ALAN TEW's Virtual Sketchbook

Bram Stoker's Douglas

2011-11-13T15:59:00.000-07:00

After completing a 24-hour comic (err, pencils) and feeling proud of the accomplishment, I found myself craving "productive" art more than my typical doodles, and my Nausicaa fan art was an outlet for that. Also coloring the comic -- which I'm doing on the side now (about 8 pages in, in my spare time) -- has helped. But random doodles still exist in the cracks, and craved a posting.

This one was done shortly after the 24-hour comic, I think. I struggled with inking my comic -- I'm constantly disappointed by the reminder that inks are a separate craft that needs separate attention devoted to it -- so it weighs on my mind. This page was done with a .05 micron, which was one of the pens I liked for getting tighter control and results. The page wasn't a very conscious exercise, though, as much as random fiddling. The thick lines are the result of a Sharpie being within my line of vision, and the sitting kid is a absent-minded reaction to some thoughts I had thinking about "the Marvel way" of doing inks, with constant black shadows inhabiting all manner of corners in the drawing, without serving as much an "iconic" purpose, if that makes sense. It just seems like throwing down thick blacks is fine but kinda defeats the purpose of high quality paper and colors, whereas it might have once been very fitting -- even iconic -- in comics when you have really basic colors, as they were when limited by newsprint paper. Regardless, it's hard to deny the utter sexiness of a finished page of inked pencils. Ryan has them littered all over his office, and it's all drool-worthy. And then there are the Sean Murphy and James Harrens of the world, but I'd like to make pretend they don't exist, thankyouverymuch.

Quick doodles. I think I've mentioned before that I like toying with the idea of getting much more explicit with my art, but still have a hard time diving in. Again, the drive is not to satisfy a base urge so much as just master an aspect of human figures that I can't say I'm good at drawing... but yeah, just sketchy innuendo for now, and there are a million other things to get better at, like non-people and inking, to name the tip of the iceberg.

Before doing my Nausicaa piece, I doodled a bunch of costume and equipment to make sure I didn't mess up anything. Lately I've been in a Miyazaki mood, and I really feel like re-watch all of his movies. It actually depresses me that so many people watch those movies and only output a "meh," or just dump in the "bleh anime" bucket. I love how many amazing, character-driven moments are in his film, and Spirited Away might be my favorite; in it, I see a perfect combination of a singular vision, a "Through the Looking Glass" classic storytelling feel, a powerful character arc, and the perfect balance of un-insulting elements of danger and triumph that parents and kids can enjoy at the exact same level.

After doodling up equipment, I was going to dive right into a fan art piece but I stumbled into another problem with having done the 24-hour comic (err, pencils), which is devaluing solid pencils. Because I approached the comics with roughs before finals, I became sloppy with my pencils for layout purposes even without plans to then re-pencil them later. But perhaps more than that, the approach in this sketch just looked like most of the moments I see with Nausicaa -- always kicking butt and never really doing the wrong thing -- and that's why I went with the "Nausicaa effed up" approach with the final piece.

After awhile I just wanted to do my the usual thang. It was nice to just bust out some figures and play around. I'm sure going back to what you know has some rejuvenating merit, though I also hope it doesn't also mean feeding habits instead of growing past them. I'm too busy anyway. Blerg.

Showing my latest comic effort to friends has been interesting because the content is so heavy. I got in the habit of showing both 24-hour efforts -- the Zombie Bean and my new one -- to reassure them that I'm not just brooding with spooky angst. I really just wanted to do a unique take on the fight-to-enlightenment story and it happened to be heavy. But yeah, it reminds me of how many more comments and seemingly better reaction I got to the Zombie Bean story. People love the beans. And I do too, it's just not what I'm most proud of in my art. I suppose those things don't have to align.

This past Tue's draw night was more silliness. I drew an old man with a big dong because those two things don't meet up often enough, and the character had kind of a celestial quality to him. But any resemblance to the big guy is coincidental, dammit. The girl without pants has kind of a Keira Knightley (sp?) vibe to her because of the underbite (?). In my opinion, Keira has a very un-traditional look at certain angles. The last doodle-figure of note is Douglas. He had a hairdo that kinda reminded me of Dracula's do in Bram Stoker's Dracula, so I pinned him with a similar surname. Thank you, Doug. The scribbles on the page are notes from playing RoomBreak on the iPad -- a kinda fun / irritating puzzler.

Nausicaa Fan

2011-11-02T20:08:00.000-06:00

I recently brought Nausicaa to work for Ryan to read and it's reminded me of how much I love it. It really is one of the best comic series I've ever read, and expands hugely on the content of the movie. The art and story -- by Miyazaki himself -- are absolutely breathtaking and the world it explores is mind-bogglingly cool. While my Nausicaa bug was still buzzing, I thought it would be fun to do some fan art at this past draw night. The end result is a bit hard to dissect without some visual aids, so I decided to employ some grays to lend a helping hand; after scanning in the drawing, I went to work.

And this is the result -- a quick-and-dirty job with a bit of subtle lighting thrown onto the various layers. Her sandwich received a bit of color and focus because I worried it would be hard to spot. I tried to get as much of her equipment as "correct" as possible, but I noticed her plane had a few details missing when I was perusing the manga later. Other weird errors include a lack of dark-patches on the tips of the critter's ears, and getting the date wrong... I meant for it to read 11-1-11. The biggest issue I have, however, is her squirrel-fox (or whatever) not being that clearly in the foreground -- it might look like a human-sized rodent sitting on the tree.

After coloring the sandwich, I was curious what the two main character focuses would look like with similar, simple treatment, and gave it a whirl. Fun.

24-Hour Comic: The End

2011-10-17T10:30:00.002-06:00

Follow this link or scroll down to read my comic from this year's 24-Hour Comic Day. Warning: it contains male nudity, graphic violence, and adult themes. I have lots of commentary but read the book first to avoid spoilers.

Process
All done? Let me start by confessing that I cheated. I spent the week leading up to our marathon writing, drawing roughs, and printing them in blue on letter-sized paper to pencil on the big day. I never expected to get more than halfway through but I pulled it off with a bit of rushing and the next day I spent about 8 hours doing minor touch-ups and adding dialogue and sound effects on the computer so I could post the final result here. The blues were left in so you could see them, but if I go through with my urge to color it, I'll post a nicer version later.

Why Cheat?
My previous 24-hour comic was completed under the official rules, which require that you go in empty-handed -- without a story -- and exit with a finished comic. I'm really proud to have accomplished this in the past, but last year I aspired to something more than I could do within the time frame, and hated the taste of failure. Now my attitude towards 24-Hour Comic Day has changed -- because a 24-hour marathon takes so much out of me, I want to stack the deck to make sure it ends with something to be proud of. Since I participate primarily to actually produce a full-blown comic then I have no qualms with cheating if it helps me do so. In this particular case, cheating made me really happy.

Idea
The idea used for comic was the same one I failed to execute on at the previous year's 24-Hour Comic Day. It's basically my take on the "reach enlightenment to become the ultimate combatant" from stories like Matrix, Star Wars, and Karate Kid, drawing inspiration from a moment in the Avatar: the Last Airbender cartoon series, where Ang was being trained and was told to abandon his desire for someone he loved to reach the final level of power. This thread was abandoned during the series, but I thought it would be fun to create a hero with the same hindrance, only to have the person he loves overcome his problem for him.

