Day after Christmas...

Here's a bizarre doodle I've had to draw 3 times over the life of my truck.



Ya see, somethin' broke in the drum brake assembly of my rear passenger wheel. My dad and I JUST replaced the brake shoes and hardware kits on both rear wheels over the summer. But somethin' broke, and miscellaneous pieces were rollin' around squealing in the brake drum for a couple days. The day after Christmas we fixed it, but brake drums are completely asinine in structure - they require a drawing so we know the order in which all the pieces and springs go together. It's a delicate house of cards with all the parts holding on to each other with springs and cables. The whole mechanism floats around and it hardly seems like a precision piece of equipment that's responsible for your brakes.

And so, I guess that's why they invented disc brakes.

Christmas card

For Christmas I made a mini Santa card for the team at work. I had an original plan of printing the characters out on vellum with the BG printed on nice matte paper then layering the two. The BG had a white silhouette of the characters so the vellum print would be clearly visible on top. Just a neat separation I thought. Well after fighting with the printer to accept the vellum, it eventually worked, but all the detail was lost in the imperfect parchment. I had to bail on the idea and just went with a nice matte print.

Here are my doodles and the final.

Hope everyone had a Happy Festivus!

INSPIRATION

Just a couple mutie bros max chillin'...

I have a lot to say...again... and so I'm gonna try really hard to explain the inspiration behind this image and hopefully not offend anyone.

I don't necessarily do a lot of superhero art, but one day I was like, "Yeah, I'm gonna draw me some Colossus because he's one of my favorites." So I start with some searches on Deviant to get the juices flowing. "Maybe something inspiring will pop up." I say to myself.

I should let you know, I've only recently been lulled into Deviant Art's world. I dunno why, but I guess I never really gravitated to it before. Never even really browsed it. Maybe I figured I'd seen plenty of Pickachu fanart in "art school" already... But here's the thing: turns out, Deviant is a whole COSMOS of art. The GOOD, the BAD, and every UGLY fetish in between. Even .SWFs are postable on Deviant. And so you say to me, "...yeah no kiddin' ya rube." But here's the thing again: When you're presented with page after page of Colossus art, dozens of hundreds of thumbnails, something has GOT to get your attention somehow. A cool pose? Bright colors? Stellar inks? A great style? What image deserves your precious mouse click and several consecutive seconds of your attention???

Well for me, these did. Don't laugh. My eyes stuck to these from a mister "bitBEE" and I actually saved them down. Sure, ya might say Colossus has seen better days, and I'd be lying if I didn't say initial reaction was "wow...really???" but this is where my search ended. I kept starring. Which is more than I can say for some masterful Alex-Ross-ish render of Colossus in the thumbnail right next to these.

Certainly there are still many things to take into account like age, talent, tools, but it came down to decisions. What I like about art and animation, what engages me, is the decision making process. So every stroke and shape and color choice was something I was vastly more interested in here than with other images. How does this artist see things? How does his brain come to these conclusions? And then I think about my childhood and how much fun it was to draw. How completely decisionLESS drawing was back then. I could hold a number 2 in my fist and draw you a scene of warring robots while thinking about spaghettios.

I'm jealous of that. I'm jealous of what these "Colossi" represent here. I'll NEVER be able to return to those times - to that effortless decision making. ...well, I guess I COULD try mentally, but it might be hard to sustain being a commercial artist.

And this isn't to sound all depressed about "good ol' days" or whatever. I still enjoy drawing and making stuffs. I think as we all grow up (somewhat), we just embrace the decision making process. Certainly it's tough at times, and unfortunately ya just can't go back home.

So that's what motivated me. "Let's have fun making some DECISIONS!" I said to myself. And I started doodling.

For whatever reason, I wasn't content with ONLY Colossus so Wolverine seemed like a natural runner up. I'm not a big comic nerd any more so I had to look up the specifics of their "classic" costumes. In doing so, I came across some images of X-MEN cards!

