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.