Another woman

Here's another. Any one want to venture a guess as to what historical figure this pic was drawn from?

Photoshop, Shorpy, and Bunny Roosevelt

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Shorpy.com, I encourage you to take a peek --great daily postings of old photos. Sure, it's nothing you can't get directly from the Library of Congress photo archives, but who wants to slog through all that? I save anything that floats my boat as a reference image.

Today, I used a picture of Bunny Roosevelt from 1920 to draw a picture of a 1920s woman. I drew directly in photoshop, colored, then played with settings. I've been experimenting a lot lately in Photoshop and Illustrator, trying to find a style that I like and is time-efficient, in anticipation ofthe comic book I will one day make.

More birds

Just some more of the birds. Low resolution versions of some quick scans. Before I use these for anything, I'd need to make them more black and white rather than so gray-scale.

Paper and Pen + Digital

I love Photoshop and Illustrator, but I don't like drawing in them. Even with my digitizing tablet, I just don't have the same control over input as I do with paper and pencil. I'm not alone in this -- it seems like many (if not most) illustrators who have to work or want to work digitally still rely on paper, pencil, pen, and scanner to get their basic image ready for digital work. But then the really fun part of digital art can begin -- you can try so many different ways of coloring in the image, playing with textures and brushes and various ideas on how to really make the basic image better. You can do the same thing with paints and pencils and markers and such, but it would take a lot longer. Sometimes I use the digital tools only as middle step -- as a way to experiment and come up with the final coloring, etc. -- before making an actual painting. Sometimes I intend to have a digital finished product.

An example from my sketchbook:

1) I scanned a drawing

2) I cropped and sharpened it

3) I tried a varity of color treatments (some of these are unfinisiehd to save time, but you get the idea): translucent brushing, bucket-fill, blending with background texture, and vectoring in simple color blocks.

Sketchbook/Book

My friend John K and I tried another daily journal concept this past Spring -- find an old hardback book somewhere and draw on the pages using words or concepts as a prompt for an idea of what to draw. He found us a couple of used Agatha Christie mysteries that were a good size and had nice paper, and off we went!

I'm done with mine now. I have to admit it was hard to do -- mostly in my book (Curtain) people sat around talking, so not much in the way of cool ideas. I did work on character, though. These are two examples: Poirot's temporary valet and some other guy who liked to watch birds and turned out to be the murderer.

Just a couple of things

Ahhrrggg!

On another note, I started up a new blog. It's just short reviews of all the kids books I read.

http://piratesghostsandorphans.blogspot.com/

Boy One

I am practicing coloring on Photoshop. I couldn't really get his skin color right. He's super super pale, but was in shadow in the pic I was using.

One is colored in photoshop, the other was then converted to vector in Illustrator and played with.

It's midnight? What am I doing up so late?

Woman Posing

This comes from a photo (shorpy.com -- way cool). Practicing Photoshop and Illustrator some more, but I am using a graphics tablet which gives me more control.

Castle, part 2

In the end, I am not happy with any of my castles. So I made a new one. I figured I could call it work if I forced myself to figure out a new trick in Illustrator. I did -- I figured out "join" so that I could make half of something, copy, reflect and then get the two parts to meet up to form an enclosed space (enclosedspace being important for adding color).

Step 1: Find a castle picture for reference. Bring into photoshop. Using the brush tool, trace the parts I like, add some other stuff from my head. Intersting part is that I am only making the left side of the castle. Save. Bring into Illustrator. Convert to vector. Resize as needed. Copy and flip so I can see the whole castle. Fairly symmetrical! Now, add another layer and trace this image, this time in Illustator. Practice using the pen tool for this. Copy shapes and squeeze or stretch as needed -- saves lots of time. Make half of a shape, copy, flip, and join. Makes things look more even. Slowly create all the shapes. I am doing all of this with a red line so I can see it over the image I am tracing.



















Step 2: Instead of being empty on the inside, give all the inside a color. I used white to start. Re-order all the parts so that they stack correctly. Change the line color to a black line.

Step 3: Fix a few details, like the missing windows on the right side. Change the line weight so that it is a thicker dark line. Add color. Add another layer for the background -- just a green and blue background.

At this point, it is not done, but this version works as a color/size/detail draft. When actually projected with an overhead up onto a huge canvas dropcloth, I'd use the black and white version. When actually painted the colors here would be the underpainting, and then details -- like the lines between stones would be added.

