girls in color

edit: updated!

My biggest issue, I think, is that deep down,  I believe that I'm far better than I actually am. Gonna keep working on this one and will post an update soon as I get the chance.

Sketches of girlzzzzzzz

Some sketches, each of which took me quite a bit longer than I would like. Lesson learned: I have to go back to basics and draw tons of boxes and lines to grease up my eyeballs for seeing angles and proportions much more quickly. Also finished applying for a fall internship with Marvel in their creative services devision. Really hope I can get it, being around professional comic book artists would be a refreshing pace from being surrounded by Pollock-Warhol- Wannabees who paint like colorblind children with underdeveloped motor skills "on purpose". Learning from people who do what I'm trying to do with my life would make the prospect of another lonesome semester bearable, maybe even exciting! So let's hope. Also, the Green Wing is fantastic. Watch it.

Mouse in /Progress/ color-ish

Edit, final: Fixed a few tangent lines and did some clean up work.

Edit, again: Added some texture clipping masks and changed the background color. Still not quite liking something about it.

Edit: My roommate lent me a temporary replacement chord for my tablet, so I was able to scrap this together. Not sure about the background color, and overall something about the colors comes off as messy, just can't place my finger on any exact reasons why. I think the composition overall is boring, so I'm going to be making an effort to avoid static front-facing compositions as much as possible.

Usually I try not to post works in progress but the micro-usb cord for my tablet broke this morning, meaning this is the last update until I get the new one to come in. Was in the midst of coloring this guy and starting some new pieces in order to apply for a handfull of fall internships. So far I'll be applying to Marvel and Titmouse Animation in NYC. Hopefully my experience this summer means I have a fighting chance! 

Los Colores

Edit 8/15/12: Realized, after all of this time, that the face was waaay too wide and asymmetrical. It actually looks like a female version of the mad magazine dude and somehow my brain didn't register that until today. Spent three hours fixing that because I'm a looser who will never amount to anything.

Edit 8/14/12: Decided to try to make the drawing into something that could pass off as an actual composition, and made the eyes less uncanny-valley/dead looking.

After a few days of showing my parents and youngest sister around the city and exploring the White Forest National Park, I've finally gotten around to coloring this piece. It has problems, complete lack of any background environment aside, but I think I'm pretty happy with it overall. I think this style of coloring works well with my line work and can continue to be developed into something cool. We shall see.

Beginning of the End!

Pretty girl! :3

Edit: Nope, not pretty at all. I don't know shit. I suck at this.

It's the beginning of the end both for this drawing and this summer, and I'm not sure I'm content with how I've done with either. The drawing, even in its current incomplete stage, has taken me ~8 hours from just getting a maybe-somewhat anatomically correct sketch to the cleanish but still spotty line-work.  My goal with this one was to use less lines to describe the features of the face/bust, and for those lines to be rendered quickly, cleanly, and expressively- the same way Darrow seems to draw his human faces. I fell short of absolutely every one of those goals. Just getting the level of likeness I've achieved here, which is still not really spot-on, was incredibly difficult. So issue number one: I've yet to develop a go-to way of establishing the proportions of the head.  The linework ended up being an ordeal of zooming in ridiculously close and darkening, redrawing, and erasing stray pixels on each. Very far from putting down, completely erasing, and redrawing strokes over and over until I could get them just right. So, issue number two: my hand is still way shakier than I'd care to imagine, probably a consequence of flapping my wrist around instead of using my entire arm as a pivot. But now that I think about it, using my arms appropriately has always been a problem, even when I was really young. Long ago, I had been placed in a rather odd dance class where the teacher started us off by having us pretend we were birds. While the other kids in the class immediately seemed to grasp the concept of grace and would extend their entire arms up and down slowly as if they were draped in feathers from fingertip to shoulder, my arms remained stiff as a pole while my hands flailed about like they were two fish out of water stapled to the ends of my wrists. While the other kids were graceful, delicate swans, I was a demented kiwi. So I gotta work on line drills, and also figuring out how to get my brush settings in PS just right for this type of linework. Last but not least, what was first intended to be a sketch to be in a gallery of other face-sketches ended up being a many hour ordeal stretched over several days. Issue numero tres: I really need to let go of my pride and concentrate on quantity and not quality for once, and maybe, just maybe, that'll allow me to overcome all of the above problems, which i'm convinced are being held imprisoned in my box of habits by this lock.

