From my sketchbook - Sirena

From one of the sketchbooks I carry around with me.  This was drawn with a mechanical pencil then inked with the Faber Castel manga pen set I bought recently.  I love working in shades of grey, especially with pen and ink.  I’m going to have to stock up on those pens since I think I may use them up pretty quickly.

I actually started drawing this one over a year ago, but then set that sketch book aside for a while and didn’t come back to it until recently.  I think the original inspiration may have come from “Bizenghast” but I don’t really recall now.  I just know I like drawing weird, creepy, flowing things, and I think this one certainly qualifies.  My five-year-old likes this one a lot.

The Adventures of Cynical Woman - Episode 16

Another episode in my new webcomic.  Yes, I’m posting this everywhere.  It’s been a great promotional tool for my writing, and yet has also been fun to work on.  I love using Manga Studio Debut, but I wish they had a rounded rectangle tool.  To make word balloons I either have to use the circle tool or the curved line tool.  The curved line tool seems to work better – I can get the balloon to the exact size and shape I want – but it takes so much longer to make balloons this way.  Also, I wish Manga Studio had some way to adjust the spacing between lines to below 100%.  This would go a long ways toward making all that text fit in the panels.

Froog the Weird

Now that I’ve got some blogging software (namely BlogJet) that will actually let me upload my images to the FTP of my choice, I feel ready to resurrect this blog.  Here’s today’s image:

This was done with Micron Pigma pens, no pencils, and Faber Castel’s Manga set of grey-scale brush pens, plus one Prismacolor marker for the background.  No pencil drawing in this one. I just started randomly doodling and this is what came out.  I’ve saved a large version to my computer and have separated out the background color in Adobe Photoshop so I can do some better color on the background. Actually, this isn’t even the final image.  After I scanned this in, I went back with some of the pastel colored Faber Castel brush pens and added some orange to the shirt and the tentacles.  I’ll have to show that version later.

Recent Project - The Adventures of Cynical Woman

I’ve been working on a web comic called The Adventures of Cynical Woman.  I’m using Manga Studio Debut to do the artwork and lettering.  I like the final results but it sometimes it takes forever!  Especially this one.  I had to pencil, ink and tone four characters plus all those seats.  Like I said, the end result was worth it, but if I’m doing this every week, and that’s the goal, I need to speed things up.  I’m thinking of doing the pencils by hand on real paper, and then maybe upgrading to Manga Studio EX to see if having the vector tools will make the inking go faster. 

By the way, that hottie in the passenger’s seat? That’s Orziel, the main character from my erotica e-book, Demon By Day.  (Insert shameless pimping here!)  Demon By Day is available from Mojocastle Press.

Cartoon up! The Adventures of Cynical Woman

Well, Picassa has effectively killed my incentive to use it any more for posting any further artwork there, including the cartoons I've been doing. Sometime in the past week, they changed how they handle links to web albums, so that I can't simply e-mail the link from my computer, but have to do it from the Picassa website instead, meaning I have to have addresses set up there, probably need a Gmail account (which I don't have and don't plan to get at this time), etc. And it looks like if folks want to see the cartoon, they now have to log into Google as well, which don't work if folks don't have a Google account. Basically, Google took what used to be a simple, handy operation for me and made it useless in their attempts to pimp themselves.

Fortunately, I think I have found a way around that.

I'm testing out Zoundry's Raven this week, to see how it works for posting blog entries and images. What I like best is that I can upload images from my computer to a designated place on MY webhost, as opposed to some third party service like the aforementioned (and now useless) Picassa. So let's see how this works shall we? I'll upload my cartoon with the click of a button and...

Presto baby! Now if you click on the thumbnail below, you get the cartoon but not the Picassa album. Looks like this will work just fine for now. Still need to get a regular web comic site set up though. I'm working on it...

Test post using Zoundry Raven

Last week, someone on the Marketing For Romance Writers Yahoo group asked if there was an efficient way to post the same post to multiple blogs. I've been wondering that myself, since I have three blogs and am considering starting up a fourth. I did some digging around in the Blogger help section and came across a list of third party utilities that offered such services. I decided to give Zoundry's Raven a try. This is the first test post to see if it does what I need it to do.