Dude! Do you remember these!? I had the whole set! They were all drawn by Jim Lee who was a GOD in my eyes at the time. So I immediately knew I wanted to lift the same sorta card motif here.

Here's my rough layout.

And here's the start of my colors. The black inks I did in Flash and brought into PS. And right around this time I remember really liking the black lines and the flat colors. I kinda wanted to end it right there. Though I pushed on with self-color lines and some brush work knowing I could always go back to flats. I'm kinda bummed where Wolvie's head and elbow land on Colossus. Weird sorta tangents and his head is completely inside the arm silo. Eh, one of those things ya don't really think you'll notice once ya start working in the computer, "oh it'll be fine..." but in the end ya sorta do notice and so ya say, "oh well - there's always next year..."

That's about all for this episode. I gotta go thank bitBEE now!

UPDATE!

Over the holiday break I stole back a buncha my childhood drawings from my folks. For your enjoyment, and my embarrassment, I'm posting a couple notebook scribblings from '92. That woulda made me 13. That middle one of Colossus is straight from the Jim Lee cards again.

Oh those poor feet on Colossus. Like someone smashed them with a hammer...

Stay Classy.

Here's somethin' new!



Let me start at the beginning...

A friend shared this color challenge meme from Deviant Art with me. The object was just to make an image in each of the squares using ONLY the 5 colors for each of those squares. An exercise in restriction in other words. Cool.


I've been on an "Anchorman" kick lately so I thought I'd draw busts of the characters, work that out of my system, and try to match up appropriate colors from the meme. 2 birds with one stone...so to speak. The milk carton (not that it's an actual character...) gravitated to the primary colors immediately. All other characters I kinda just had to make work as best I could. It was also about defining lines and shapes in their faces - defining lighting for me too. Then it was kind of a layout exercise as I tried to assemble the busts to read well...enough. Then I retrofit those busts into the meme. It was all sorts of exercises!


And here're some horrible, horrible, scribbles as I was trying to work out the characters. Also, I've listed the order in which I drew the characters and the number of times I drew them before I felt satisfied taking them digital:





Brick - 9 drawings
Ron - 15
Brian - 4
Champ - 3
Veronica - 1
milk - 1

Just kinda interesting to note that some drawings or characters can click better/faster than others.

SDCC 2011 wraps up

Another year, another round of love! Thanks to all who stopped by, looked, pointed, laughed, scowled, bought, talked, and even frowned (I feel like a jackass for selling out of my Mega Man prints when there were still a couple interested folks!).

The show is always fun despite the rumors that always seem to float around about location changes, price increases, hostile TV take overs, etc. ;-) I hope to keep going and meeting new folks. And I always come back home with renewed ideas. New artistic hopes and goals. A new book? Themed prints? Animation??? Who knows?!!?

Here's my pal Dave manning the table. No new books, but we tried out a variety of prints this year. Every year is an experiment!



Thanks again! See ya next year!

SDCC 2011 print roll

Another summer and another con is almost here...

Dave and I will be back behind the table (F5) fielding all sorts of questions, comments, requests, job offers, photo opportunities, portfolio critiques, awkward furry moments, etc. :-)

We'll have a VERY limited run of prints this year. Some old, some new, some old with new colors. Here's the lot I'm bringing, but we're aiming to wrap up Saturday night so like I say, I only gots a couple of each.



Should be a good time as always. I wanna see some friends, eat out every night, and soak up some nerdly inspiration!

Point and say "Hi" if you walk on by our way!

Mega Man on my wall

...that last post reminds me:





It's done. No other game deserves to be immortalized on my wall in legos more than Mega Man 2 on the original NES. I broke my NES playing this game so much. When blowing in the cart wasn't doing the trick any more, my mom had to mail my NES to NOA (Nintendo of America) and they had to fix it. The wait was unbearable. I musta asked every day if it showed up yet when I was picked up from school. There was much rejoicing on the day when the mailman returned my NES and Mega Man 2 fully restored.

This is just a tribute…

Mega Man Tribute Book! YES.

Udon just gave the official go ahead to post contributing artworks featured in their latest tribute book. I'm super looking' forward to some sweet-ass robo art at ComiCon in…just a few weeks! HOLY SHEEP.

The official low-down reads like this:

MEGA MAN TRIBUTE LIMITED EDITION HARDCOVER
- The book is premiering at the San Diego Comic-con at the UDON booth (#5037), July 20-24
- For fans not attending the show, you can preorder the book at UDONstore.com (click here!)

MEGA MAN TRIBUTE SOFTCOVER
- The standard softcover edition is also available for preorder on amazon.com (click here!)

And so here's my attempt at art:

For whatever reason, this composition plays tricks on me. It looks fine I suppose, then I flip it and it looks largely asymmetrical and weird. …then not. …then it settles in my brain and looks fine. Then I flip it back and it's asymmetrical and weird again. Bah, whatever ;-)

I set out to use traditional media exclusively here and draw/paint as much by hand. I drew MM's head with graphite on bristol board trying to eyeball a symmetrical head in the process. Next I "inked" it with some thick EBONY charcoal pencil. I had no idea what I was doing. I wanted to add color with oil bars but it's like I was combining control with chaos. The pencil line was fairly tight but the thick bars are meant for spontaneous painting of sorts. I ended up masking off every "zone of color" within the line work using removable tape. Then went to town filling in blocks of warm colors with the oil bars. A convoluted process for sure. The white outline and the pixely squares at the top were masked off as well. Over a couple nights, as the different colors would "dry" I'd add highlights of lighter colors. When it was all done, I asked my sister to snap a high-rez photo of it since it was too big for my scanner and I wouldn't want oil residue all over the glass. Once in the computer I started fooling more and more with whiter highlights in Photoshop, a shadow pass, adjust a few things here and there, etc. It was definitely a moment of weakness having to fall back on the computer, but I did think all the adjustments were improvements. I'm happiest with the details of imperfection that the raw pencil and ink could only bring. Flecks of bare paper poking through, some blue col-erase in his eyes, a wobbly line, everything has real texture. I'm just sayin' - it feels good to do some REAL crappy art :-)

In the end, it's all about process - what I enjoy most about art and animation. I had no idea how to make pencil, and oil bars, tape, a photo, and photoshop, all work together and it wasn't my initial intention, but that's what happened. In fact...

"That just happened."

Goldblum

Some recent inspiration drove me to draw Jeff Goldblum this weekend. I started messing with "object drawing" in Flash when I did the FIGHT! animation a few posts back. Flash CS3 instated an "object drawing" button in Flash that makes every stroke you lay down an object. They're essentially "groups" but they call 'em objects because I think it relates to Illustrator and how everything you do in Illustrator is an "object". With this mode on and with a brush color of low opacity, you can effectively "build up" your line work like you would in Photoshop. Stroke after stroke will thicken the opacity and your line becomes more solid. Nothing new to artists, but it's sorta new to Flash and not something all that explored in Flash.

The downsides are plenty: tablet pressure doesn't control opacity in Flash, there is a selection box that always appears around each object, Flash's brushes are "loose" and the "ink" feels uncontrollable at times to put it nicely, there have been 8 brush sizes and 9 brush shapes since the dawn of time in Flash and there is NO way to make a short cut to adjust them. ...basically you should be using Photoshop or Painter.

The upside is that I think it can be handy for animation actually. Roughing in lines and building them up coupled with a timeline and onion skinning can help the traditional feel of animation in Flash. Far from perfect, but it's somethin' to rough in some keys.

Anyway, here's a time lapse of me and Goldblum using the object drawing method in Flash. I think it's worth pointing out that I drew him 5 times (the timeline sorta shows I'm on the fifth frame...) before I even felt warmed up. Then once I got close to done I questioned everything and felt I could push everything more. Never happy, but it was fun dammit!

If you see me on a daily basis you might get this...