Similarly, this summer I haven't accomplished nearly as much in artwork as I had initially hoped. I wanted to figure out a 9-5 drawing routine Monday through Friday through which I would work out all of the setbacks I've mentioned and more, while also refreshing my stale portfolio and learning the basics of Maya. The only things which I have accomplished in this vein have been posted on this blog. Quite a lot has been learned and experienced outside of this aspect of my life, but I would have much preferred it if I had been able to balance advancements in both areas more effectively.

All Hail the Mouse King!

An icon of the Lord Mouse King riding in gallantly on his noble steed, the overburdened german cockroach. 

     Amongst the things keeping me from sleeping like a normal human being have been an army of mice slowly scratching and slithering their ways through the pastel painted basement apartment walls. We've successfully trapped and taken two mice out of the apartment, but we keep spotting more. Perhaps the original two have made their way back, as apparently mice tend to do, like little disease carrying puppies, or perhaps the fresh wall debris on the bathroom floor underneath a new, messily gnawed hole indicates a new portal for new unwanted friends. Or, just perhaps, my roommate is a Mouse King- a mythical person that is to mice what a queen ant is to its colony, permanently pregnant and dropping loiters of squishy pink vermin unknowingly as he sleeps. For whatever reason, I've taken to the latter theory. LONG LIVE MOUSE KING!

Over the rainbow

Took a long time since I've been pretty busy lately, but here's turkey jobs colored in. Was going for comic-book style coloring, not sure what it is I actually got. I've never been able to do two pieces that look the same. Guess I really haven't hit anything style wise I've liked enough to pursue whenever I sit down to draw...

Gobble gobble.

This is fowl word play.

I'm a gross follower and really want an ipad so that I can work on digital pieces somewhere other than this dark art cave.

Apparently this is what Steve Jobs does these days. Witnesses report seeing him wandering from PC user to PC user in the dead of night, showing up at the foot of their bed and whispering "one of us...one of us...gobble gobble... one of us..." On a more technical note, I had no idea turkeys had so many different types of feathers. Complicated little de-evolved dinosaur!

Running up the Ice

   
     Seems that more often than not my head is several years in the future ahead of the rest of me. That at least has been the case this summer, and its been as problematic as it might sound. Its difficult navigating your way around the moment when you don't have your head and its many useful bells and whistles there to help out. I mean, smelling the roses is kind of out of the question when your head is busy figuring out what, besides the walls, your bathroom options are when they inevitably put you in a tight white coat in a nice white room several years (being kind to myself) from now. That's been one of my toughest predicaments this season, along with moods that have been swinging more than a fifty year old man that didn't experiment enough sexually as a teenager and realizing that insomnia is not the poetic affliction so many make it out to be. My guess is that those who romanticize laying dreamless on a mattress, tormented by the sound of their own heart trying to barge its way out of their chests, at least have the benefits of an air conditioner and being alone. Being awake when you don't want to gets old fast when the person next to you turns into a sticky, snoring, drooling, chewing, screaming creature of the night. Its even better when the screaming, which sounds like the type of of sarcastic monotone noise you'd make trying to pretend that the friend in the blood-streaked halloween costume that suddenly popped up in your rear-view mirror on your three a.m. drive home didn't make you wet your pants stops for a while, so that you can finally focus on the soothing sounds of the mouse in the kitchen trying to claw open bags of your food with its little raid-covered hands.
      Last night, despite not only these obstacles but a headache which should have easily split the earth in two, I have finally managed to fall asleep while its dark and wake up in time for coffee flavored sugar and milk, and that alone has done wonders. Hopefully this more livable schedule means I'll be able to start reeling in my head from its explorations into distant, dark futures and secure it back onto my neck, where things are actually not that bad. The more notice I take of the general okayness of life, the more okayness reveals itself. Who would have thought what they say about self-fulfilling prophecies is true? I have, for instance, recently struggled to completion a picture of a roommate and friend as a wildly puking t-rex after he had an unfortunately excessive and excessively unfortunate night out, and more fantastic than the positive attention its somehow gotten me from some very talented, employed artists, (and the fact that I can come to any sort of life understanding by drawing pictures of puking dinosaurs) its reopened me to drawing and art-making for the love of it. Or for the love of the attention it gets me. Maybe my parents weren't the best when it came to curating the fridge door back in the day and I'm trying to fill that sad, magnet-less void now. In all honesty, I don't know. I'm not really sure where it is I really get my kicks from yet. However, I would not have even been able to complete the drawing at all had I not brought my head back from the future where I am wearing my hair electroshock-therapy-chique and coughing up colorful balls of wax because in this particular future I have developed a taste for Crayola crayons and back to that present moment, where the only thing going into my mouth was cold water and the only thing coming out was bad (really bad) lip synching. Everything was okay, and everything is okay. It continues to be far more difficult than I could have ever imagined remembering that, but I'm convinced that its salvation for people who are, like me, constantly struggling to hold down their stir-crazy time-heads.  Hopefully my resolution to attend the meditation sessions offered a pleasant walk away with consistency will help burn the "things are okay"  mantra more deeply into my thinking, because so far in my life its somehow managed to be the most slippery thought I've ever tried to grasp.  


