A Present for Mommy and Daddy

She just can't wait to show her family what she found!



The little girl didn't turn out quite as young or as stylized as I had hoped but still looks all right, I guess. I think maybe the cranium is too small (or face too big), and the neck is probably too long as well. I was going for a watercolor look but I guess to get that you need, you know, watercolors. The airbrush tool in Sketchbook Pro looks like, surprise, an airbrush.

JP's Drawing "Club"

Went to Panera Bread (Eldorado @ 75) today from 12 noon until about 2:30-ish and sketched. I'm committing to myself to do this weekly, so even if I keep being lazy or hesitant to draw, I MUST drag myself out then to do it. Panera worked ok today, though I think I may wait around until closer to 1 P.M. to avoid the lunch rush. Actually I'll probably head to the Cafe Brazil next door next Monday, I love bottomless cups of coffee. Figuratively, not literally.

Would love to have some company too when I draw so if that time's not good for you drop me a line and we can get together sometime. I'll probably keep doing the Monday 1 to 3-4-ish thing since it works well for me, but I don't draw enough, so more is good!



Playing around with some character ideas for a graphic novel idea I've had kicking around for years. Decades, really, I was thinking about it in high school. And how much have I done on it in all that time? This page...seriously. Anyway, since I have nothing else inspiring me at the moment, I'm going to actually put my nose to the grindstone and get it done. Obviously from the drawings I have forgotten nearly everything I ever knew about anatomy.




Some stuff I was warming up with. I was trying to get something Michel Gagne-esque. I failed epicly. Is epicly a word? Well, this certainly is failing epicly.

Industry Giants 2009 with Dr. Sketchy

Yes, I know it's been a while. I won't even bother to "catch up". Always look forward, right?

Lots of life drawing this week at a Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School "mini" drawing session at The Soda Gallery in the Bishop Arts District and then a full session with the same model (burlesque dancer Ginger Valentine) at the Industry Giants 2009 CG developer's conference the next day. Industry Giants also sponsored a drawing class with the Society for Figurative Arts' Michael Mentler which was good since I have been meaning to go to some of his classes for a very long time and this gave me a taste of what I've been missing.



I love drawing with my Sakura Pigma brush pen! My only complaint is that the ink always looks very washed-out. Would also be kinda nice if you could wash the ink like watercolor, but waterproof has its pluses too. The yellow is the natural paper color of the Moleskin sketchbook I'm trying out. That's a circular saw sitting on the table; they were running a contest for "best incorporation of 'hardware'" in our drawings. I loves me some non sequitur!



Playing with a mix of my Lamy Safari fountain pen and watercolor.


Michel Gagne (one of my favorite artists), Jason Manley (Massive Black, ConceptArt.org), and Jay Hawkins (Senior Concept Artist for Gears of War at Epic Games) were there at Industry Giants, as well as several other very talented CG artists. Very inspiring, gotta hit the drawing pads!

DFW Sketch Club Meetup 2009-02-14

Had fun meeting some other artists at the Borders in Lewisville. Ended up chatting almost as much as drawing, but here are a few I did. Will I ever draw anything again besides disembodied heads? Hmmm...



That red I used looked like ColErase red on my tablet but looks almost DayGlow pink here. Maybe a color calibration is out of date or something, need to look into that.

The Doctor

Some sketches while I watched a marathon of Doctor Who that's been accumulating on my DVR for weeks...






This guy started as an "experiment" in inking (to say I suck at inking is one of the understatements of the year) and I ended up shading in some too. The beauty (and curse) of tone and color is that it helps cover a multitude of drawing sins...Also, some sketches of my son, and some girl sketches from a couple days ago.

Samurai

I ran across an amazing collection of vintage photos from Japan and decided to sketch one of them. I think maybe I'll use them as inspiration for some Jedi character designs; who can ever see enough different Jedi? I know I can't...




My samurai has clearly been eating too much sushi and sake and stopped working out since the original photo was taken.

I'm trying to work "al prima" and put down opaque colors directly, particularly as color practice for when I ever get my lazy rear end around to doing some pastels again.

Fish

Fish...

Coffee Shop Sketches

Visited a new coffee shop, Coffee N Cream, in Allen. Nice place...

Random doodles last night while watching TV. Trying to work more with basic designs and reduce things down to simple line and shape.



Starting to kind of get back into the swing of things...kind of...

It's the Progressive Insurance girl!

Actually I think her real apron is white.



Random creature sketches:



Screwing around in Painter...

Sketch dump 2008

Hey folks! I'm starting up a blog to hopefully motivate me to draw and sketch more. Sadly, I did precious little in 2008, but here are a few I did in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro 2009 (and maybe a little Photoshop or Corel Painter) soon after I got my TabletPC, a Lenovo X60 (a fantastic little convertible pen-abled laptop).