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.