Set Design

I don't know anything about set design for plays. Nothing. Zip zilch nada. Yet somehow I found myself enthusiastically volunteering to design and paint the castle backdrop for the version of Sleeping Beauty that my son is performing in later this summer. It's all because I had a drawing of a castle I made last year that I liked. So I felt compelled to say "I can do a castle, I have a castle!". Now in the end, another guy kind of elbowed his way into the project, which is fine -- it's too much for me to do myself in the time frame I have, so in the end, he's getting the canvas sheeting and will project and draw the outlines because he has a space large enough to hang the 12'x16' dropcloth and a projector that will do that, and I am sending the design to him, procuring the paint, and then we'll paint it together at the theater in a few weeks.

So I get home from this meeting, crank up my computer, and realize that my castle image is just not right. Too many colors, and it is taller than it is wide. Perhaps also a bit modern. I might point out that we had absolutely no art or stage direction form the director, so this whole set and props meeting was a bunch of people sitting around saying "hmm, I am just not sure what he'd like to see..." Seemed kind of unprofessional for the director to not be at the meeting. But I digress. So my castle sucks, is the bottom line. But I said I had a castle, so I needed to make a castle. So I spent the next two hours working on my castle in a an attempt to come up with some alternatives that might work. I needed something that has clean-ish lines for projecting and drawing, that would only require a few colors of paints and their mixed tints, and that would shout "Sleeping Beauty" to all in the audience.

This is the original castle, tweaked for size and with a background added:

These are some alternatives I played around with:

Any comments before I ship these off to the director to see what he thinks? I find myself leaning towards the silouette version, although the other one has the child-like feel I was also thinking about. I'm, just not sure so I guess I'll send them all along to the director.

Did I mention that Owen has to perform in Sleeping Beauty 6 times over two weeks? And that he is also in High School Musical 2, so he is performing in that 6 times during the same time span. Please, please, please don't let me turn into one of those theater moms.

Grandmamobile

If I had to live in a car, one of these old 1960's era two-couches-on-wheels cars would be the way to go.

Scanner!

I have been grumbling about wanting a scanner for some time, and I finally bought one! It took me just a few minutes to install the drivers, set the thing up, and run a test scan. It took longer for Photoshop to open than it did to set up the scanner.

Unfortunately, the thing has a pretty big footprint, but I figured out that it fits perfectly on the shelf above the computer area. It's not like we'll scan every day or anything, so pulling it down the the desk to do some scans shouldn't be any trouble.

This pleases me. I think I'll be able to post more stuff if I can scan it here rather than having to bring it to work and jockey for access to a scanner.

I pulled something out of a box of older drawings for my test scan.

Help me choose

Help me choose. I need to pick one of these to submit to the Adams County Art Council annual show. My other submission is the bigger painting I posted earlier today. This collection here consists of all small things, but they are not in scale with each other. The cars are both 6"x12". The skinny abstracts are 2 or 3" by 10", and the landscape is actually 3"x5". The works on paper would be framed, probably in a black frame with a wide white mat. the two cars would be framed in a simple black frame. Try to picture them that way. Oh, and first person to respond gets one of these!

Painting

I have been doing some work, although you wouldn't know from my output here. I should do more progress-so-far posts. I prefer here's-a-finished-thing posts, though.

Today I figured out how to stich 4 images into one. I scanned this painting, then used Photoshop's nifty merge tool to put them together. Literally two clicks and I went from 4 different smaller images to one big image that looks like I used a huge scanner to scan. The edges weren't perfect, but that was from the original scans, not the merging process. I cropped slightly to resolve it. The painting is 18" by 18".

Another try at the banner

Any better? No paint this time, but I do feel that the gnome has a certain sense of accomplishment and self-satisfaction, after a long day's work with his brush...

New banner

I'm playing around with my banner. I liked the new one until I actually posted it, but now I worry that the gnome looks like he is spraying the world with a firehose or, er, something. So feedback please?

Quantity, not quality

I've been drawing quite a bit lately. I have three sketchbooks going right now. One is a small 5" square hardback sketchbook that I mostly practice brush inking in. One is an old copy of an Agatha Christie novel that I draw a picture on each page (just fronts) based on something in the text for each page. It's a little exercise I am doing with my friend John. His cartoons are better than mine, but I am having fun with it. My third book is a three-ring binder filled with hole-punched copy paper. This is where I have been doing the most work -- I just carry it around and do line drawings every chance I get. This one is about practicing seeing and drawing and about letting go of the idea that I can't draw. If a picture sucks, then so what, I flip the page and start the next one. A couple I have liked, most are crap, but it's getting easier every day. If I had a scanner, I'd post these more regularly, but I have to fight with the undergrads for the computers connected to scanners here at work, and today was the first day I got on one in a week. Maybe I'll do a little scanner research today.