Setting
The pit fight seemed like a natural setting for the idea. Roughly, I knew it would be about a pit fighter sentenced to death via combat, and a girlfriend who was in the audience, and who eventually killing herself to help him overcome his desire for her so he could save himself and wipe out everyone responsible. I worried that it would be too hard to sell everyone on the protagonist's rapid ability to fight through his own grief in a matter of panels, but I felt the idea was interesting enough to shoot for it.

Writing (~24 hrs.)
Writing was the time consuming part of the process. I used Excel to map out all of the plot structure beats I wanted to hit, and then paired each one with page descriptions and dialogue that matched, fleshing out the in-betweens as needed. I tried to picture the dialogue and events of each page as best I could, but had sections of broad strokes for things like the Rat Pack fight. If you want me to post the Excel file, lemme know.

In the beginning, I assumed I would have to do flash-backs of the protagonist's love, training moments with the master, as well as some story of what brought them to the arena, but all of this was ditched because it seemed unnecessary to say what needed to be said. Having things as trim as possible was an objective not just for a honed message, but because I wanted plenty of room for combat -- I love when action has lots of panels to breath with little time passage between them, because it seems to flow better, like a movie. I ended up with decent space, though not as much as I wanted. For this same reason, I made a point to run the story past as many people as I could, and listening to their feedback really helped (thanks guys).

Layouts (~20 hrs.)
Layouts took about 16 hours, plus an additional 4 hours or so on 24-Hour Comic Day. Working in Ryan Ottley's office lets me mimic his layout method and use his tools to do it. Each page started as a thumbnail that became the basis for layouts done on the computer using the Cintiq -- basically a sloppy stab at each page. The advantage to this approach is letting you move, zoom, rotate, or paste in reference content until everything feels right without having to erase or make a big mess on a physical page. Then everything is converted to blue and printed. I chose letter-sized paper because that's what I usually draw on. Why mess with a good thing?

Page 01 was going to be a splash of Ben with the camera looking up at the crowds around him, but it didn't offer me the scale I wanted so I was going to go with a straight arena shot (as seen in the right panel). Though an establishing shot seemed fine before zooming in to the protagonist, I like it when heavier movies begin with extreme content so you know what you're getting into, and I wanted to introduce the protagonist, so I decided to put the male nudity and violence front and center, preferably with a top-down shot that suggested someone other than Ben was in control of his fate. The decision to go with a nude protagonist was a simple matter of doodle habits. I first drew Ben nude and kinda liked the idea of using it to enhance his sense of vulnerability, but then worried it would be too much for the reader and gave him some jeans. When I told Ryan about my waffling, he was confused why I wouldn't go with my initial instincts, so I just went for it. I can't say that I feel that strongly either way about the end result, but an angle I hadn't considered was that some readers would find flailing privates distracting enough to actually detract from the story, and that kind of thing can be hard for me to predict.

Page 02 is where I introduce the antagonist and Maria. I never named him because it never seemed important. For his design, I wanted someone visually irritating so even on first viewing you wanted to see something bad befall him. At first I tried making him "fluffy," with garish robes with feathers and other fanciness, but it started to "make a scene," so instead I went to a big hat and elegant curls, and hoped that a juxtaposition of (a) responsibility for horrible events (Maria's tears, the torn bodies, Ben worried about dying and his master dead) with (b) boredom or disinterest in current events would do the trick. He was probably, personally my least favorite design but I didn't see the point in noodling him. At least one friend commented on how they liked him, so that's good.

Page 03 was mostly stat (repeated) panels, so it took more time in post than in penciling. But this page is seemed to be one of the more confusing ones, with people asking whether the corpse was either (a) Ben's master, (b) someone that reminded Ben of his master, (c) someone Ben killed, or (d) Ben's master killed by Ben. I probably could have done a better job to reduce the confusion but it never disrupted the story enough so I let the error sit. It felt kinda like a "B" bug in video game development, where the bug can be nasty but not a show-stopper, and the game has to be shipped, so oh well.

Page 04 sets up Ben's first challenge, and introduces dialogue from the Master to deliver the story premise -- that Ben needs to remove all desire to win. As I mentioned earlier, my original thought was to show training flashbacks with the master to illustrate this concept, but this narration approach let me stay in the present action so I preferred it. The design for the enemies was a riff on the design of the larger, following gladiator, who was nicknamed Shark. An animal theme seemed okay, so I went with a "Rat Pack," probably inspired by a previous draw night where I was toying around with the idea of using mice / rats in the game I'm working on in place of humans.

Page 05 leaps into the action, and though the first panel got quite a few compliments from friends, it's an example of something I dislike in comic action -- unclear motion from one panel to a next. Comics, especially American comics, often feel like martial arts in movies where the director cuts the action too much and hurts the choreography of the fight, but either for time, panel economy or laziness, I ended up jumping from the introduction of the pack to one of them getting knocked out of the scene. The transition from panel one to panel two is closer to my preference, where the action from one to the next is pretty easy to follow. I also enjoy little details, like the middle rat spitting out his toothpick before his attack.

Page 06 initiates the transition from falling to rising action. On paper, my entire story tries to follow a three-act structure in very compressed form. Act I was introducing the main characters and conflict (Ben, antagonist, and Maria; Ben must survive the arena) and Act II would be rising and falling action leading to a big disaster (ups and downs of fighting, with Shark defeating Ben). Everything is compressed out of necessity but I liked starting Act II with falling action (the Pack hurting Ben) because it set up the lethal nature of the fight and let me show Ben tapping into the source of his power ("desire nothing...") for rising action. I wanted to make sure to have Ben seem a bit super-powered when he taps into this reserve so his final abilities (i.e., running up walls, etc.) didn't appear too much like "mumbo jumbo" (left-field moments that are hard to swallow, like vampires appearing in the middle of your zombie movie). Ideally, everything you want the audience to swallow is front-loaded in Act I as part of the story premise, but his actions are close enough to the beginning that I hoped no one would be bothered by it. This page has another uncomfortable leap in action, from panel 4 to panel 5.

Page 07 has been picking off the second member of the Rat Pack, and I thought the action here was a rushed but easy enough to follow. Originally, I had the "charging rat" reappear on Page 06 to tackle Ben, who then concentrated while avoiding being bitten while pinned. Ben then grabbed the upper and lower jaw of the rat and rips his head in half. You can see this sequence in the thumbnail sketches, but it required too many panels to set up the action in a way that was readable, so I went with a quick-intro-then-easy-kill (x3) approach to conserve panels. The Rat Pack fight was actually the last thing that I did the layouts for because it was the least important part of the story. As long as I had a fight with the narrated words in x pages, I thought things would be okay, so I finished the suicide and intro pages long before getting to the rat fight.

Page 08 offers a brief reprieve before the introduction of Shark. Sound effects are something I don't have enough opportunities to play with, and they were fun to add after the fact (in Painter, bleh). I like having sound on the page, and it's fun to struggle with the exact letters to use. There are a lot of four-letter, "BOOM"-like onomatopoeia's around but my favorite sounds are the three-letter ones because they remind me of Orc Stain, an amazing comic that Ottley introduced me to. I love the way sound effects are handled in that book, and the pages where I keep repeating three-letter sounds are inspired by it.