Manga Fairy and Picassa Problems

Here's the latest sketch of the seedling fairy from the one drawing I've been playing with. I've cleaned up the detail a bit and shrunk the head -- it was originally far too large. I still need to work on the hands and feet, but that will come later this week.



Picassa has been giving me trouble with uploading the images for this blog. I was using the "Blog This!" button, but it never works right. I could only upload the images so long as I didn't actually try to add any text to the blog entry for the post. That meant I had to come back and edit the post once it was created so I could write up my explanations with the images. And then usually the links to the images would fail to work the day after I posted the blog entry. The whole thing is really too annoying to deal with, so I've just switched to uploading the images to the Picassa web albums and then creating the link from there to put in a new blog entry. Saves time, though still not as convenient as using a single "Blog This" button to handle the whole process. Oh well.

I just got Adobe Photoshop on my laptop. I know I said I'd probably use Corel Photopaint until the day I died but then two things happened. The first is that my husband is building me a new computer with Vista on it (please don't tell me how crappy Vista is -- we did our research and are prepared to live with our decision). Some of my older programs -- Dreamweaver 4 and Flash 5 -- won't work on Vista, so I had to upgrade those, and of course, they're both owned by Adobe now. Then Corel released the latest version of Corel Draw the very same day I bought the upgrade to the previous version. I got no e-mail telling me this product was coming out, no warning. I just bought version 12 and then when I started up Corel Draw on my laptop that day I got an alert informing me that I was still behind the power curve, and no, there are still no decent tutorials online for people who actually want to use the program for illustration and artwork. Oh, and the version I just bought comes with this so-called tutorial book from "the Masters of Corel Draw" that pretty much is useless as a tutorial book. No step-by-step explanations, just vague (very vague) overviews of how the projects were completed and none of those projects is really impressive. In fact, I thought they were all pretty lame.

So I'm parting ways with Corel. As I play with Adobe and become more and more familiar with it, I will be phasing out my Corel usage until finally I no longer need to keep it on my computer. I have no idea what I'll do with that upgraded version I just bought. I didn't even have the time to load it onto my computer before I bought Adobe (which I was able to get for over 60% off the retail price so it only cost me an arm, not an arm and a leg). But I'm changing my allegiance. We'll see how it goes.

Elf and Seedling Fairy roughs

I'm still working on the Cupid image, right now doing some backgroundwork. I'm setting up a 3D model in DAZ Studio to use as a reference for the figure and lighting. It's slow going though, so when I get bored with that I doodle some more in Art Rage. Here's the latest doodle, which has also turned into a slightly larger project (Ha! Only slightly larger, she says...) This is a picture of a woodland elf with a seedling fairy. I call it a seedling fairy because when it's finished, its wings will look like the little maple tree seeds I keep finding in my yard.

Here's the elf...



And here's a detail of the fairy. I'm working on it in its own image; then I'll import it back into the original sketch before I do the inking.

Thumbnail Sketch For The First Big Image

 

I know, it doesn't look like much, but I worked all morning on this.

So what is it? It's a thumbnail (very large thumbnail) sketch of what I'd like to draw next. If you look very carefully, you can see a stick figure crouching to one side and sort of a background roughed in behind it. And you can see my notes. This is going to be another manga illustration, but maybe this time with a more painterly approach.

I'm still working from "Girl to Grrrl Manga" for the details, like hair, face, clothing, but now I'm also trying to incorporate the stuff I learn from Imagine FX magazine. I read this magazine all the time, and I'd actually like to do some digital painting (thus the purpose of this blog). So rather than just follow along doing a bunch of little exercises, I thought maybe I'd just jump right in this time and get to work on a full blown image. I like the idea - a feral Cupid or Eros hunting for his next victim in a ruins or abandoned building. I'm thinking of calling it "Love On The Prowl." Honestly, the hardest part so far was to come up with a decent idea, but now that I have one, and I have a rough guide of how I want it to look, I'm ready to get to work.