Project

I have been working on a project for the last week or two, and I have finally finished it. Well, I finished it Friday.

It's a little book! All nicely bound with endpapers and stuff. The poems are E.E.Cummings, and I illustrated them. i went back and forth on about five different ways of doing that (my first plan was all pop-up), but eventually did it all in Illustrator.

Fairy

Fairies aren't normally high on my list of critters to try to draw, but I am working on something that needs a fairy.

Snow and Trees

What I was doing at 10:13 am today

Truck

vs.

January

Happy New Year!

After the flurry of finishing up various arts and crafts for Christmas presents, I haven't been doing much. I cleaned out the studio last week -- I mean really cleaned it up and got rid of a ton of junk and put away a bunch of canvases. J asked me what kind of projects I had planned. I really couldn't describe what I have planned, because aside from a couple of specific things (such as a new painting to go over the bed), what I have planned is more a process or idea than an actual "thing."

I think to sum it up, my main project for this year is to do more, and get better at it. I spend more time thinking about really cool projects than actually doing really cool projects. I got two books for Christmas (thanks sweetie!) that I am going to use to help me with this. One is about writing and one is about comics. I have lots of books about writing and lots of books about comics, but there’s something about these two that I think will really help.

The first is What It Is by Lynda Barry (a supercool cartoonist). I can’t even begin to describe how wonderfully amazing this book is. I first saw it at a friend’s house and I came very close to stealing it. It took a lot of willpower to put it on my Christmas wish list rather than going out and buying it right then. So, it’s a book made entirely from beautifully collaged pages that combine cartoons, drawings, paintings, text, old magazine stuff, snippets of a 1940’s era elementary school teacher’s personal papers, and so forth. Part of it is like an autobiographic psychedelic essay about creativity and part of it is a presentation of the activities and guidance she provides in her writing workshops. So for all its technicolor wackiness, it has some great step-by-step activities that focus on learning to write in a way that evokes strong images (both for the writer and reader). I love it. So I am going to work through each activity.

The second book is Drawing Words and Writing Pictures by Jessica Abel and Matt Madden. It’s a book about making comics, but it’s a textbook based on the courses they teach. So rather than just nice theoretical discussions or specific “how-to” stuff (most books do one or the other), it has fifteen chapters that have information and then specific assignments. Each chapter builds on the prior one, so by the very end of the book, if you have done all the assignments, you’ll have a comic. If I have been successful in my attempt to get through the Lynda Barry book, I should have a story to use as I learn more about turning a story into a good comic.

So that’s the plan. What I haven’t decided yet is whether or not I want to post this process as I work through it. Maybe the comic stuff. Maybe some sketchbook stuff. Like all good wannabe artists, my new year’s resolution isn’t to lose weight; it’s to keep up a daily sketchbook…

Monsters

J and I made these for my niece. I designed them, J sewed the bodies, I embellished them, J figured out how to make them connect together (using a magnetic snap -- perfect for a 16 month old). It was fun to work on. They are made out of wool felt (except for the eys and mouth, which are regular craft felt) and they are very soft.

Another portrait

In the interest of full disclosure, most of these portraits are pictures that I base off of photos. In some cases it is a straight trace in photoshop (although they are hand traced rather than auto-traced in any way).

Why grade, when I can draw robots?

Another

This will be my second to last robot ornament post. K and K, yes, one of you gets this one. The other gets the next one. It will be random when the time comes to ship.

I found hooks.

More of these critters

Made two more of these this weekend. They already have a home, but I'll make some more this coming Sunday. One robot will be bequeathed upon the first person to comment with words for "Rudolph the Red Nosed Robot".

Another one

Just another of these. I need to hook up my graphics tablet to do these --mice kind of suck as drawing tools, at least for me.

Just a picture

Playing around with a crayon-like brush in Photoshop.

Studio

Many of you have seen the studio space in my house. I use up about two/thirds of the room, while J. uses the other third. I can't keep it quite neat enough to actually use the space as effectively as I could, but it pleases me to know that I have the materials to just about anything I want.

Some paintings. All but one of these is mine. I keep one of my sister's in plain sight because I like the style and keep thinking how to incorporate the technique into my own.

Painting area. I don't have an easel up right now since I have been mostly working small. There are two barely-begun paintings on the table in the corner.

There's a table under there. Really.