Page 09 intros Shark, who was the third character I designed (after Ben and Maria). He was a pretty straight-forward brute but I liked how he turned out. All the pink scars on him were there not just to suggest being in tons of battles, but to approximate gills down his neck so it made him just a tad more shark like. In my original design I had him holding a big cement block by a handle but it was awkward to illustrate that idea, so I just gave him a kind of prosthetic arm with a cement block at the end, which seemed to read okay...

Page 10 is the end of Act II, where everything goes wrong for the protagonist. When I showed Ryan the page (prior text), he asked if it would be better to start with Shark's attack before Maria's reaction, but I explained that I wanted it because her face follows the "but there is someone... that I desire..." narration. This was also an example of me trying to limit text as much as possible. The amount of dialogue I used in the end was greatly reduced from the first draft of the story. Though the action here is okay to follow, it feels really compressed, and I wished I had more panel space for the beatdown. In the end, this was all the room I felt like I could (conveniently) afford.

Page 11 was given space to highlight and emphasize Ben's failure. Designing non-fight pages first probably squeezed fight scenes, and it makes me wonder what the book would look like if I had designed them in reverse order. Hopefully it was the right expenditure. Describing this reminds me of a story technique I heard Pixar uses, where they allot 100 popsicles sticks to a story and place them throughout story beats in order of importance, stacking multiple in one scene if it was more important. This way, they have a kind of "story payoff" chart they can use to know whether they are expending too many company resources on a scene that has too little value, or vice versa. Ryan mentioned that he liked some of my economical shortcuts as I did very little with backgrounds. For the most part, I felt like once I had established the arena, very little needed to be drawn since the audience would know where it all takes place, but there were moments I wanted in my head, like the cheering audience. In panel 4, I knew drawing a bunch of detailed little figures would be too time consuming, and I hoped a bunch of head circles and action lines flying into the air would suggest the cheering crowd.

Page 12 has some crowd, though, since it was close enough that only a few simplified, faceless figures could probably get the point across. The gore on Ben is something that seemed fun and appropriate, but it haunted me for continuity because it disappears as Ben becomes more powerful. I was aware of the problem as I was drawing, but I ultimately decided to skip over the problem and hoped no one would really notice or be bothered by it, because I felt leaving it there would detract from him "powered up" moments. I reasoned that blood cleanup happened as Ben spun around rapidly, but "older" blood (e.g., cuts from the Rat Pack) was dried up by then. A cop out, perhaps...

Page 13 features a flower in Ben's hand and believe it or not, I made a point to try to make sure Ben's right hand was clenched into a fist throughout the comic up until that point. I'm not sure how the flower managed to get through the fight so nice-looking. I can't draw guns from my head but did the gun here sans reference because I had done the layouts for page 14 earlier, so it was fresh in my mind. One of the neat things about doing layouts in the computer is that you can scan in items like guns and play with the contrast until it looks a bit like a line drawing, then just print it out to draw on later with your pencils. I love that.

Page 14 was meant to be manipulated a lot in post, on the computer. The starting idea for this page was a splash page of Maria blowing her brains out, with the panels appearing to break apart like glass so it felt like reality itself was shattering for poor Ben at this moment. The lead-in panel was added later when Ottley mentioned that seeing Maria in the page prior with the gun in her mouth would spoil the surprise on page turn (Page 14 was an even page so turning it in a book would leave the surprise). In the end both panels happen on one page, and it worked out just fine. I struggled to get the breaking glass looking okay quickly -- most of my time in post-processing was on this page -- but in the end I was reasonably happy with it.

Page 15 was the the biggest source of worry in the entire book because it was here that I would either keep my audience because they got why Maria killed herself or lose them because they didn't, at which point they are reading just to finish. I wanted the audience to figure things out alongside the protagonist, so I was overly vague in almost every version of the story, but in the end too many were still struggling with the concept, so I chose narration that spells out that Maria was removing his desire by killing herself. Hopefully if the other connection was strong enough -- that "no desire" meant "super-fighting" for Ben -- then the story concept would click. The visual idea may or may not come across correctly, but the gist is that the glass would still be shattered and messy where Ben was panicking, but appear to be mending and turning white where Ben was beginning to understand Maria's gift.

Page 16 is the last turning point in the story. In Act III the protagonist is wanders (defeated and held up by Shark) without a hope before discovering a new path which is pursued rapidly towards a fulcrum of conflict. For better or worse, I skipped the "discover a new path" part and went right to the point of climax, where the antagonist appears to have won and the climax is peppered with some enhancing tricks I learned about from working with story people. Trick One is the protagonist taking a left-field action (think Luke turning off his targeting computer, Neo standing up to Agent Smith or Daniel-San standing in the crane pose). Ben holding up the flower doesn't have the same impact because it has no skepticism-inducing shot of helping him win but it was my best shot on short notice. Trick Two is a secondary character taking a left-field action that enables the protagonist to succeed (think Han Solo appearing to blast Darth off course, Trinity kissing Neo or Mr. Miyagi using healing powers on Daniel's leg). Maria committing suicide does a fine job, I think. After these events (in any order), the defeat of the antagonist is best done in as little time as possible (in my pages it feels drawn out because Ben takes time to kill Shark before defeating the antagonist) but it was fun to attempt hitting all the beats and think about how it could have been stronger, time permitting.

Page 17 was originally drawn with Ben having normal eyes, as do the pages following, but while on the computer, I liked the idea that Ben goes through some physical transformation to reflect his internal growth (think Gandalf the White). If I get to coloring these pages, it would be fun to add a nice eye-glow until Ben kills No Name at the end. As edited, I worried Ben ended up looking somewhat like a zombie. Hopefully no one reads it as Ben returning from the dead to avenge Maria (but I wouldn't fault anyone for thinking so).

Page 18 is where the action gets a bit confusing. I get overly excited with speed and action lines -- anime-influences from childhood. That's not to say that anime or is confusing, just that my art can be confusing when trying to emulate it. I so badly want to see Ben as a blur cutting his enemy in half like a spinning buzzsaw that whether or not it's actually readable falls a bit by the wayside. I know some people had to pause to understand what was happening to Shark but everyone eventually seemed to get it. Even the last panel confused some because the silhouette-shot wasn't all blacked in, but I think if it were all black it wouldn't be hard to figure out.

Page 19 continues the suerhero spree. It's worth noting too that at 19 hours in -- at 5 A.M. or later in the morning -- things can get pretty sloppy. I mentioned earlier that I spent some time doing touch-ups after the fact, but it was more fixing continuity (missing gashes or scars) than it was touching up bad art. Though I did do touch-ups where it was particularly cringe-inducing I tried to keep the spirit of the 24-hour endeavor, despite my cheating ways.

Page 20 is both my favorite page and the most confusing to anyone who read the book. The effect I wanted was Ben pushing all of his super-power-y-ness into the antagonist, causing his flesh to expand and eventually explode like Thunder in Big Trouble In Little China or Tetsuo in Akira. I always wanted to draw it and just went for it without enough explanation. At first I considered adding a halo or fire around Ben that shoots into the antagonist to help make it clearer, but it seemed to complicated to add effectively at 6 A.M. in the morning after a drawing marathon, so I just let it go. If I color things, I might make the glow from Ben's eyes mentioned earlier surround Ben during the swirl and flow down his body in the punch, shooting out of the antagonist's eye sockets and lighting up his interior as he expands.

