LIZARD BODY - COLOR

Wha-bam! Color. So since this character is basically like a raptor humanoid, I went with a green color scheme. Who the hell am I kidding, I don't know what I'm doing here. I put this into Photoshop, outlined it in black, and went nuts with the airbrush. I also gave him more dinosaur like feet, and I love how those came out. I might do even ANOTHER version of this in Photoshop, where I give him clothes or armor or something. If I was better at fine details, I would have tried to do stuff like scales or wrinkles, but nothing I tried came out right. Still, I'm pleased with this result.

THE FIGURE IN SPACE (AND DARKNESS)

For this drawing, the goal was to consider an imagined figure within the darkness of the shaded canvas, and sketch the character by erasing, thereby "etching" the form of the figure out of the darkness. The inspiration for a drawing like this (since I rarely leave my comfort zone) is Francisco Goya, and the lighting he creates in his etchings. I think the goal I was shooting for was something like the picture below, where the main female figure is the bright spot in a haze of darkness. 

I wasn't quite as refined with the eraser as he was with an etching tool, so I had to sort of blot out certain parts of the page with my eraser, and then return with a sketching pencil to give the character definition. Unfortunately, the way I shaded the page was foolish - I used a charcoal pencil to haphazardly draw zig zag lines across the page. I figured these would wash out when rubbed with a paper towel or even my own fingers. Unfortunately, they are there to stay. So now the scene looks like it's supposed to be raining, inside the room, which I guess I can live with. At least it makes the room look dark, which was sort of the "interrogation room" look I was going for - a shadowy scene with only one light source, dangling above. 

By the way, those aren't guidelines on her arms or legs, nor is the picture incomplete - she's a robot. Those are like, metal plates I guess? I'm still working on the anatomy of this particular character, and defining her figure is one of the goals of this semester.

ROOKIE MISTAKE - AFTER EFFECTS

An animation I did in After Effects this weekend. I used parenting to make my own little 2D biped. I'm particularly proud of those clouds in the background, since I made them myself (with the help of a tutorial, of course) in Photoshop.

Most of the sounds were from various free sound websites, except for the talking, which was from the Mac's TextEdit Text-To-Speech recording device.

ASIAN KID

This is an Asian kid I drew while he was studying in the library. He actually kept relatively still throughout the whole process, which was surprising. I like how his hair came out, as well as the wrinkles in his shirt. The reason the mouse is actually INSIDE HIS HAND has to do with the fact that although he kept rather still, his mouse hand was constantly moving. I gave up on trying to draw what I saw, and instead drew the mouse when it was there, and there hand when it was there. 

ROBOT CHICK - RAIN

For my Drawing 1 final project, I drew this robot chick that I thought of because of those SVEDKA vodka ads. Anyway, here's that same character again, drawn poorly. I really don't like how the body came out on this one - I tried drawing with just normal drawing pencils, but I find those so difficult to erase, that there's almost no way to correct your mistakes - so what's the point? That's part of the reason I made it raining, just to cover up how weird she looks. The legs look pretty cool, what with that armor covering her knees and all. But the right hand that's holding a rifle just looks like a mess, and her torso just doesn't look like anything.

MIND FARM

So, I wanted to do something kind of weird, where I would draw a person and then have a bunch of farmers in her hair plowing through it like it was a field or something. Only after I showed this drawing to a few people did they bring to my attention that i actually drew a "Mind Farm." I was shocked that I never made the connection myself. I don't need to tell you the drawing is awful, since you can see it for yourself. You can barely see the farmers, which is okay I guess, since they have that feeling of being "off in the distance." The face of this woman(?) just looks ridiculous, though. I need to work on drawing women a LOT. 

LIZARD - CLOSEUP

This one didn't come out too bad. I feel like my half-assed cross hatching on the upper eyelid actually makes it look rounded, almost. My goal was to really get in close to the figure you see on the bottom right of the page, there. I still don't think I added enough detail, however. And even though this is a character of my own design, the proportion for the mouth is really weird. It should probably be a lot bigger, and be going off the page more. Now he has a teeny tiny mouth that's smaller than his eye, LOL! Still, I am pleased with this one.

LIZARD - BODY

The original drawing on this page was the one done in darker pencil, that takes up most of the page. I was so disappointed with how it came out, however, that I just had to draw the other two heads you see at the top of the page. The body of this character came out all wrong. The arms are just hanging there stupidly and are grossly out of proportion. The claws should be larger, but there's more than that - I just can't quite put my finger on what it is. Also, his head looks silly the way I drew it - I don't usually draw this character dead on, and this may be why. (Where is his tail? Why didn't I draw his tail XDDD???) The other drawings on top, however, I really love. They consistently capture the design for the character I came up with. Also, I think I redeemed myself for drawing that terrible lizard mouth before, because the one on the top left actually looks decent.

PROXIMITY COWBOY

Hell yeah! So we had to draw Polyclitus' Canon, the template for the perfectly proportioned man. Mine really sucked, since I gave him enormous Popeye forearms. I erased the legs, but those also looked kind of weird. Anyway, since the design was so poor, I gave my guy a cowboy hat. Then the phrase "Proximity Cowboy" popped into my head, so I figured "what the hell?" and I just drew that on the top of the page.

Later, when I returned to my sketchbook, I found this naked guy with a cowboy hat on and designed to flesh his design out a little more. One of my secrets is that whenever I'm drawing something and it looks really awful, I just give my characters clothes to cover up my mistakes. (So when we start drawing nudes, expect to see a lot of them with clothes they weren't actually wearing) Anyway, I like this character now. Yeah, his tattoo says "TATTOO."

LIZARD - BODY

Easily my favorite drawing here. And I can tell you why, too - besides the fact that the proportioning looks right even though it might be pretty off, I used a mechanical pencil to do this instead of a drawing pencil. I'm sure any classical artist worth their salt would condemn me to Art Hell for doing that, but I really couldn't care less. I hate sacrificing precision when I draw with these messy drawing pencils. With my tool of choice, I was able to erase over and over again until I found the lines I needed, and I think the end result is just what I was trying to draw. What I penciled in there at the bottom is "Try Dinosaur Feet," which I think I will do from now on, since human feet look very out of place here. In case you were wondering, the reason why he's holding a pistol is so the viewer knows he's a badass.

A BUNCH OF GUNS

I feel the title sums this one up quite nicely. These are a bunch of concepts for pistols for the lizard character above. The first one is a pistol that utilizes the chambers you see at the top of the page, that can hold three bullets. The middle one is supposed to be some kind of pocket pistol that can shoot two rounds. That one didn't really come out as planned, but it doesn't look terrible. I guess I decided to draw some bullets, too, in the middle of the page. The last gun is some kind of cool design when you can add another barrel on top of the existing one.

THIS LITTLE GUY

Is awesome and that's why I wanted a close-up of him. He looks a little like a frog, which wasn't intentional. In the future, I want to make this character look less like a frog and more like a gecko, which probably means he needs a tail, too. Yes, he is holding a large gun, in case you're picking up on the violent undertones prevalent in a few of these sketches.

Expect to see at least one or two of these drawings back again, once I put them into photoshop and work my magic on them! I want to define the lines more clearly, and also add colors and textures to them.

Just Testing... For Now

This is a picture of MLK I photoshopped for the cover of a paper for a class about the 60's. I needed a test picture to make sure this blog is working, but I'm also kind of proud of the image I created here.