Finished finally!

 

Well, here it is! The manga portrait I've been working on. I did the sketch in Art Rage, took it into Manga Studio Debut to do the inking, and then took it back into Art Rage to do the coloring. I used the marker tool in Art Rage for the coloring. The blending worked pretty well for the skin tones, but I couldn't get the streaking I wanted for the hair and eyes. I did some experimenting with the palette knife tool, and discovered if I set it to a very small size, I could get the streaks exactly how I wanted. So anyway, this project is done, from sketch to inking to color.

I think it's time I moved on to something else. I feel pretty confident about drawing faces (at least when I'm copyin- er, refering to someone else's drawing). Maybe now I should see if I can do something original from scratch (or at least by refering to a photo instead of another drawing).

So I've Been Out (Part 3)

Here's the culmination of my work for the past few weeks. The original sketch was done in Art Rage 2.5 using the pencil tool. Then I exported it and inked it in Manga Studio 3.0 Debut (that's the less expensive version; runs about $70). Manga Studio Debut probably only has half the the features of the full version, but I still think it's a very nice little program. For starters, I can rotate my drawing on the fly, allowing me to ink from any angle with ease. Second, the pen tool has options that help control the flow of the ink. If you've got a shaky hand with the graphics tablet (like me), you can correct that with these options AND you can determine how much correction you want on your inking. There are other tools in the program that I really like, but I haven't had time to fully explore them yet, so I won't get into them here.

Finally, after the inking, I exported the image from Manga Studio and brought it back into Art Rage to color. I haven't finished that part yet, but I do think I've got a nice start on it. I'm working with the marker tool. It's a bit tricky getting the settings just right. I want my markers to blend together without streaking, so I keep having to tweak the hardness and the wetness of the marker tool. Sounds a little obscene, don't it?

Anyway, here's all three stages of the drawing so far: pencil sketch, inked drawing, and partially colored drawing.

 

 

 

So I've Been Out (Part 2)

More of the drawings I've done over the last month. Really just a series of heads as I work my way through the first chapters of "Girl to Grrrl Manga."

 

You'll notice this head drawing looks a bit better than the one below. I figured out that I do a lot better if I can more clearly see the example I'm working from, so for this drawing I decided to prop up the book I was working from in a cook book holder. Now I could see what I was working from without having to constantly close and re-open the book (it doesn't lie flat, so that was a problem). The other drawings below don't look quite as nice as this one, so I'm definitely using the cook book holder for my practice drawings from now on.

 

 

 

So I've Been Out (Part 1)

I didn't mean to be out so long. I got caught up in my work, and while I kept drawing in the mornings, I couldn't find time to post blog entries. Part of this was because I switched to drawing in a drawing pad with a mechanical pencil, which added the extra step of having to scan in the drawing before I could post, and for some reason I could never find the time to get all that done. But now I've caught up and I've got some time to show what I've been doing.

 

This first bit is a doodle I did while drawing with my kids. We decided to call him Squarby. He's sort of a squarish monster with parsnips for ears and tail. I don't know where it came from. I was just drawing with the Sharpie marker and this is what I came up with. No pencil sketch with this one. It all came straight out of the pen.

 

This is another straight pen drawing I did, starting with just the curve that made up her tail. I love mermaids, and love to draw them. All those beautiful long flowing lines. This one really isn't finished, but it is what it is.

 

This one was sketched in pencil first before I inked it with Micron markers. I refered to the chapter on manga eyes in Colleen Doran's "Girl to Grrrl Manga." I love how she does eyes. They're always so expressive. I have to really study the examples in her book to come up with something I like, though. I'm going to need a lot of practice before I can draw manga the way I want.

