Sketches

Sketchbook Saturday #2: Tennis Sketches

Posted on August 9, 2014 Leave a Comment

We rather enjoy watching the tennis whenever it comes on TV! I also like to pull out my sketchbook and see if I can draw the players while they’re playing. It’s a tricky challenge but much like gesture drawing it encourages me to focus on the main movement and lines of the figures in order to capture the essence of the action.

Some of these sketches are rather old but I’m quite pleased with the way they came out. There are a few scribblings here that aren’t based on tennis players – when I was getting frustrated at not getting opportunities to draw things then I’d just doodle other stuff.

Sketchbook Saturday #1

Posted on August 3, 2014 Leave a Comment

This post is a little late as we went out to dinner, then spent much longer hanging around than anticipated. I fell asleep on the couch and everyone thought that was a good excuse to play a few hands of poker while I was non-responsive.

Here are some recent little scribbles, experimenting with a couple of things. I’d been watching Revolutionary Girl Utena for the last couple of weeks and wanted to experiment a bit with hair!

This first picture is kinda based on some Utena fan art I found, but it’s also inspired by recent depictions of the AVCon mascot Ayvee. I’m also trying to decide on a new paint colour to add to my collection, and I experimented with paint from a sample sheet to paint the hair. I still haven’t decided on new colours to get! if you want to make a suggestion, the Daniel Smith watercolour range that I use has an extensive offering. I’m looking to get another blue and maybe some more earth tones. New colours are a tricky thing!

Some more experiments with hair and a frilly outfit kinda also inspired by Utena. Last week I bought a new white gel pen, which is a little more effective for applying highlights and covering inking errors than the old pen I used. Leaving the whites of the paper unblemished is always the most striking and effective way to depict highlights but the gel pen works great in a pinch.

Smash Brothers

Posted on July 2, 2014 Leave a Comment

For some months I’ve been meaning to start work on a massive poster with the entire Smash Bros cast. Of course with new characters being announced regularly for Smash 4, I’ve had a great excuse to not start that work. Besides, the prospect of fitting some 50 characters or so into a single image terrifies me.

Still, I needed an idea for something to scribble today, so I got started on the Smash Bros. What was going to be the massive poster has instead turned into the original 12. Much more reasonable. There’s a bunch of white space though because I thought I’d need to fit four times as many characters in!

If I was to paint this it’d need a lot of refinement first. But it was a fun exercise in seeing who I could draw from memory (Mario, Link, Samus, Pikachu, Fox, Ness) and who I needed to look up reference for (Captain Falcon, Kirby, DK, Yoshi, Luigi, Jiggly). It surprised me because I’ve never drawn Samus before but I have drawn some of the others. I guess part of it was that I started out scratching things in very low detail but decided to be more detailed for later characters.

Sketchbook Pages.

Posted on August 28, 2012 Leave a Comment

I’ve just put up what should have been Saturday’s post, so check it out here. I might have just used up my “stuff from art classes” content so who knows what’ll be up tomorrow… I’m sure I’ll find something.

Anyhoo, to today’s post. Here is possibly the most populated page in any of my sketchbooks, ever.

Creation

Posted on August 25, 2012 1 Comment

This piece was the major homework assignment from my life-drawing classes last year.

: The piece started in class with a drawing done from observation…

: We were invited to introduce a sense of context to the scene, drawing from the surroundings of model. However we were also encouraged to make the image as busy as possible, so many of the objects and surroundings here aren’t actually drawn the way they were found in the classroom. The pot plants, for example, came from the other side of the room.

: The model took up another pose and we were asked to redraw her in the image. She didn’t have to fit in the perspective or context of the scene. Some of my classmates drew the new pose over the old one. We had opportunities to add a third pose as well however I felt my image was sufficiently busy at this point.

: The image was divided into nine sections and we were given a few minutes to work up each section individually. It was interesting to see the works evolve by bringing each section to different levels of polish.

: For homework, we were asked to cut up our image and then enlarge each piece. The desired effect was to introduce some slippage and distortion.

: The new pieces would then form the basis of our work. We laid out the pieces in ways that would allow for interconnecting lines or concepts to be drawn across the image.

: It took me a few tries to settle on something I felt comfortable with…

: Eventually I felt that trying to fit all nine pieces in wasn’t serving me well so I took a few out. Here are my first attempts to link the pieces together and pull together a concept. The drawing process is pretty stream-of-conscious from here…

: Feeling the image was top heavy, I turned it upside down and continued…

: Here I introduce a bit of depth with black gauche. The image was pretty chaotic at this point as I hadn’t got in my head what I was doing yet. By blacking out a busy section I was able to get some of the clutter out of the way and concentrate on building up shapes and form.

: The white paint steps in here!

: This step feels much more cohesive than the previous ones. I’ve worked up a good range of tones and it feels like this has some real depth and flow to it. A a little yin-yang symbol appears. It’s a little scribble that I make while I try to remind myself to stay on task. I don’t really have a theme for the image yet, so it’s an attempt to find a conceptual direction… balance again?

: The yin-yang felt poorly placed, compositionally. With reminders that this was a life-drawing class and some encouragement to “find” people and body parts in our image the yin-yang evolves into a little person. With a focal point now found I have no idea what to do with the rest of the image. I’m feeling a little lost, but I soon work out what to do…

: I find a second person in the lower sections of the image! (You may need to view the large version to see my initial face scribbles)

: Now my picture has some direction! It feels like this is turning into a story about creation – of art and of ideas. The squared shapes and edges will become picture frames and the swirling masses will become hair for my creation goddess. There’s the totally unintentional treble clef in there too.

: I try to find some way to link my upper figure to my lower one, both visually and narratively. For this image we were allowed to use white and black gauche and a single pastel colour. It feels as though the ‘magic’ here is flowing like water, so I choose blue.

: Some better lighting here. It’s funny how much the colours change under different lightings!

: Here I’m working to integrate the white from the paper sheets with the rest of the image. In some spots I blend white in the surrounding areas to integrate things and in others I just try to match things tonally.

: More blacks!

: I use photo reference to fix up the hands.

: The completed piece! I had been unhappy with the straight-down blue line in the image which ran counter to all of the nice flowing lines so I played with the shapes a bit. I could have polished this a bit more but I was feeling a bit nervous about how I’d tackle some areas and felt they’d probably be left ambiguous instead of introducing details that might ultimately just confuse the whole thing. Part of what I like is just the simplicity in some of the bold blocks of black.

Copics

Posted on August 20, 2012 Leave a Comment

This past weekend I’ve been at Manifest, the Melbourne anime convention. At one of the stalls selling art supplies I had a chance to do some scribbling and try out some Copic markers.

At some point in my art history I’m sure I would have snapped up a set but now that I’m enjoying using watercolours it seems superfluous to invest in the Copics. Still, I had some good fun trying them out.

Balance

Posted on August 18, 2012 Leave a Comment

I painted this picture as a Christmas present for John back in 2010. When I uploaded it to deviantArt, I promised, “I’ll upload concept and progress sketches to my blog after Christmas.”

Wel’p Christmas came and went and another one too, and it’s finally time for me to fulfil that promise.

The Idea

I wanted to paint a picture that could be quite personal but would also be quite ‘accessible’ to the casual viewer as just a pretty illustration. Based on this I discarded the possibilities of doing portraits and looked instead to find suitable avatars of myself and John. The answer was quite simple – Zodiac animals. What fortune that I had such a great pair of animals to work with, too!

Rawr!

Conflict

Do a google search for ‘dragon tiger’ and you’ll immediately find images of the two locked in combat. Frequently poised over a Yin-Yang symbol, the two animals represent balance.

My first concept sketches attempt to riff on this idea.

Finding my feet with drawing tigers…

<3

Finding nice flowing lines is easy when working in ink.

Purpose

The hearts felt hackneyed and the composition uncomfortable. I decided that I wanted to portray the dragon and tiger as an exuberant and harmonised pair. For this I decided to move them in the same direction, as though they were running toward a common goal.

A very tiny thumbnail with the new composition scribbled out. I think I’d intended originally to have the animals in some kind of setting, possibly clouds or a mix of cliffs and flames to go with the elemental years we were born in.

Scribbles to work out the tiger’s pose.

I wanted to present a quite stylised tiger. I had been inspired by a piece of art that had recently been printed on the back cover of ImagineFX.

More experimenting with the style and pose of the tiger.

Unfortunately my laptop was stolen around March 2011 so I’m missing all the Photoshop sketches and any progress scans I took. But for a quick run-down of my process I think it went something like this…

Sketches were scanned into Photoshop and composed into a rough arrangement.
The sketch was worked on in Photoshop, correcting awkward anatomy and finalising details.
The final lines were traced to the watercolour paper (probably straight from my computer screen, as I can’t find a paper-trail (hur hur) to indicate I printed the lines).
I laid down washes and underpainting, sprinkling in rubbing alcohol to create texture (it’s most effective in the little bubbles at the top left). I don’t think I used any salt for this painting, and if I did it wasn’t very effective!
Lastly I worked up the Dragon and Tiger in a series of layers. The dragon’s scales and the tiger’s stripes were probably added last. I also used a white gel pen to add texture (along the dragon’s hair and in the tiger’s mane).

Like many of my paintings, this one doesn’t have a lot of tonal depth as I was timid about laying down too much paint and being unable to correct mistakes. When choosing a frame and mounting board for the painting I kept this in mind and went for a light mount and a dark, rich frame to bring the viewer’s eye to the painting and complement the tiger’s stripes.

The framed painting now hangs above our bed.

Table Trifles

Posted on August 14, 2012 Leave a Comment

Last month our friend Mark celebrated his birthday at the Grand Cru estate winery . This had also been the venue for his wedding in March, but unlike at the wedding, this time the restaurant had the tables set up with crayons and paper. The only logical course of action was to draw.

Ayvee sketches

Posted on August 13, 2012 Leave a Comment

A bunch of sketches and scribbles of AVCon mascot Ayvee.

From t-shirt design brainstorming:

From trying to define some kind of style for the booklet comic:

(kinda terrifying!)

The one on the right was the first drawn up, and was copied from a panel from this comic. Once I’d gotten a feel for the style I was aiming for, I drew the others.

And some fun scribbling:

This picture kinda reminds me of Laura…

Jump

Posted on May 23, 2012 Leave a Comment

Another attempt at a familiar idea. If I could be bothered I think there are some interesting comparisons and contrasts to draw here in terms of execution and themes.