character sheet

Here's a loose character sheet I made for a comic idea I had that takes place in an ice cream parlor.

Horny Holidays!

Don't click unless you've been naughty this year! I have. A lot.



Trying to arrive at an efficient method for drawing digital cartoon smut. Leaves less paper trail, and may prove handy for an upcoming 08 project.

alien picnic -- color 2

My much more color-savvy wife Wendy helped me pick a less garish scheme to proceed with. Going to try to make the end result stick to this warmer palette, with some subtler stuff going on. For instance, her uniform, jetpack, luchpails etc. now need more definition, not to mention that little cyclops-squirrel.

+++edit+++

Overwrote this with some minor finishing touches. I think I'll leave this here, or risk over-rendering.

alien picnic -- color 1

Blat! Main selections mapped in. This one may not actually call for an overly laborious color treatment, but we'll see what the next few days bring.

alien picnic -- pencils 2

Made one more costume design modification. Now I can begin coloring the piece with confidence! Holiday break is coming soon, so that's when I'll tackle that.

alien picnic -- pencils

After doing another print/trace, the drawing was losing too much energy, so I redrew it from scratch, trying to preserve the elements I liked while axing the stuff I didn't. Unfortunately I chose to black in areas of the gloves and boots (really badly I might add -- where's the volume?), drawing emphasis away from the important stuff. Hopefully I'll be able to knock this back in the colored version. Not really happy with the way that shoulder emblem and headpiece came out either, so I'll most likely be tweaking these areas heavily. *sigh* Concept art is sooooo much easier than illustration, even cartoon illustration. If anything, cartoon illustration is harder because it demands selective simplification for maximum impact/readability. Only when I'm more confident with compositions like this can I ever undertake something as big as a comic. Gah...so daunting.

alien picnic -- mid-res alterations

I pulled a Bret Blevins and turned her into a skin-tight suited space girl w/ rocket pack, making some modifications to the alien. Going for "CutesySexySciFi." This is the drawing I'll tighten up and color.

alien picnic -- mid-res

The thumbnail was enlarged, printed, drawn over, then scanned back in and cleaned up slightly for the next round. The scene doesn't really say "sci fi" to me yet, so I'm going to mess around with the tree, alien and girl costume in Photoshop. Stay tuned...

alien picnic -- thumbs

Yesterday's musings on giving spacegirl a sandwhich gave me an idea for a little scene : picnic-ing spacegirl is getting her thermos drained by a long-tounged alien whatzit. Here's me thumbs!



I plan to do the one to the right of the star, most likely going with a different costume.

Spacegirl RMX

...this time based off a drawing by sketch-cohort Brett Bean.

~~~afterthoughts~~~

-I forgot to give her hips even a sutble tip/swivel, making her look a bit ED-209ish. Her posture is unfemininely rigid. Where's the distribution of weight?

-The whole piece suffers from "concept art syndrome" where lack of plausible motion, background elements and dynamic perspective result in something not quite worthy of the term "illustration." What are her hands doing? What's her story? Should've given her a weapon, or a PDA, or a sandwich...anything to lend last-ditch purpose to the pose.
-The boots are the only part I'm remotely pleased with, which is strange considering I normally gimp out on the lower legs/feet. Random blob-tech ftw!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Could spend lots of time correcting the little things, but I'd do better to start over and get the *big things* right -- i.e. motivation/gesture/silhouette/weight/composition. Funny how something as simple as a fantasy pin-up girl can be such a struggle.

peachy

Wauuugh, painting is hard. Think I got a little closer to eyeballing the colors on this random web photo, but as you can see, when it comes to quickly getting everything into a picture, I choke big style. Well...that's why I'm keeping this blog. We'll see what happens in a year's time.

Eyeballin' color # 1

'Kay, so previous painting exercises were done using the color picker to get palette. But now the training wheels are off! My first "just eyeball it" attempt is waaay washed out, as you can see (haw!), but I'm still totally infatuated with this picture.

Zombie Head

Blouuuughhghahahaha!!!!
Very loose pencil sketch underneath.

Goat Girl RMX

This piece is a remix of Vinod Rams' "The Faun."

Here's the lineart...

Berrylicious

Andrew Trabbold and I both decided to do a color study of this piece by Rick Berry. Blot, blot, blot!

dumb ol' turtle

Happy The Turtle is a happy...turtle. Anyhow, I'm through with today. Needed some Photofun (TM) to help my brain ease down.

Speed Gurl

g'mornin'thishere'sagurlIdonedrawed...whereza coffee?!

Morning blot

Warmup time! Eventually I'll apply this color-sampling technique to line drawings. There's something liberating about working on a single layer as opposed to the 80 bazillion adjustment layers I'm used to fiddling with.

Photofun cntd.

I tried to be all Ashley Wood and bust out the halftone screen on this color study. Was so stupidly easy. Copy-merge the colored stuff into a new file, grayscale it, crank the levels until only the darkest, shadowy bits remain, ligthen those shadows, then convert to bitmap. Paste halftone back into original color file and set to "multiply." Combine this effect with a squared-off directional brush and -- hey presto -- instant indie-comic-I-couldn't-be-bothered-to-finish.

Study : Lucy Pinder

I'm not so hot when it comes to doing paintery work, so this is my first "training wheel" attempt at a quickie-style color digital piece without first working in grayscale. Found this random image of the the lovely Lucy Pinder (British glamor girl who shows up at lot in the "men's interest" section of the magazine stand), and just color picked/dabbed. Likeness, proportions and posture are off. I'm more interested in how colors behave/mix, and where shadows and highlights wind up. My hope is that I do enough of these kinds of exercises, some good stuff will stick.

...

I have a thing for brunettes.

Cowboy Witch - Color (Part 2)

Okay, pared back the glazing to fit Kurt's line art. Think it works a little better. More basic. /// On a coincidental note, I recently stumbled upon books 1 & 2 of a manga called Kurohime, chronicling the adventures of a gunslinger witch who fires magical creature-bullets from these chiseled hand cannons with samurai sword hilts. Katakura Masanori's got a dynamic, humorous style that has loads of character. And...also...sex appeal.

Cowboy Witch : Color (Part 1)

A little explanation : Some years back I turned down a bizarre commission request for a "half-cowboy, half-witch" on the grounds that it was too ridiculous to depict well. My brother Kurt took the challenge and came away with this illustration, which I then colored well past the cell-shaded treatment it probably deserved. It contains a "tartan" texture from Mayang's Texture Libary as well as a fuzzed-out sky. There's no strong light source, and the motion blur is overkill, not to mention irrational since her hair is blowing in the opposite direction. I realize all this now, but oh well -- hope you like anyway it, Kurt! Er, and you too, nameless commission person...

Original [by Kurt Richards] :

P.S. -- I'm determined to get this right tomorrow.

Scuba gurl

Pinchy, pinchy!!!

a little buggie I pinched off before leaving work...inspired by this neat photo gallery...

RELEASE THE DONGS.

Thanks to my homie-in-arms Joshua James Shaw for passing along a sweet brush preset that inspired me to create this digital-only sketch blog. No Cintiq action yet, so this is strictly "caveman wacom."

Let's get this shit rolling.