 

This is just a doodle I did in Art Rage. I started with random scribbling that sort of formed a head shape with horns, so I roughed in some paint. I didn't spend a lot of time on this one. I'm still trying to figure out how to blend the paint in Art Rage. I found a tutorial that showed how to lay down paint and the blend it with the palette knife, but honestly, I'd like to blend it as I paint with the paint brush tool, rather than just smudge stuff around after I've laid it down.

These are only a few of the drawings I've done lately. I've got some more to post, so we'll see if I can get them up tonight.

Work Related Doodles

 

 

I've actually been looking for excuses to draw lately. Quite a change from never finding time to draw at all, huh? The images above are actually work related. One is a 3D image done in ZBrush 3 and one is a quick thumbnail I sketched in Art Rage. These two images are related. The thumbnail is something I'm going to have to build in ZBrush 3 this week. It's a six-limbed alien, and it's for a book cover I'm working on. The ZBrush thingie I drew is just a test to see whether or not I can still use the damn program. I've had ZBrush longer than I've had my kids, but have never really been able to get a handle on it. I can do the basic sculpting and painting, but nothing fancy. I opened the program up on Friday after months of not using it and couldn't get it to do a damned thing. Big part of the problem was that I was trying out version 3 for the very first time, when I'd been using 2.5 previously. They made some big changes between the versions. I finally got some things sorted out when I found the patch for 3.1. That made all these nifty tool trays appear in the program, making it much easier to find things. Any way, I stayed up way too late on Friday night test driving the new version of ZBrush. What you see is the results of my dabbling.

I've done some other drawings over the past two weeks, all on real paper with a real pen/pencil (whoo-hoo!). I'll try to scan those in tomorrow and post them.

Last Night's Doodle

 

Another messy drawing. But I like it better messy. Interesting things show up in messy sketches. I started out with a blue pencil in Art Rage and switched to red then black to pick out the details I liked from the mess. The hair was a problem. I have no idea how to do hair. The "Girl to Grrrl Manga" book covers how to do hair, so I'll get to that eventually.

I was supposed to work on the eyes more, but got carried away with doing a whole head. I'll do more eyes tomorrow maybe. Time for bed now.

Drawing While Busy?

I had a lot to do this weekend. My parents showed up on Thursday for a week long visit. My husband Michael is getting ready to head out of town. And he and I had a karate camp to attend. That's right - karate. We're both second degree black belts. We started out about eight years ago, and look where we are today. It took a lot of practice to get here, but here we are.

Which makes me think, if I practice drawing every day, could I have a "black belt" in that too?

In any event, I had to find time to fit in a bit of drawing. I actually did more than I have to show today. I did a random doodle on a desk calendar that I thought was actually kind of nice (for a doodle), and I did a pen and ink drawing this evening that looked interesting. But I don't have either of those scanned in yet. What I do have is more manga eyes.

 

This first sheet shows the scribble/doodle warm up I did, along with a quickie eye and a cartoon style head. It's sort of a female elf. Nothing fancy, just me scribbling away.

 

This second sketch is a series of eyes. Still working from Colleen Doran's "Girl to Grrrl Manga." She has pages of eyes in that book. Some are really interesting shapes, not what I would normally consider for eyes, but they look cool. I mean, eyes are supposed to be round, right? But I did a little playing around, drawing a pair of rectangles, a pair of ovals and a pair of triangles. You can still see the basic shapes beneath the final eyes I drew. I thought these came out pretty well (although a little lopsided, as usual for me), and the using the different shapes definitely kept me from drawing the same eyes over and over again.

Eyes

 

Still working from Colleen Doran's "Girl to Grrrl Manga" book. After going over the basic head, she starts getting into details, like eyes. The sketch I did wasn't bad, but then I tried to ink and color it in (all in Art Rage). Obviously, I need lots of practice at this. I'm not crazy about the pen/marker tool in Art Rage. I can never get a dark enough line for inking, and can't figure out how to make the colors blend together really well. So I'll be working on that too, off and on.

Welcome To Doodle Day!

