Strange · Aeons

Months of carrying this little sketchbook around, this is it. I'm sorry. Really.

Subway and a brush pen, plus some markers.

( the sadness continues )

ElfQuest Wolverine? I don't know what happened. :( It was just on a whim anyway. Drawing muskly guys is not my forte. Inking body hair is just pure evil! Assorted silliness abound. Doodled and inked at heartshapedkey's house, art party!

Actually, I lied, I have more stuff but I have to dig through much crap to scan it. Instead I'm going to drag my insomniac self out to Union Square, try to soak up a few measly rays of sunshine, then get some good grub at Whole Foods. Big plans indeed.

Happy Zombie Jesus Day boys and girls, if you're into that sort've thing. Though I certainly love me some zombies, I like naked girls too, and the original spirit of this holiday thing was more about the whole happy, pagan, fucking in the fields thing, which means naked girls. So have some:

I started this inked triptych thing last month and I'm slowly progressing, these are all ink and ink wash on watercolour paper, no reference. I'm actually going to scrap these and redo them, something I no longer dread since I can now use my window as a lightbox, I can preserve the things I like and fix everything else. It's like a brilliant revelation and has taken away the natural media phobia I've developed lo these long digital years. I, uh, just have to wait til I'm home and awake on a really good sunny morning, hehe.

Feet kick my ass. I mean, erm, well, you know. They're hard. Everything else on the body can be approximated or faked or just isn't that hard, but feet are funny. If you don't know what you're doing with them, it damn well looks like it, especially bare. I need to do some feet practice. Also, those damn ribbons, rargh, not actually following the 3D space. Will work on that next try. I had fun though. I feel like I'm slowly, slowly getting better with ink. I love, love, love ink and those that wield it well, so, yeah. Is good.

I am tired and cranky, and this is the kind of thing I've been expending all of my energy on for the last week or so now, just in case anyone was curious.
( Eet's a leetle beeg. )

Yup. Maids. In the one I'm working on now, I've turned Marisol into a happy blonde girl who just couldn't be more goddamn excited to be doing your laundry! Joy!
( Oh and a WIP of that one for good, time killing measure )
I'm tired.

Oh, yeah, this could also possibly use some colour correction, I have yet to go through the looking at it on many monitors process.

It seems there be now a Superboy meme, brought to you by the same fine folks that incited the Batgirl craze.

Yes, everything I draw turns into some pseudo-punk-goth-angsty thing. Shush. Maybe Superboy's alter ego goes to art school in the Wendyverse, okay? Yes! He's an artfag, just, leave it.
So many things are terribly fucked about this, and I know, I know, it's not my monitors fault that the forced/fisheyed perspective is all kinds of blah (do you know how hard it is to find that sort of reference?!), but I do blame it for my inability to see detail in dark areas. Boo.

And, while I was browsing that immense Batgirl list, I kept track of the images that I particularly liked for one reason or another, so if anyone was daunted by the list and would care to see my top cuts (still, very long, many much batgirls), yeah, knock yo' self out.
( bat-shit insanely long list of links )

Also, I fully intend to procrastinate more work in the very near future to draw Lancelot for the artmeme community.

I'm so sorry. This is so, Barbara Gorden's teenage years as a Suicide Girl. I had a teacher who used to get mad at me for always drawing cheesecake girls. Heh. Sorry Scott!

The frighteningly large and quickly growing Batgirl master list, courtesy of himynameisjamie

Can you tell at what point my fingers started to ache and I got sick of looking at it? Yay!

Seriously, best meme ever, something that actually encourages people to draw? Awesome.

Ignore the head, I'm still working on the head in a separate PSD at a much higher resolution. I decided to render the body at a lower res so I could work faster, then blow it back up and sharpen it when it more closely matches the head's level of detail. Do the feet look in perspective? And is that left (her left, our right) fore arm too short? I've been staring at this every moment I've been at the computer since late last night, when I discovered an awesome technique for painting (well, more like rendering) in Photoshop. My eyes are screen burned! I'm also so damned paranoid about what this shit actually looks like because my monitor is too dark and I get no detail in dark areas, so I'm working at a fairly low contrast because I want her skin to be medium dark, but if I push it, I won't be able to see what I'm doing. Arg. I need to make a human sacrifice to the monitor fairy.

Also, we saw King Kong tonight.

Holy fucking cow! AWESOME.

New figure thingy. Not as good as the one the got blipped. Poo. 17 on the first dude, 15 on the other. some distortion did occur, but it was fun anyway. Reference here (4th one from the bottom, if ya care), lots of cool, actiony reference in that thread.

Done, more or less, missed the deadline by a single minute and the thread was locked. Bugger me.

I need a long break from the computer, maybe even to actually sleep at night, then I'm going to clean this up. So, uh, someone should magically give me a job doing this sort of thing for a living. Actually Josh stared over my shoulder, very stoned, and declared that I shouldn't ever work for anyone, I just need to make art for myself all day. I tried to explain to him that this work has a fairly limited market, I can't just live off of selling prints if I don't do all sorts of work in the field as well. Also, he doesn't seem to believe me that the fine art world scoffs at things like this. They do, though! The bastards! Scoff!

