shot a few rolls of film depicting some of my relatives in customized action poses. It was fun sketching thumbs and having them act out scenes for my future reference. They prints  have been in a photo album, largely unused… until now! Enter the new category “Action Sketches”. Here’s the first one done in Photoshop in under 5 minutes.

Green Rooftop

I’m going to refine this when I get the time: either Vector or hand-inked I haven’t decided yet.

The Premiere

I have a lot of stories bouncing around in my head. I usually try to jot them down immediately in a nearby sketchbook for later development. Sometimes they become a poem, a song, a short story, an illustration, or comic. In this case, I created a storyboard for a short film (could live action, could be animated). I had alot of fun working on this idea. It has a wide range of emotions and some nice acting moments. It works great in pantomime. It’s also the first time I’ve used a female protagonist. Enjoy.

The Sarge

Tooling around with a story idea, I sketched a few versions of Sarge. I like this one soI thought I’d walk through some digital inking, coloring, and texturing. For those of you with military knowledge, the uniform is a total fantasy based on poorly remembered war movies and cartoons (mind you own beeswax.) Real research to follow.

Natural Inks

Yesterday a friend invited us over to pick blackberries. I ended up sketching some flowers and plants in her backyard. I was promptly loaded up with clippings from a variety of plants to take home with me. One flower (whose name I don’t know) had petals with a vibrant, nearly flourescent blue-purple. I boiled some of them to make a thin ink. I also made some 2 strengths of Blackberry ink and used some of my morning coffee to round out my pallete.

Sketching a quick composition of some leaves from a Bleeding Heart plant, I just began layering the drawing from light to dark with my natural pigments. I did add a little baking soda to the various mixtures since I don’t know what the pH values were and I didn’t want any acids eating into my sketchbook paper too soon (I have no idea if my logic is sound from an archival perspective, but I know that coffee is acidic so a base should neutralize it , right?).

I mixed linseed oil with the darker blackberry ink so it would stick to my chop.

I also scanned some negative washed paintings of the actual Bleeding Heart leaves that were my model as well as scanning the leaves themselves. I took those and messed around in Photoshop using various blending modes to get the final composition.

Below is the final composition followed by the 4 painting stages:

1. Coffee
2. Petals
3. Blacberry thin
4. Blackberry dark