Page 21 is also confusing, but the sound effects from the previous panel and the big "BOOOOM" here were helpful to friends struggling to understand what was happening. Prior to the sound effects, people struggled to understand what they were looking at after the sound effects, people at least knew there was an explosion even if they didn't understand why. It seemed that the more a friend was exposed to the same crap I was as a kid (i.e., Big Trouble..., Akira), the less confusion the whole expand-explode thing caused. No excuse, but an interesting side not.

Page 22 was tricky. When I first wrote the resolution, Ben was really broken up about the death of Maria and talked about how he would trade everything just to see her smile again. But friends felt robbed, as though Ben had regressed from his "enlightened" state and made Maria's sacrifice feel like a waste. I thought it was a great comment so I removed words and went with a more respectful approach, where Ben acknowledges her sacrifice and puts her to rest without revealing the innermost feelings at that moment. It seemed to do a better job of showing love and acknowledgement of her sacrifice while preventing the perception of a regression.

Page 23 needed touch up more than any other on the day following, and even the touch-up was iffy. Maria's head was really warped at the angle I chose so I spent some time trying to fix it without damaging the feel of things. It still feels screwy but it's better than I left it around 8 or 9 A.M. Maria's right arm was also altered. At first it disappeared under her dress but that made a bad silhouette, so I laid it out instead, just beneath her gun.

Page 24 is the end. The entire experience was really amazing, and Ryan deserves thanks for putting on an awesome event. I was driven and after I finished -- an unexpected result -- I was on a real high that's lasted for awhile now. I even started painting the book and hope the momentum lasts. I don't know what I'll do with all this work but it was a fun ride that I wanted to share with you, and if you've read this far you have my respect and admiration. Seriously -- thanks.

Fan Gnome

2011-09-24T12:30:00.000-06:00

This past draw night was particularly fun because a close non-artist friend of mine brought his 10 year-old aspiring artist son to join us. It's always fun having fresh blood, though I obviously worry that customary adult language around our table can get too lax. He was drawing dragons and such, and telling me about a game he likes called Realm of the Mad God (noted for perusal later). To inspire him to do more doodling, I asked if he would draw a character that I could then interpret. His doodle was a gnome-like stick figure with a beard and a curly hat and a massive sword and shield, the former of which had a happy face scrawled on it. Awesome doodle.

After that it was just a bit more light sketching, and I decided to do a little more "no-erase drawing," which is in the lower-left corner. I typically don't erase much to begin with, so a lot of drawings might technically be "no-erase drawings" without knowing so. Regardless, I find it interesting that when I approach drawing with this "no-erase" in mind, that my lines really thin out.

No Redos

2011-09-20T11:15:00.001-06:00

More work doodles, this time with some notes on conversations Ryan and I have been having about the state of mainstream comics and comic retail. Ryan encouraged me to post my thoughts on these topics but I haven't gathered up the courage yet. I felt a lot more in my element writing about games.

While thumbing through artist sketchbooks Ryan has bought over the years, I was enjoying me some Wendling and I read that she doesn't like to erase when she draws, preferring instead to doodle the same pose over and over. I believe the thought behind it is that there are positive elements in art that come from not retracting that can be disrupted when erasing to achieve something else -- as though twisting the arm of a drawing can hurt it. It was an interesting notion, so I started doodling without erasing to see what it might look like -- the drawings numbered 1-3.

At work, after reading some Joe the Barbarian, I wondered if mice / rats would be good for my game and I fiddled around with them without getting much traction. Also, on the lower-left is a guy with his hands gesturing. He was my attempt at drawing someone that gestures like I do. I don't think I got the effect quite right, as my hands flop around a lot while I talk.

At draw night it was time for lots of random stuff. The thought occurred to me that I don't draw tattoo'd people that often, and apparently I'm not that good at it when I do. The most fun on the page, I think, is the soldier on the bottom of the page. I wanted to give him a name but have no idea how that one popped in my head.

No Touching!

2011-09-19T17:12:00.000-06:00

More random bedtime doodles. It looks like I was trying to practice some punching there, towards the bottom of the page. I've been reading a lot of comics since sharing an office with Ottley, and I notice a lot of my favorite artists are much better at presenting me with "iconic poses" than "snapshot of real action." I still wish I was better at it myself.

I'm pretty sure this one was a work doodle -- scribbles while I think about mind-numbing code.

This last one was from draw night. I asked Ottley for a rough pose that I could fill in assuming he would give me some iconic action, but instead I think he was trying to "out-Alan" me and gave me a really weird figure. He looked sorry after he roughed it in and offered something more "Ottley," but it looked like a challenge to fill in, so I went forward with it.

Sleep or Doodle?

2011-09-07T22:32:00.000-06:00

I'm slightly behind so I hope to have some updates pretty near each other, covering the past couple of weeks. Now that I'm around Ottley every day and doing a bit more regular doodling, and since I don't have a book to read of late, I've been doodling in bed before sleep. It's a decent way to wind down, but now there are eraser bits on my side of the bed.

This second bedtime doodle illustrates one of the problems with trying to tie drawings together with speech balloons over the course of time on a page. I was too lazy to rearrange and rewrite content so I had to number which balloon came first. I had a fun time drawing the hairy mess; after I had finished the lady it looked like she should be holding something in her hand but I really didn't want to think about it and her expression was kinda "grossed out," so I just started making a mess.

When it got to Tue night I was still playing around with figures. Derek made a comment that he liked it when I drew characters that were a little more relaxed and not in crazy poses -- that it better brought out subtleties in the figure that he likes me drawing. I was just happy to finally draw a banana raping a cookie.

Next up was a face that I fiddled with after glancing over at a nearby artist's (sorry for not knowing names!) sketch of a black woman. I drew some bigger lips and the rest pooped (not popped) out. I need to draw people of differing race more often. And more naked ladies jumping out of bubbles.

This was a tired-er nighttime drawing. I asked Jen what I should draw and she asked for a hamster. I don't really know what a hamster looks like off the top of my head but I went for it. Maybe she was just tired but she started laughing uncontrollably at it. With all the laughing going on, I added a hamster wheel and someone giving him a carrot. Shoddy fun. After fending off the giggles Jen complained about the cold, so I wanted to draw a lady that looked chilly.

More work doodles. The line quality of some of the drawings is a little different than my usual fair, so I kinda like looking at it. I imagined someone pinning their palms to their chin and making a weird pose with their hands and head, but after the fact I realized it just looks like I tried to put someone's head in their hands and did a horrible job of it. Oh well. As for the check boxes: it works fine, it detects the sphere, and it's because I had a logic problem with how I was reading my collision trigger options. I know you were dying to know.

FWOOS

2011-08-28T12:27:00.003-06:00

Check out Derek's colors over my inks before looking over this week's sketches!

Before draw night, I wanted to ink my picture of Bearclaw for Derek to see if the gray thing I came up with a week earlier still produced happy results. Before I began, I played around with the ink brushes to get in the swing of things. The actual doodles didn't matter too much, but I thought someone might enjoy seeing them.

The actual inks -- finished at draw night -- still made me happy with the approach, but of my two light-gray Pitt pens, I may prefer the warm over the cold gray, the latter of which was used here. The next thing I ink, I'll try a warm. It's weird, I was just looking at some amazing inks by James Harren over at Ottley's new side project and found myself wishing I could do stuff like that, but the real point of all this fiddling lately is finding something that matches my pencils, so if anything, I might just be wishing I could wield a pencil the way that guy does inks. O artist envy.

Once draw night got going, it was the usual fare, which I was happy with. I doodled naked ladies, which I always love; hair, which I also always love, and a weird demon-looking fella with scary wings. The page started with a guy on a saddle (top-center), but I had no reference for a horse so I caved.

Sometime last week I got stuck on game progress, and when I'm busy thinking about different approaches to my Unity scripts, I start mindlessly doodling in the borders. That's what this and the next two pages are.

Ink Stab

2011-08-22T10:01:00.001-06:00

If you follow my blog, you know that I occasionally play around with inks. Inks pique my curiosity because it's so important to the comic craft but such a struggle to do without taking something away from the feel of the pencils. This is true even when the inker is the same person as the penciller; it's simply too deep a craft, with enormous room for growth and mastery independent of all the other things you might learn as a comic artist, like composition, design, backgrounds, animals, tech, or any other unusual thing you might regularly asked to pull out of your arse.

This page was done during one of my breaks from coding. Using Ryan's scanner and printer, it's possible to print out "blue line" versions of pages (in this case, two pages) onto Bristol board. This paper was somewhere between rough and smooth, and Ryan let me borrow some pens to play with. My goal was just to find which pens and which inking approach kept the spirit of my original pencils the best, using doodles from the previous day.

I began with a brush pen that is pretty standard (and to my feel, loose). I started with the guy with the outstretched arm at top-center, then moved to the nude female figure, and then the woman with the upturned head at page center. I didn't feel like I had much of a natural grasp with the pen, and I started to wonder how his .3 and .1 non-brush pens might work. I moved to the head in the upper-left, and though it was nicer, I still felt like a lot was lost. I tried going even thinner, using the side of the .1 pen for any fine or any suggestive detail as seen on the pondering boy, with edges done using a .3. It still looked a bit stiff, however, so Ryan gave me a much tighter Japanese brush pen that he says Cory Walker uses (I used the same brush pen for the 24 hour Zombie Bean pages) I redid the edges around the boy and liked the result enough, but wasn't very happy with the process because the thin lines process still felt unnatural to me. Regardless, I tried pushing forward with it, and repeated the approach for the remaining drawings. Any gray you notice on the page came after the next page...

After Ryan looked over the inks, he suggested I use a smoother Bristol board and printed just the Fat Vampire doodle. I began inking the surprised guy with the same approach I used on my previous doodles, but I was still unhappy with the result. I put a finger on what I disliked about the process: when sketching, I intentionally use loose and "sketchy" lines to vaguely suggest shapes that I expect the viewer to fill in with their mind. For example, a lot of times when I'm drawing lines around the nose or even things like abdomen muscles, I'm not making a statement with each line, just suggesting some definition or bounding shape that makes the drawing come together. The problem is inks set those lines in stone and make them pop, and unless it's very thin, it comes across as a very purposeful and important definition. The thin line approach worked in the earlier doodles, but wasn't very natural-feeling because it had to be done so carefully. What I wanted was a solution that let me ink in "suggestion lines" confidently. It struck me that maybe gray would be a decent approach, and I tried it on the fat vampire behind the guy. I used the "Cory Walker" brush pen for blacks and it had a more confident and flowing feel, and any place where I knew I was using "suggesting lines" I swapped to gray and confidently threw those down as well. The end result was an ink job that I felt captured my pencils while being true to the original drawing (in my estimation, at least) all while feeling comfortable in my hand.

I asked Ryan if this approach was okay in comics, and he thought aside from having to figure out how to send larger comic files it wouldn't throw anyone for a loop. At his suggestion, I bought some gray Pitt pens the next day and tried to decide on a gray I like. I'm still deciding on the lightest Warm or Cold gray in my set but regardless, I'm excited to play with the technique more to see if it works on smaller drawings, because the fat vampire doodle was on a pretty big page and I think that helped.

Fat Vampire!

2011-08-21T15:59:00.020-06:00

Some of you are aware of the game I'm trying to solo build, but it might be a surprise how much of a struggle focus can be when working at home. This past week I finally took Ryan up on a gracious offer to to spend time at his office space during the day, and it's been an incredible boon for my work. I couldn't be happier that he's let me work there, or more hopeful that he lets me continue to do so. And a perk of being around Ryan is putting me in the mood for drawing. Breaks from coding have thus far been spent on doodles and practicing with inks. This page is one of the former.

At draw night later in the day, I was in the mood to do some fan art, and picked Derek's Bearclaw. I'm not sure what his age is in the comic, but I wanted to try a "realistic" take on the character. I imagined him as kind of a grubby, poor white kid with a self-destructive streak and aggrandized ego, though I'm not sure how much I got at that with a few lines. Regardless, it was really fun to draw.

My last draw night sketch page began with the guy in the stiff pose and look of surprise. I wanted to draw something for him to be surprised at, and a fat vampire seemed to do the trick. I really the doodle, because fat is fun.

My Brush with Comics

2011-08-20T23:12:00.001-06:00

This a big post about a journey I went on back in 2004. I had just quit my job at Saffire after working for 10 years in the video game industry, and was trying to decide whether I wanted to continue in games or explore a childhood dream of working in comics. I knew that Comic Con was coming up in about 2 months so on the day of quitting I called up my childhood pal, Joe Abraham. Joe was living in Jersey City penciling Hero Squared for Boom Studios. I wanted to hang with my childhood art peer and work on a comic portfolio for Comic Con. Joe agreed to it and I booked a flight to leave the very next day.

The Portfolio
You can see my comic portfolio here. The format is something Joe told me about, invented by Joe Quesada. It's a 12 page portfolio featuring three stories: one team superhero story, one solo superhero story, and one about pedestrian story, with covers for each story included at the end. The point of the approach is demonstrating an aptitude for any kind of topic a writer might throw at you.

The Approach
With the 12-page format in mind, I had a basic plan to spend most of my time brushing the dust off of my drawing skills. Since my drawing had been limited to once a week at draw nights, drawing every day would help me get into a groove and sharpen what I could do, and give me confidence to commit something to the page. I also wanted to do 12 pages in 12 days, waiting two weeks before the Con to begin. If someone liked what they saw, I wanted to feel confident promising them similar work in a similar time frame.False advertising is not my bag.

The Doodles
Every doodle page over that two month period follows -- 43 in total (excluding the portfolio) -- never before posted, along with my usual blather.

After arriving in Jersey City, I split my time between doodling and pressing the flesh in video games. Joe was working on cover layouts for an issue of Hero Squared, and I was excited to help. In the upper-left of this drawing is a cover-rough for the armored villain of the series, holding its hand over the crumpled protagonist, who has Kirby-energy coming out of his eyes. It's probably hard decipher but layout doodles are often done just to get an idea across, with explaining to go along with it.

This next page should seem familiar to a regular visitor -- lots of random figures to get in the swing of things. I often complain that my superheroes look very awkward, and until I start envisioning them not as a person wearing a costume but rather a person-costume hybrid that embodies the point of the hero, it look like ass. I knew this was something to work on, so you see a couple efforts to get superheroes on the page here -- Superman, and someone that looks vaguely like my memory of Black Widow.

It crossed my mind to work on an old comic idea set in a future city surrounded by a vast desert filled with nasty robots (called "viruses," constructed by kids for lulz). The twist to the world is that everyone trains towards a particular destiny in their dreams. The protagonist has dreams of being an unmatched swordsman but nothing about it matches his meek personality. The story revolves around how he comes to grips with this incongruity.

I liked the setting because I could keep drawing shirtless dudes with swords -- a common theme in my work prior -- but there was a hitch in my struggle to doodle interesting robots. I explored that inability here. Two ideas that interested me were, (a) using "non-specific bunches of metal" as seen in the upper-right (with the dark robot head) and (b) limbs made of some kind of accordion-ing bands that didn't require me to figure out robot hinges.

The metal bunches and accordion bands were explored further on this page. I tried to expand on the dark head seen in the previous page with a full side-body shot, and even showed what expanding arms might look like in action (upper-right). In the end, it might have simply felt wrong because I kept struggling to solve the joint problem.

The focus on this older story culminated in this drawing, of my hero reacting purely on instinctual training from his dreams to avoid an attack by a "virus." I wanted to capture the fear and incredulity someone might feel using abilities they don't believe in to save their life from an impossible obstacle. The robot I settled on is kind of a tin can -- at this point, I think I decided that avoiding the logic of mechanics might be forgivable if the picture was fun.

After the robot fun I went back to everyday figures. A lot of days were just me getting comfortable by fiddling on the page.

Two things stand out to me on this page: first is the perspective punch in the upper-right because I remember thinking to myself that I need to get some practice at swinging, dynamic figures, and the second is noting another shot at the hero from Hero Squared positioned at mid-left. I see myself trying to get into the "hero-costume" hybrid by drawing a naked guy and adding the barest of lines to suggest a collar poking out. All the fire on the page is a mystery. Maybe Joe made a comment about how I draw fire, and it led to some doodles.

At the top of this page is a loose shot of the desert city in my mind's eye. I thought it would be a stacked ghetto with a perimeter of devices that prevented the viruses from wreaking havoc in the city proper. I'm not sure why everything is surrounded by smoke / sandstorms / fog; either it had some important role in the narrative or I didn't feel like drawing more. The other figures have more visual variety than I usually doodle, so I think I was getting in the mood for comics, which are filled to the brim with freaks.

One of the things I remember wondering about was curvilinear perspective. I don't remember if I knew an approach to drawing it or if I was trying figure it out on the page, but it explains the center-left doodle. The awkward joy of this page was my attempt to draw someone with Down's syndrome sans reference (bottom-right). I remember it took a lot of light sketching and erasing but eventually I was happy with the result. It might not be accurate, but I was fooled.

This page is more Hero Squared cover roughs. I hope I wasn't pestering Joe with them, but I remember them being fun regardless. I also feel like noting how much I like the top-down view of the character on at center-right. Something about him tickles my fancy.

Though most of my time in Jersey City was spent doodling, an itty-bit of time was spent socializing. I remember one night going into historic downtown for a party and I doodled the scenario from memory as a "pedestrian" exercise. I'm the guy schlepping it up at the table with video game shirt while everyone else parties. What a nerdy Nerdly McNerdlington.

This page is where actual portfolio page roughs appear, about three days before portfolio work actually began. The roughs are for the skinny dip story which -- the last of my three stories. Perhaps it was cheating not doing the roughs on day-and-date of the actual pages! I think they match the final product fairly well, but the look of the girlfriend changed.

This random head doodle was my only output two days before I began my portfolio work.

My first portfolio story was going to be the X-Men so I needed to get familiar with the current team. Joe took us to New York to get some comic reference from the comic shop, and the day before my portfolio work began, I did research and exercises to help me learn how the characters. Characters like Nightcrawler and Marvel Girl were nice and straightforward, but I knew that Juggernaut and the enemy robot (my invention) would be a problem. Why I keep drawing robots when I have difficulty drawing them I'll never know, but I discovered an interesting thing about drawing robots -- that I was much better at it in the beginning of the day than I was the end. Perhaps it had something to do with my patience level and attention to detail in the morning. Regardless, I made a mental note to try to do robots in the morning whenever possible.

X-Men's Beast was the strangest to revisit. I grew up with the blue, furry, and ape-like Beast but in 2004 he was ion-esque. The reference I had did a bad job of capturing this quality, so I wanted to punch it in my version of the character. Even without reference, I found an approach that gave me a consistent look to use in the portfolio X-Men pages. Rough layouts for the X-Men story are also visible on the page.

One of the moments in my X-Men story was of Juggernaut doing the "fastball special" with Wolverine as an unsuspecting participant. Since I was afraid of Juggernaut, I wanted to do some tests to make sure this idea would come across correctly.

Storm and Nightcrawler were came out for fun on this page, along with some explosion tests and Marvel Girl freaking out.

Wolverine was the last cast member to attempt, with more Storm and a lot of random figures.

Robin was also on my mind as my choice for the solo hero story. In 2004, the Robin was a female. It was an enjoyable twist, and I was looking forward to the story I had planned of Robin infiltrating and beating down a bunch of thieves in their den.

The roughs on this page were too crammed for the final portfolio page so I eventually went with a different take. Also on this page is a test for Marvel Girl detecting the robot before he falls into the scene, ready to fight the X-Men.

This was the day I finally went to work on my portfolio pages. Most of it went directly on the page, but there were moments where I drew panels on the side and transferred them to the final page with a light table Joe had handy. (The light table was invaluable!) Also notice the space made for speech bubbles. I knew that newbies sometimes forgot about it, and I wanted to make sure I left room for them.

Eventually I found a backside Beast that tickled my fancy, and I transposed it using the light table to the final portfolio page. I also did tests to see where the "X" on the X-Men costumes would connect on a side view.

The tests on this page were ultimately abandoned.

Still on the first day of portfolio pages, I was worried about my rendition of Juggernaut, and I did some crunching to get his costume to behave a little more logically to my mind.

I needed to break down what Juggernaut looked like beneath the costume before I it started to make sense to me. My eureka moment became the basis for the rest of my drawings of him.

After some final tests, I felt confident in my approach to the Juggernaut.

After finishing the first portfolio page, I did some preparatory doodles for Robin and my final pedestrian story, as well as one more test of the Juggernaut throwing scene. That first page was an enormous amount of work -- the number of hours each page took is jotted down and circled on each page -- but the final product was incredibly gratifying.

The second X-Men page was where my robot appeared. He blasts Beast and Marvel Girl runs to help, but the robot drops in front of her, rising as Nightcrawler teleports her back into the fold. Too much information! The robot was surprisingly difficult to draw -- it always turned out stiff -- until I tried drawing a human figure in the exact same pose and then doodled the robot over that figure. It was a weird trick but it worked great, and I still use it to this day.

I played around with some few poses to see if any of the angles could be useful, but they were looking pretty awkward.

I needed to loosen up, so I did a page of random doodles to get me in the groove of things. After awhile, I felt like I was reaching my happy place.

To make sure I was feeling things again, I did a few tests with heroes. I've always wondered why creators didn't do more with the fact that Nightcrawler was a master swordsman and he can teleport into other objects, so I decided to explore the possibilities. I was happy that my Juggernaut was still looking okay from the previous day.

Feeling prepared, I started on page two of the X-Men story. I used this page to toy around with roughs for Beast getting zapped and Marvel Girl running to rescue him.

Eventually I settled on a behind-shot of the team looking at Beast getting blasted.

I drew out the details and used the light table to transfer the result to the actual page.

Using the robot-drawn-over-human-pose trick, I used this page for the robot-rising panel. Once it looked right, I transferred the results via the light table.

No doodles exist for the final X-Men page because it went smoothly enough, but I have this page of doodles from that day (probably in the morning to loosen up), featuring some silliness with Wolverine, a ring, and a shitty no-reference car.

Being in a top-floor apartment in Jersey City was fortunate because it gave me a lot of helpful rooftop reference for the Robin pages. I remember eating delivery Pizza with Joe on the roof in the evening studying the details of the nearby roofs. It's staggering how many things you need to know how to draw as a comic artist, and having spent most of my life only doodling figures felt like a weakness. On the first Robin page, I actually avoided doing perspective lines hoping my eyeballs would be good enough, and without a ruler hoping it would make the environment seem less "stiff."

The second Robin page to feature a bunch of enemy clones but when Joe found out, it prompted commentary about how much he disliked generic characters because each is an opportunity to do something more interesting.

As I came up with thug ideas, I was haunted by what Joe said. I was concerned about having to do character design for 5 grunts in addition to the actual choreography of a fight scene and complete the page, but it was sound advice and I went for it.

With no real time for revisions, I settled on final thug designs swiftly. The "lineup" was a fun way of highlighting each character, and it made me more excited for the final product. Psylocke because I felt like it.

The choreography for Robin page two was the next bitch. Self-inflicted, because of my gripe that fighting in comics -- much like fighting in movies -- is too often shorthand that didn't allow the viewer a means to collect details about the choreography taking place. I wanted to show moment-to-moment how Robin might actually dismantle 5 thugs in close combat, but with three pages it had to be quick. With a bit of brainstorming and rough sketches, I thought I had a good approach, and I committed to it.

A couple spots needed help, so I used a blue pencil to basic shapes placed and drew simple lines over to transfer with the light table. This relatively bare approach was a nice way of minimizing the work before the final page, where more detail was applied.

No More Doodles
No more doodle pages were made for the remaining pages. The final Robin page was pretty simple, with very little in the way of background and figures.

The Pedestrian Story
The pedestrian story was a lot of fun, but the first page was brutal. I used reference photos from the block where Joe lived, and did the long street-shot (3rd panel) entirely by eyeball and hand, like the first Robin page. On the second pedestrian page I added an Easter egg -- two of the thugs that I designed for the Robin pages. On the final pedestrian page, the trees and grass ended up stiff, but I enjoyed going cartoony with clothes removal as "the girlfriend" does a cannonball into the water.

The Covers
The three covers leftover went quick, and were finished in a single day.

The End Feeling
The net result was really gratifying, and represented a lot of hard work. To this day, I have a strong emotional memory of how difficult it was, and maintain the deepest respect for anyone that consistently turn out a page a day or more. It's a staggering amount of work juggling story, design, composition, and wildly divergent subjects, often on a single page. When I finished, I was reminded of pro wrestling. Wrestlers get addicted to the pain their bodies are subjected to day after day and even become dangerously depressed when injuries leave them inactive for too long. I felt similarly addicted to the grind of drawing comics, and wanted to start another page the next day. Even though it was hard work, I knew it would feel amazing to have a finished comic page to show for it.

The Personal Review
I was pleased with the work, which I felt improved visibly with each story. My speed was still slower than I wanted, but I expected that would improve as I did more comic work. I was disappointed by the X-Men pages because of the sloppy tech and confusion from trying to cram too much information in each panel, but I still liked some of the action involving the robot. The last page of the Robin also felt sloppy to me but I liked the first and second pages, and loved the thugs and their action sequence. Similarly, the last page of the pedestrian story seemed off, but I was really proud of the rest of it, and it really seemed to flow, perhaps because I was getting used to sequential storytelling, or because it was the least established in the first place.

The Professional Review
I thought the reception to my portfolio was good. It was the first year Marvel and DC had dropboxes -- no meeting with editors -- so I don't know if anyone saw the work or cared, but I got one on one time with editors from Dark Horse and Devil's Due and was given cards and positive remarks to follow up on. One of the Dark Horse guys even asked if I would send pages so that he could ink them. My impression from the Con was that if I stayed on it, after a few years of hard work I could probably make something happen in comics.

The Result
But may never know if my assessment was true. After interviewing with some game companies I eventually had to choose whether to go with comics or games, and I eventually chose to see how far the 10 years already committed to games could take me. I never did send that page off to be inked...

Delicious Chest Hair

2011-08-14T13:02:00.000-06:00

I was in a nice doodly mood at the last draw night, but I felt like I didn't have a lot of control over my pencil. I think I was using new printer paper that was slightly thicker than normal, and it made my lines more thin, and I need some time to compensate. It's really strange how finely tuned artists can be to their tools. At some point I turned to someone and complained about how I hated everything I was doodling, but after some time I felt like I was starting to regain control, and I went over some of the first drawings to make them more appealing. You may think the head of hair in the upper left might be one of the poo-doodles, but it was actually the last thing I drew on the page. I wanted to give the hairless head some locks, in the laziest possible way I could think of. My favorite doodle on the page is the guy sucking his chest hair, because he's gross.

The next page was just a few more random bits. The main point of interest for me is Lo Pan. From the moment I saw Big Trouble In Little China at age 11 I've been a rabid fan of the movie; it's one of the few I can quote, and after getting into a discussion about it around dinner time, Ryan pulled out the movie on his iPad and told me to doodle Lo Pan with the reference provided. It was a close-up of his head, so I could only see so much; but it was enough for me to recreate another scene -- one of my favorites -- where he and Egg Shen (sp?) are battling with magical avatars and Lo Pan is wiggling his thumbs like he's controlling a character in a videogame.

Pittance

2011-08-02T19:41:00.012-06:00

It had been awhile since I was at Draw Night because of my trip to Tennessee, but despite jonesing for a visit, I really didn't get much doodling done. Ryan Ottley had brought back some art books from Comic Con, and I was enjoying thumbing through them, seeing work from Andrew Robinson and some-other-artist-whose-name-I-regrettably-can't-remember-but-whose-work-I-loved, and I all I had time to throw out was a quick little doodle, perhaps inspired by some of the expressions I was seeing in the books.

Why this small, second doodle got its own page is a mystery.

Air Mental

2011-07-22T19:40:00.023-06:00

These drawings were done on a plane ride to visit my immediate family at my parents' new home in Tennessee. It was a decent flight -- three hours -- and I was determined to draw through most of it. I remember having fond thoughts of crammed doodles from my last trip to England, and I think was intending to mimic the results. My first page is full of the usual random doodles, but my favorite is the light, rightmost, armless, male figure in the lower-right of the page; there was something about his look that appealed (and still appeals to me).