How in the blazes can sitting on your ass in front of a computer for hours on end with 80 percent of your motion relagated to your hands be so damn exhausting?!

Gah! I need to finish this, or at least have a resonable facsimile of finished, by midnight for the ConceptArt.org thing.

I need a nap.

Goat Christ! I spent ages on her butt, she's got an absolutely beautiful ass, and then, then I remembered that I needed to put pants on her. Rah! So, here's way too many hours worth of work for too little progress. I really, really don't like painting in Photoshop. At goddamn all. No blending, no real natural media. Lots of squidging colours/values together with transparency and the color picker. Miserable. Time consuming. I complain a lot, huh?

Anyway, I'm owning the fuck out of this cold. My immune system seems to be functioning not only properly, but above and beyond capacity, for the first time in years. This is awesome. Usually, I get a cold, I'm debilitated and it takes weeks for my nose to get back to normal. Not so any longer! Victory is mine!

*sneeze*

Stayed up until 7 am, occasionally working on a "Battle Angel" for a ConceptArt.Org Character of the week contest. Battle angel says to me punk Valkyrie, so, yeah. I actually put more work into it than this, but that iteration looks too crappy right now, you gets the sketch/value study.

It's due tomorrow, so I'll probably never finish it. My new computer has not yet arrived, so I can only work in Photoshop, and even that, not so much before this beastly machine crashes.

Stump girl. OpenCanvas 1, a little less than 40 minutes. Oy vey. Did I mention that I read Wet Moon lately? I didn't mean for it to turn out so, er, some one else's style, but they kind've had that vibe in my dream, and it's just how she came out. Ah well. I've got the event file for this, so if anyone else uses OC1 and wants to watch it being drawn, for shits and giggles, let me know.

I don't know. I'm on some kind of a role tonight. The text is super bad and hard to read, because by the time I'm done drawing, my hand is too cramped up for decent lettering. I don't know. I'm just fucking around anyway.

( big comic here )

Mural site illustrations, obviously not done, the cat and the puppy still need to be painted. Any suggestions readily considered. I'm so ready to go back to just drawing naked ladies all of the time, but I feel that I need to, y'know, show what I can do on the mural site, since I won't have a whole lot of finished mural work to show yet. I don't want to send people fleeing by sharing what art I already have sitting around. Especially what little I have in color, like the fetus girl, or the cthuloid.

griphus mentioned that I absolutely must have a pig somewhere on the site, what with my piggy penchant, and it just spiraled out of control, in a good direction, I thinkg.

I only got all of that done because I want over to Marisol's house and we both sat there and made with the mark making, effectively preventing eachother from just fucking off to watch television or go online just through sheer presence of someone else drawing. This is a very nice technique. We know so many artists, so why aren't we having sketchgroups or something already? Eh? Eh? It's gotta happen.

My dad called Marisol yesterday to tell her that Thanksgiving will be a BYOB event. She's bringing vodka. I'm hijacking my mother's untouched bottle of Jamaican cream rum. This is clearly going to be the big, gay, drunk Thanksgiving. I, for one, am very thankful for that.

More art later.

I layed out a few more pages of the Alice comic, but I really haven't done much work on it since I got here, so I'm going to try to do just a single image as if it were going to be a cover or a poster. This is the layout I finally came to, critique welcome.

Before I run off to finish sewing a giant cookie monster costume, here is the art dump. I promise some cam shots of Portland too, later.

My mediocre street sketch of, erm, myself, in Portland, suddenly gigantic beside a bus stop, and yet somehow at the same time very squished, like the feet and the head. Alas. Drawn mostly in Pioneer Square, experimenting unsuccessfully with a couple of prismacolor markers I had sitting in my bag.

( More peeechures, several boobs )

Ladeeda. Gruesome little torturer fellow, pencil, a couple of hours tonight while I watched some Firefly and the first Superman movie (man, that was not good). I'm going to try to actually ink him, and possibly horribly ruin the original in the process. Inking just scares me. Computers, far less scary, but it never looks the same. I had to photochop the strands of his whip, and they look crap compared to the pencil, but if I hadn't put them in, he would have looked like he was holding a vibrator. Which might have made it even creepier now that I think about it.

Someday I will actually go to bed before 3. Someday.

I'm having a bad art day.

I mean, the art itself isn't bad, but my tools, my computer and Painter IX are reaaaallly fucking fighting me. Glitchy weirdness in Painter, like that weird little line when I shrunk the image, or Painter just disappearing, poof, and then the computer itself rebooting randomly, and it's all just driving me up the fucking wall, when all I want to do today is sit here and listen to music and paint. I really like this image too, this is just a snip from it, the focal point, yeah, but I really love the whole thing and I'm dying to finish it. Bah. I guess I'll defrag, clean up, and leave the house for a while. Nothing else seems a viable option at this point.