So I actually decided to break out a real (as opposed to virtual) drawing pad and pencil and do some work. Correction, I went with pens instead of a pencil -- namely ball point and Micron Pigma pens. I love using these two kinds of pens for drawing. There's just something about the feel of a really smooth ball point pen; it gives just the right amount of resistance without being too damn stubborn to draw with. And it's the perfect medium for doodling. I was going to just go with the ball point for today's drawing, but the pen I was using wasn't giving me quite a dark enough line for some of what I was doing, so I broke out the Microns. I love Microns for inking cartoons and comics. Yes, I have actually drawn cartoons and comics. At one point, in college, I drew a twice a week strip for the college newspaper. It was great! I did it for four years. Then I sort of... stopped drawing. Why? Why did I give it up?

Sometimes I like to blame my parents for my failure to pursue my art. Dad refused to let me major in art, because he said I'd never be able to make a living at it. Ironically, the highest paying job I ever had was as a graphic artist, and I made pretty good money, although the job was so stressful it just about killed me and so I eventually quit. And most of the money I make these days is off of art. It's not a lot of money, but just think of what I could make if I really pushed myself to do more art. I could be making some dough, I tell you.

Anyway, Dad wouldn't let me major in art. And Mom never really seemed to understand why or what I was drawing. She was the one I always showed my stuff to, and her comment was always the same. "That's nice, honey." I wonder how many budding artists were killed by the words, "That's nice, honey"?

So yeah, I could blame my parents for not letting me major in art and for not being enthusiastic supporters of what I wanted to do. I could, but then I'd be forgetting the biggest culprit in this whole mess -- me. I was the one who stopped putting pencil to paper. I was the one who quit cartooning after I finished college. I was the one who let myself get sucked into 3D computer graphics but failed to continue honing my drawing skills. And none of that is my parents fault at all. It's mine, pure and simple.

I turned 39 yesterday. I already mentioned this blog is a birthday present to me. Five years ago, on my 34th birthday (just a few days after my first child was born), I got bit by the overwhelming urge to write. And so I wrote. Everyday. For five years. And now I'm a writer with a portfolio of work and a reputation in my chosen genre. I'm not hugely famous, but if you read erotica, you **might** have heard of me. And there are things happening in my writing career that make me think maybe in another ten years or so, I just might be famous.

Five years of writing did that. And I started with almost nothing as a writer back then. What could five years of drawing do? I'm looking forward to finding out.
Here's today's drawing. You can see the warm up scribbling I did up top, with a doodle of an angel/heart. It's February, which makes me think of Valentines and hearts, so that's the theme I went with. Enjoy.

 

Happy Birthday To Me

 

 

I have no idea which image came up first. One of these is just a warm up, random scribbling done to help me loosen up with the graphics tablet. I have to say, this is a good idea. At the very least it helped me figure out the best settings for the pencil tool in Art Rage (I put the pressure sensitivity all the way up to 100%), and I got a nice long stroke out of it.

The other drawing is another manga portrait. This one looks a lot better than the very first post I did. Still messy, but that's fine for a sketch, and I think it adds character. The eyes look a lot better, and the head is more symmetrical over all. That's probably because I kept flipping the layers and then drawing over top of them. Boy do I cant to the right when I draw.

By the way, I originally started this blog as a birthday present to me. Today is my 39th birthday, and I think it's about time I started doing something I've always wanted to do - be an artist. I am an artist, sort of, because I can do these really nice computer graphics, but as I've mentioned, my sketching abilities suck and I really want to be able to draw by hand. So, that's what I'm working on.

Any way, kids are up and I have to go make breakfast. Tomorrow, I'll do something different.

My "Professional" Work

 

Here's a sample of my professional work. This is a commission that I'm currently finishing up. It's for a book cover, and I have spent months getting this just right. The customer wanted a Lichtenstein style comic of a voluptuous and dangerous woman, and it took several roughs to get the features just right. Then it took even more work to get the shading, line art, and colors just right.

This looks really nice, doesn't it? I have to admit though that a lot of this was traced. I did the original model in DAZ Studio using Victoria 3, then rendered an image and brought that into Corel Draw. I am the only person I know who uses Corel Draw and Corel Photopaint instead of Adobe products. I've always used Corel and probably always will because they're great programs and I can get the whole package for half of what Photoshop would cost me. But I'm pissed that Corel doesn't bother to promote these products more. It's like they just don't care that these products even exist and they think no one would use them for any serious work. Well I do, dammit! And I'm sick of having to translate Photoshop and Illustrator tutorials into Corel terms, so get your shit together, Corel, and treat your own damn products with some respect!

Where was I? Oh yeah, tracing. When my client said "Lichenstein," I did a Google search and came across this very nice tutorial by Melissa Clifton on turning photos into Lichtenstein-style art. Again, she uses Adobe, so I had to translate a few things, but I got the results I wanted, so it's all good.

However, one day I'd like to be able to do this kind of work without having to TRACE an image. Thus the purpose of this blog.

And that's all the artwork for today. Since it's now almost 1AM, I am not getting up at 5AM to do any sketching. So enjoy this instead and I'll do something new on Saturday maybe.

Another Head...

 

This is me sort of copying one of the examples in "Girl to Grrrl Manga." Sort of, but not exactly. I keep the book on hand to refer to, but I don't have the book set up on a stand or anything so I have to open it every time I want to look at the picture I'm working from, and that gets old after a while.

This image is more messy than the others, but I think it also looks better. I had the hardest time keeping it from slanting to one side. Fortunately, Art Rage has a short cut keep that will allow me to do a quick horizontal flip so I can check what I'm doing as I go, and if I still need help, I can duplicate the layer, flip it permanently, and use it as a sort of guide to fix any major problems. I actually spent most of my drawing time this morning just getting the basic circle-triangle head shape right. It was way off kilter.

By the way, I do this stuff around 5:30 AM. It's the only free time I have to do it. And the only reason I got up that early this morning was because I knew I wanted to draw.

What I'm Using To Draw

 

More manga style heads today. I grabbed the first book I had on hand to read through and practice from, and it turned out to be "Girl to Grrrl Manga" by Colleen Doran. Colleen is nice. I've met her a couple of times, and I like the book. It's not the most in-depth book on manga, but it does go over shoujo manga styles of characters pretty well, and I like the way she describes the techniques. The heads, as you can see, are basic circle and triangle shapes, with the details just sketched in. I'll probably do just heads for a couple days until I'm comfortable laying out the basic shapes.

What am I using to draw? I'm probably going to do most of this digitally, so I've decided to mainly use Ambient Design's Art Rage 2.5. It's a nice little natural media program. It's got all the basic tools - pencil, eraser, oil paint, marker/pen, pastel, etc. The big bonus though is that I can rotate the canvas on the fly. Makes it easier to draw in my opinion. Plus I can flip the image to see if I've got it all cock-eyed and slanting too much in one direction, which as you can see, I do.

I need to fiddle a bit more with the settings though. Art Rage doesn't handle small detail as well as I'd like, unless I use a really big canvas. So I probably won't draw multiple heads on one sheet again, like I did this time. I couldn't really get into the eyes and noses like I wanted. Maybe it's better that these details are sketchy. This is hardly supposed to be a finished product. But in any case, I can't do four heads in one sitting anyway. I only get 30 minutes a day at most to draw, and I can't really do four heads in that amount of time right now.

So I Want To Draw

I need another blog like a need another hole in my head. But I want to draw. I've always done some sort of artwork for as long as I can remember, and I used to draw all the time as a kid. But come this Saturday, I will be 39, and I feel like I've forgotten how to just draw. I do a lot of 3D artwork, and 2D stuff with vector graphics and photo manipulation, but where are my basic drawing and painting skills? They're crap, I tell ya! So I'm pulling out all those old art books I've accumulated over the years and I'm teaching myself to draw. You can follow along and see how I do. My goal is one post a week, because I've got a lot of demands on my time, but hopefully, I'll do better than that. At the very worst, I'll have 52 crappy drawing by this time next year. But at least I'll have them. And here's drawing number one.