Day 007 - Karate Mama

I'm packing up for EPICon 2009, which is in Las Vegas this week. Going to promote my writing. The convention has arranged for a book signing for all the erotica and erotic romance authors at the Erotica Heritage Museum, and you can be I'll be there to pimp my books. Meanwhile, today's drawing is a cartoon I did for Oh Get A Grip, a writers' group blog that I belong to. The post goes up on Friday, but you can enjoy the cartoon now.

This was done in Art Rage, using the pencil, marker, paint brush, roller brush and air brush tools. It's basically a cartoon of me and my husband and how our life works. Lettering was done in Adobe Photoshop. Someone clued me in on doing word balloons in Photoshop. The trick is to set a style for the layer with a stroke, black, about 2-3 pixels wide. I added a slight black glow to that to make it stand out more. Now I can just paint a white area with a paint brush and the line shows up automatically, or I can use masks and the fill tool and get the same result.

Day 006 - Triangle Dog

Maybe technically this should be day 007? I missed Saturday entirely, and I'm not going to do two cartoons today to make up for it, so I think I'll just go with Day 006. I'm more concerned with keeping an accurate account of the number of drawings I do instead of the number of days that go by.

I've been reading a book on cartoon character design, name escapes me at the moment, that talks about using shapes and repetition of shapes to create a character. So I drew the triangle dog. Done in Art Rage using the marker tool, the paint brush and the roller tool (sketched with the pencil tool, but I painted over that). I love Art Rage. It's a simple little program. When I do simple little things, I get good results. Now if only I could figure out how to do more complicated stuff with it!

Anyway, enjoy the dog. Arf!

Day 005 - Flower

Today's images is an experiment with Photoshop brushes. Nothing huge here, just trying to blend colors and textures to see if I can sculpt a sort of three dimensional shape with digital paint. I started out by painting random shapes on the canvas until I had a form I recognized as something and went from there. Done in about 15 minutes.

Day 004 - Self Portrait

Nothing insanely brilliant here. Just a quick cartoon drawing of me, sort of. Most of my pics look like me, so I suppose this one isn't that far off, though at age 40 my hair isn't that red any more. Done in Adobe Flash in about 15 minutes. I'm going to try and keep these sketches as quick as I can, to 15 minutes or less. I'd like to spend more time on them, but the idea right now is quantity, to do it every day, as opposed to quality, and only turning out a piece of artwork when I have several hours free to work on it. Which would be never.

Doodle-A-Day 003 - Tape Monster

Spent some time yesterday fighting with a roll of tape to help my daughter get her homework done. Those damned dispensers have some nasty teeth. I got bit. This is the result. Done in Adobe Photoshop in about 25 minutes.

Doodle-A-Day 002 - The Adventures of Cynical Woman

Yeah, I know I'm already a day late, and it's only day 2. But this is the latest episode of the webcomic I do, about my life as a stay-at-home mom and erotica writer. I spend most of my work hours on this yesterday, and finished up at around midnight. I was too tired to post it last night so I'm doing it today. Not a doodle, but definitely artwork, so I'm saying it counts.

I wasted a lot of time yesterday trying to figure out how to best get the word balloons done. The program I use for these cartoons is Manga Studio Debut. It's a great program, except... It completely craps out any time I try to adjust the line spacing in any of the text. Nothing else I do with the program causes any problems, and nothing else I do with the text I'm working on causes a problem. Heck, I can adjust the letter spacing with no trouble at all, but doing anything with the line spacing causes the whole thing to go down in flames. And since Manga Studio Debut defaults to 100% line spacing and I prefer to use 80-85%, you just know I'm doing a lot of swearing every time I go to work on the dialogue balloons. Still, I've not yet found an option or work around that looks better. Even taking the artwork into Adobe Photoshop and adding word balloons there doesn't look as clean or nice. Believe me, I've tried.

So here's yesterday's doodle. I'll post another one later today for today's efforts.

Doodle-A-Day 001 - Fembot

Doodle 001: Fembot -- 23 February 2009

I turned 40 today, and thought it was time to challenge myself with regards to my artwork. I've been VERY lax about putting anything up on this blog, partly because Blogger won't let me use Zoundry or any other software to upload posts. I have to actually sign in to Blogger to do that, and I think that's a huge pain -- I'm not spamming my own blog, dammit! But also because I've been too busy to be believed. I'm hoping things have slowed down now, and now I can steal a little time for a small, daily project.

Here's the deal. For the past year and a half, I've written a story a week for my erotica podcast, and in the process, I've learned to write quicker and better than ever. I've learned not to judge stories until they're down on paper, thus allowing me to blast through a couple thousand words without stopping, and I've learned to slap words down on the page no matter what, so that stories get done every week to meet the deadline. Not every story has been a jewel, but most have been pretty good and more than a few have been outstanding in my humble opinion.

Now I want to see if I can do that with my art.

Here's the deal. I'm going to scribble out a small doodle a day. Nothing fancy, just something quick. I can do it on paper, on computer, using any program or medium I have available. I can draw any subject however I want, but I have to draw it. The drawings can be complete crap, even stick figures, so long as they get done and posted by the end of the day. I don't know if I can actually do this, but I'm thinking after what I've gone through with writing for the podcast, this would really be worth trying.So here's today's doodle - a fembot. Just a little blue and purple robot girl zipping along on her single wheel. No thought put into the subject matter. I just started scribbling a face and the rest of the body came right after. I used Art Rage, mostly the pencil and marker tools with the palette knife to do some blending and smearing. Opinions and critiques welcome -- you can leave a comment on the blog -- and here's hoping I get a new doodle done tomorrow.