Anywho, enjoy that drunken dinosaur!

Summer Posting Time

     Nothing quite like a new blog to get me in gear to do stuff, only to eventually become an ugly reminder of my malaise and scatterbrains to be deleted out of shame. There is a ton that I need to learn in such a very short amount of time, and I'm not off to the most promising start. Settling down to practice consistently continues to be tough as the disgusting amount of learning I need to do can't decide whether it'll be what gets me out of bed before noon, or what keeps me hiding there until nightfall. Its been summer for me for nearly a month, and I've spent most of it flat on my stomach with a condition that has left me unable to move. Now that I can finally sit without growing myself a ripe vine of blood clots,  I'm pretty clean out of reasons not to just take the plunge. The more time I spend dreading what has to be done rather than simply pulling up my pants and doing it, the easier it is to forget that its not supposed to be work at all, and the more guilt there is that, despite having the privilege to consider work what many cannot afford to sustain as a mere hobby, my insides still quiver when I set out to do it.
     Part of this fear definitely comes from knowing that once I do start to work, I'll be forced to face just how much of mount improvement needs to be climbed, and just how little time I have to scale it without the boulders of debt, work, and even family hurling down towards me. That fear of simply starting is probably what began this whole weird heady mess of meta-anxiety in the first place, and is the same reason I'm filled with dread before going out for a run. As is true of the first few lines I scratch into my sketchbook on a given day, for the first few miles of a run, everything involved is painfully conscious and clumsy. Everything is so unsynchronized, as though every function involved is actually happening on someone else's body in some far off place in the world.  My legs, for instance, always set off flying around with the infinite grace of those waving blow-up arms of which car dealerships seem so fond.  With each entering breath of that first mile, my lungs feel more thinly stretched than the single napkin at the bottom of the fast food take out bag. Even my very mass weighs uncomfortably on my awareness, to the point where I feel like an alien adjusting to gravity on this planet for the first time. In case I've failed to make it clear, there's no part of me that doesn't join this overwhelming resistance against my well intentioned jog. But after some perseverance, there comes a point at which, like magic, all these parts throw down their pickets and resign to working as a single system, and whereas minutes or seconds ago the eight remaining laps were too great an obstacle to even wrap my head around, I'm now able to double the initial intended distance of my run. The control freak part of my brain attempting to consciously monitor the many different functions of running just goes numb, and the process becomes easy, automated, and truly enjoyable.

 I need to get to that automatic state in terms of drawing. I know I can do it, I've done it before, but just as in running, I'm afraid of those first few miles where my face is smurf-colored and my legs feel like they would do a better job an old dining room chair.

So far this is the only piece I've worked on this summer. Was experimenting with a way to color in my linework, didn't go so well: