Now that's more like it. Another exercise in making a face look like a face, except this time I was not using a real person as a reference, but older drawings of one of my own characters, centauress explorer Porsche Kirkpatrick-Saint George, from yesterday's entry. Here's a couple zoomed in shots:
Differences in the new version: slightly narrower face to better fit what I currently understand about human proportions; slightly wider nose, because she's a frigging centaur and needs to breathe; slightly thicker neck, because even at 22-23 here she's supposed to be an exceptional martial artist (and lives in 1.7 gravities). Otherwise, I tried to abstract the older proportions and recreate the same person.
I think I got close, but my faces are still not yet stable. I see I still have the same problem with the "errant pen" occasionally jerking and messing up my lines; I also see I could be making her giant mass of hair more dimensional and less flattened to two planes (though I note my time-traveling action archaeologist and her space hair predates River Song by quite a bit, even if Stephen Moffat beat me to the screen).
Lots of work to do, clearly. Took me two hours. Need to do that in half or a third the time. Still ...
... drawing every day.
-the Centaur
As it says on the tin. Fell down a rabbithole trying to clean up my files prior to doing my art, decided to cheat by posting a sketch I did earlier today, then fell down more rabbitholes since I apparently can't not experiment with coloring a sketch. For reference, here's the sketch from earlier, the first entry in a notebook that I hadn't written in in over 18 years:
I came across this notebook just trying to find an appropriate notebook for a science idea (my sketchbook is at hand, but the science notebooks are ... buried in boxes?? Not sure) and found this one, a "commonplace book" filled with various ideas, including a life review from almost 20 years ago. I'm ... actually pretty happy with how things turned out over the last 20 years, between my wife, my novels, my comics and Google, but there's so much more to do.
Finally, for reference, here's a piece of art I found while I was re-organize my files. This is from 24 Hour Comic Day, mind you ... a bit ambitious, I think, but this pre-break art I think shows the kind of work that I'm intimidated by when I try to get back into drawing:
Yes, there's a lot to be improved with this art, but (a) my inking was a lot better, and (b) wow, I had forgotten how much the Porsche St. George character was supposed to be a "knockout". So much of what I've written / drawn about her since then has been the workmanlike space warrior stuff, not so much the original romance between the twentieth-century time traveller and the thirtieth-century centaur.
Ah well. Lots of work to do before I can get back to that level of quality, even though I see a lot of work I need to do to improve upon that once I get there.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
As it says on the tin. Quick sketched with a dry erase marker on 9x12 paper, then rapidly colored / filtered / rendered in Photoshop. Subject: one of the plush lions from my vast collection of genre toys that I once had on my desk at work - with the excuse that these were my motivation to keep working. "This is why I'm doing this: to be able to afford to enjoy that."
So far, the motivational experiment seems to be working.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
A quick sketch of Zendaya portraying the character Chani in Dune. (Yes, I put a lot of effort into this sketch, but I call it a "quick sketch" because I specifically optimized getting the sketch done for its purpose - making faces that look like particular faces - rather than solving all problems, e.g. developing a strategy for rendering her woven shawl with crosshatching). As for making a face look like a face ...
... I give me a "meh" on this one. Still, I think she'd make a good Cinnamon Frost.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
Another exercise in trying to make a face look like a face. Started with Daniel Craig, but ended up with Vladimir Putin before he lost his hair. "The name's Putin ... Vladimir Putin." Clearly more work is needed in this area: I see little things wrong, but there's a subtle "offness" that eludes me. More practice!
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
As it says on the tin. I noticed that Travis Hanson uses negative space and shading with layers of flat colors (in at least a couple drawings I happened to have on hand, not saying that's all the time) and tried the same experiment in this little visit to the Roger Deaniverse and all its floating rocks. Though I didn't end up using negative space because clouds were in my composition, but hey.
Ehh, not the best drawing, but it's an interesting experiment in coloring without the normal Photoshop filters I use, but instead just using two or three colors per layer (excepting the skin tones, which had a few more and blending). I did use the "stroke" effect on some of the layers to fake inks, but the centaur and fish inks are drawn in a full inks layer, from which I took flats and then did coloring, using the select function to help me keep highlights / shadows to the right layers.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
An attempt to recreate the March/April 1988 issue of "Star Trek: The Official Fan Club". Could have matched the cover more closely, but, really, this was an exercise in trying to make a face look like a particular face. Comparing with the original cover, I don't think human eyes are supposed to be that large - it's interesting how your mind distorts what you're seeing when you try to recreate it on the page.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
As it says on the tin. A brief experiment in a cartoony style, inspired by the work of my see-them-only-at-San-Diego-Comic-Con friend Travis Hanson. I found it relatively hard to make a cartoony style work, much less getting coloring "right" even when the coloring didn't need to be even vaguely realistic. Clearly I'm going to need to practice coloring per se, and not just rely on Photoshop filters. This exercise gave me a lot more respect for Travis Hanson's art style, and I already had a lot of respect for it! (It's his art on the wall of my old library in the current blog header; can't wait until that art gets here, though I already have some of my wife's art hanging where I can see it, just a few feet away).
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
Well, this may have been quick, and it may look sketchy, but actually, this is real drawing practice. I've long had a copy of How to Draw: Getting Started book, a meaty slab of hot drawing tips ripped from the pages of the now-defunct Wizard magazine. This "Basic Training" compilation still remains my favorite one-volume collection of comics techniques, deftly combining breadth and depth through short mini-lessons from top comics creators (I mean, come on, they've got Adam Hughes, pinup-style cover artist extraordinaire, drawing the section on "Sexy Women" followed by Terry Moore, character-driven independent artist, drawing the following section on "Realistic Women", and that's just for starters).
I've read it many times, but I've never really sat down to methodically do all the exercises.
Until now.
Pictured: roughs drawn from five comic book covers picked pseudo-randomly from my inspiration stacks: Xanadu #1, Dreamery #4, Eagle #3, Superman #39, and Cloak and Dagger #1. I figure I should do ~5-10 of these from existing covers and/or reference drawings, then ~5-10 of these from my own previous drawings and/or my mental character gallery. Then I'll move on to the next section.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
As it says on the tin: I has the ZZZ's, so you gets a real drawin' tomorrow, as Cinnamon would say. The purpose of the exercise is to make sure I draw SOMETHING, every day, in whatever medium comes to hand. This centaur in a spacesuit (well, you can't see the legs, but they're there) was sketched on a Strathmore 9x12 sketchpad with a Winsor-Newton 2B pencil, then inked hot to broad outlines with a Faber-Castell "B" Pitt Artist Pen Brush, with details via Micron 03, 08, and 1 Pigma pens. Scanned on an Epson 7720, retouched in Photoshop to pull up the inks, and then separations, fills, filters and effects to create the starfield, kettledrum starship, Porsche's uniform, transparent helmet section, main Porsche inks, and the glare off the reflection in the helmet. So while it's a quick sketch, I exercised quite a few things trying to pull the whole composition together. Hopefully these exercises are helping.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
Well, not a "drawing" per se, though I went through four pages of sketches of this comic book banner logo before I cracked open Illustrator. (Here are a couple of those, not very impressive though).
I'm still not satisfied with how this turned out ... there's some image in my mind with this logo which I haven't been able to translate into an actual drawing, much less a realized logo.
But what's up with this logo, you may ask? Well, it's from a 24 Hour Comics Day comic I did, way back in the day, but never finished - "Transnewtonian Overdrive: The Front":
The "transnewtonian overdrive" proper is that little device in the last panel, an aftermarket component to our protagonists' Porsche Hexwing staryacht (first panel) which enables them to go places where other people can't. The idea, you see, was that in an era of faster-than-light travel, no-one would seriously be interested in the relativistic corners of our universe - but by inverting a normal hyperdrive to go just slower than the speed of light, our heroes could dive headlong into places with weird physics.
When I revisited the logo, my sketching - and looking at other logos of other comics - led me to the idea of the Hexwing cutting across the logo, with a thin line connecting it to the "O" of overdrive representing the invisible hypermass that our heroes are bungee jumping off of (and back to) to travel. I feel okay about it - the logo could be sleeker - but I can't quite articulate what the logo as drawn is missing from the image I have in my mind. If I could "see" that, perhaps I could fix it. This will require research, I think: I didn't figure out what was wrong with my Batman page (don't worry! I'm not going back to it) until I looked into DC Comics' book on coloring and lettering and realized I hadn't properly exploited value to make different planes of the page stand out from each other. Fixing this logo will require doing some research (and, likely, coming up with my own logos for other things first, before coming back to this, so I'm not working the same piece of art over and over again).
I didn't finish "The Front" that day - it was WAY too ambitious for 24 hours, and I think I only got 7-8 pages in. You know, in a way, I think 24 Hour Comics Day hurt my creativity as much as it helped it. It pushed my boundaries in a way I never had before, but the speed at which you have to work mean that my artwork wasn't up to the standards that I'd set for myself with f@nu fiku. Five years after breaking my arm, when my art was still rusty, I bit off more than I could chew, and may have hurt myself more. Not sure I'd go back and change it, but if anything, I wished I'd taken on a drawing discipline like I have now.
Drawing every day forces you to get over yourself, the good and the bad, and to move on to the next day.
-the Centaur
Or maybe the day after that. Art toys on a book box, from my artist's studio. Pencils, then inks, with a tiny cleanup with levels in Photoshop. Consciously had to force myself not to touch up a few errors: the point is quantity, not quality: to create a new, consistent habit where I am constantly drawing all the time, whatever comes to mind, whatever I need to draw, with no fear or shame.
Now is not the time for fear; that comes later. Now is the time for regular practice of quick sketches in which "It's better to be DONE!"
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
Very tired. But drawing every day. Sketched no-regrets with a whiteboard marker.
-the Centaur
Drawn in Photoshop from a random picture from my Cinnamon Frost inspiration file.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
NOW it's my car. A near-copy of my California 2010 Prius, minus 120K miles and plus a slightly darker interior trim, on the principle that it's a known quantity, and was darn cheap. The equivalent of a "quick sketch" but in Photoshop, just seeing what I could accomplish with the different brushes and tools.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
Reverend Karen of Saint Stephen's in-the-Field Episcopal Church of San Jose, presiding at a joint service with our partner congregation down the way, St. John the Divine of Morgan Hill. Drawn pencils, then ink, from a still screenshot of recorded services we are using to avoid the zombie apocalypse.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
It's late and I'm tired, so I drew this completely freehand - in inks, with no pre-sketch - on my TODO clipboard, took a photo with my phone, and then downloaded it to my drawing workstation and spent a few minutes playing with comic coloring in Photoshop. Eh, it's a sketch.
Depicted is, surprisingly enough for people who know me, not my Prius. At least, not yet.
Still, drawing something every day.
-the Centaur
tl;dr: sometimes the solution to a bad drawing is to practice on something else
Finally, the completed page. Frankly, meh.
I could have done a lot more work on it to clean it up, add some pop, fill in some more cloud layers, etc., etc., but diving into the fiddly bits on this particular composition would not fix the deficiencies in the core drawing or in my abilities to realize it.
The solution, I think, is not to overwork a single piece of artwork trying to compensate for its deficiencies, but to instead identify those deficiencies, to practice to eliminate them on different drawings, and then to return to the original subject matter with a wholly new concept and composition.
In this case, the deficiencies - oh, I don't know where to start. My poor hand drawings, my lack of details about body anatomy, my poor inking skills, my lack of strategies to overcome my slight RSI tremor, my poor page layout, my lack of knowledge about digital coloring techniques, or my need for strategies to overcome my moderate color blindness? But identifying even a few of them starts me on the road.
Note fixing these issues requires a comprehensive approach: some involve practice, like drawing hands or working on inking. Others require research (and practice): learning more anatomy or digital coloring. Others require actual strategies: if I want to clean up my inking line, I need to focus on ways that do not irritate my RSI or trigger the slight wobbly tremor, and if I want to deal with my color blindness, I need both more knowledge of color theory and a plan to deal with it. But now I have GPS directions.
Time to get started. And at some point, when I've traveled around the country of comics and returned to the start with a better set of tools, perhaps I'll draw another Batman cover. Or a Green Lantern page.
Or ... maybe ... a comic of my own design. Not that I have one in mind or anything.
Till then, drawing every day.
-the Centaur
It's late and I'm tired. ZZzzzz.... cthulhu ftaghn ... zzzz....
Drawing every day until the stars are right again.
-the Centaur
My cousin helped unload those books too. I am so pleased he is not dead after the entertainment center I'm trying to get rid of nearly fell on him! The bleeding will stop soon, I'm sure, but I don't know whose femur this is lying around ... not good ...
Pictured: a plush Tachikoma atop my wife's artwork Petrified Coral, in my partially-assembled library. If you have to explain a drawing, how good is it anyway?
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur