Shoeless Joe Monsterface

Illustration Friday

Experimenting with a fountain pen...

Scattered Characters

Sorry for the silence (again). Hopefully I'll be more consistent with the updates this new year!

To kick it off, here is a collection of some characters that have spawned in unconventional locations - post-its, notebooks, index cards - anywhere except my sketchbooks. It's neat to see that as I'm learning and practicing more, even my doodles are becoming more fluid.

Index Card Gestures

Did some exercises starting with a random gesture line and then developed it into whatever made sense. Focusing on gesture first is helping so much to bring more life into drawings. It also helped my focus to keep it simple by just using ballpoint pen on index cards.

and here with some color...

Recent Sketches

I've been getting encouragement from a variety of people to focus more on ink sketches rather than pencil, it helps me to work quickly and to not get too obsessed with shading or details at the beginning. Ink also helps squash perfectionism... just like in life, when you make a mistake, you can't erase it. The master artist can take those mistakes and incorporate them into something awesome.



Speaking of awesome ink drawings... check out these travel sketches by Dice Tsutsumi.

Character exercises

When I was in elementary school we used to play this strange game where I would challenge my friends to draw a quick scribble, and then I would have a minute or less to turn the scribble into a pig. I recently found this drawing tutorial by Ron Lemen that validates the technique as artistic tool! I was playing around with it the other day (with my own scribbles) and had a blast making some strange characters!

Self-Portraits

Tomorrow is my birthday so I figured it's a good time to be indulgent with a couple of recent self-portraits. This first one was during a bit of artist's block last week.


This one grew out of a little sketch of some items on my desk, and morphed as I followed down the page. I was using a new pen, a Micron .005 mm, which has a very thin but very solid line. It forces me to be very thoughtful about each stroke as I'm drawing, which is a good exercise for impulsively sketchy me.

Cuddly sketches

Here are a couple of recent sketches, they're the same kind of stuff I usually fill my sketchbook with... pencil drawings of weird characters on a nebulous background. However it was neat to make these recent ones and see how everything I've been learning has influenced my approach. I'm finding my thought process to be very different, much more intentional in the choices I make, and consciously aware of all the various aspects of the drawing that need attention - the action of a pose, the twists and direction of body parts, the subtle variations in a shape's silhouette, lost and found edges and contrasts, and the intersection of points (no tangents!). There's a much greater sense of understanding, of knowing what to do and why, and what needs to be improved and why. It's great!! It's also more fun this way because my brain is more engaged, not just sitting idly by while my eyes and hands have all the fun.

I'm encouraged too because this particular pencil drawing style had started to get really rigid in my previous sketches, but now it's starting to be redeemed, infused with new life in the figures and the lines themselves!

Rough Sketch

About 1.75 hours

Pictures!!

Okay, so enough with the wordy introspection, lets get some work up here! Here are some sketches I did for my perspective drawing class with Mike Matessi at the Entertainment Art Academy. The class has been helping a TON! When I started I had only a vague idea of two- and three-point perspective, and consequently I tended to avoid environments in my paintings and sketches. The class is almost finished now and I'm sooo much more comfortable with the principles of perspective drawing. When I go for a walk I can see extension lines everywhere! I think I'm going crazy.