I was running out of steam by the time the second page began, however, and you can kind of see my lines tire out, until my brain is going bonkers but I stubbornly press on with my pencil. The lines start thin and wobbly with the balding man in the center and kinda waft randomly around the page until towards the end, things almost started feeling disassociated to me, producing sketches like the figure in the lower-left and top-left corner of the pages. I really felt like I was going mental. Too much airplane drawing for me.

The Case of the Missing Nipple

2011-07-12T19:39:00.012-06:00

This was a fun page of productive draw night doodles, random as usual. I remember with the couple in the upper-right, that I wanted to do some figures interacting with each other, perhaps to satisfy my drive for intimate contact sans the explicit content I considered a few weeks earlier. I also quite enjoy the pointed head at top-center. Finally, Jen was quick to notice the woman in the lower-right corner was missing a nipple. Good eye!

Precious Internet Time

2011-07-05T14:51:00.000-06:00

This image is in the running for the smallest doodle page at draw night. Not much to see here, so why would you click on it? No seriously, stop.

The second page, however, is worth every click. Okay, not really, but the female figure in the center interests me because it looks awkward, misproportioned, and imbalanced. That's worth your precious internet time, right?

Star Bubbles

2011-06-21T14:40:00.000-06:00

This seemed like another more-productive Draw Night, with some experimentation in more free-flow, cartoonish faces. The cross-legged fella in the lower-left is interesting because the legs suggest a comfortable sitting position, but his arms are awkward as hell. To his right are squiggles. I like squiggles.

More figures on the second page of the evening. A nice representation of ladies, thankfully, but the Elvis hairdo, tattoo, cupid wings, and star bubbles are equally welcome.

A Challenge or Two

2011-06-14T14:28:00.000-06:00

At the beginning of this draw night I mentioned to Ryan Ottley that I hate drawing Superman because the end result usually looks "off" to me, and he seemed surprised to hear it. I wondered, however, if having him do the roughs would circumvent this problem, so we did this experiment, me drawing over his general shapes. You might look at the result and think it looks bad, but in my opinion, it's a vast improvement over what I might do without said breakdown beneath it.

Draw Night output always greatly varies, but it looks like this was a productive evening. The doodle in the lower-left shows off my occasionally-professed love of drawing body hair; I don't draw it all the time, but whenever I do, it's hella fun. Perhaps the most interesting pic to me, however, is center-right, with the pose that might be too explicit were it completely filled in. I find myself occasionally wanting to do extremely explicit art. This is in theme, I think, with wanting to draw awkward angles to get better at doodling more contact between figures -- and I'm quite desensitized to explicit imagery thanks to the ol' internet -- but it's never something I feel comfortable going through with, perhaps because I'm bad at it or because it's really difficult to shake away how it might be perceived and appreciated. Dunno!

But here's a wiener. Wieners seem less controversial, in part because unlike a vagina -- where you have to go suspiciously out of your way to be explicit -- it's almost impossible not to be explicit with a wiener, and in part because I presume less of the public finds it titillating. Or maybe it's just that no one who knows me can accuse me of trying to titillate myself. Okay, I'll quit talking now; trying to be real and not sound dumb is more difficult than I thought. :-P

Lookin' Up

2011-06-07T13:39:00.003-06:00

This doodle was part of an anemic Draw Night. The girl on the bottom of the page catches my eye because it looks wrong; that her head is too small for her body. I sometimes wonder about the affect of mistakes in drawings ever since Howard Lyon mentioned a master artist who said that not having both eyes of a person looking exactly in the exact same direction generated a subtly more interesting picture. Maybe all deformations in art have the potential to add interest if not swiftly caught by the eye as "wrong"... not that this applies here.

England Doodles

2011-06-03T16:55:00.000-06:00

Jen and I went on an England trip to revisit some of her childhood there and relax with her dad and stepmom. They were outrageously gracious hosts, and the trip was a blast, but we kept active enough that I never found the urge to sit down and doodle. The exception was on plane trips, which is a nice time to draw just to pass the time. The first three drawings, if I remember correctly, were from the first leg of the flight to Dallas. It seems things started smoothly, though, since the drawings don't look much different than the output from a typical draw night.

Things seem a bit bumpier for the next page, though, and when that happens, I switch over to rough figure drawings so the turbulence doesn't seem very obvious on the page. The hairy dude has a swell haircut. Maybe he's Guile's biker dad.

At the end of the flight to Dallas you can see what happens if the turbulence gets real bad. If I want to keep drawing, I let rock, holding the pencil loosely and letting it add to the ambiance of the page. There were no drawings from Dallas to Heathrow, since I had a TV to keep me entertained.

The next page of doodles came during a day trip to Amsterdam. We got up at 4 a.m. and took an hour flight over for the day. The flight is so quick that the attendants barely have enough time to roll a cart through before the captain signals everyone to prepare for descent, but the entire thing makes for a pleasurable bit of doodling.

Later that evening, after lots of walking around, visiting, and eating, we were ready to hop back to St. Albans. For a short flight, I was able to squeeze out a bunch of quick doodles, even a bit of cartoon beans (upper-left) and drama (I guess? Lower-middle). It was mostly fast figures to compensate for the turbulence, but a fun page nonetheless.

Coming back from England we were going through Chicago instead of Dallas; it was a shorter flight, and though I was intent to pass the time with TV, some doodle time appeared when my TV shorted out and I started panicking about keeping entertained for the still-long duration. It was a brief interlude, until Jen graciously shared headphones so we could watch movies together on her TV.

Perhaps my favorite doodles on the trip came from Chicago back to Salt Lake, however. With a long flight and no television, I had quite a bit of time to burn. I had made it a goal to cram all of my airplane drawings onto one page, but after awhile, I realized I had a bit too little space to keep going, and I had to move onto the next page. If I remember correctly, I made a point to alternate between the male and female form, to keep things even. On the drawing in the lower-left, I had Jenny outline a hairdo for me, and I filled it in. I filled the afro shape with what I imagined was a bunch of huge, poofy, long red hair. I miss full pages like this. I need to grow to draw night earlier so I can do this more often.

After the full page of doodles, I doodled the guy in the mid-left of this page and roughed in something for him to be throwing his hand at. It became a very sketchy piece with a particular image in mind, but I became tired of problems in it and didn't feel up to the challenge of sorting it all out and making it look nice. I figured the sketchiness would be enough to get the idea across, and decided to just let it be.

With airpline time winding down, I finished with a simple figure. It was a great trip for drawing; I look forward to the next.

Ch-ch-changes

2011-05-17T15:33:00.026-06:00

The beans, furries, and tiki heads on the page suggest I was in a cartoony mood this draw night, but the point of interest for me is the inked drawing on the right, which started as a really round, simple-lined drawing with as much curves and emphasis on lack of detail and corners. Ottley's inks changed the feeling, adding those detail and edges and transforming it to something different. The relationship between penciller and inker in comics is something that always interested me as a kid, and even more interesting when applied to my own doodles.

The Bold and the Beautiful

2011-05-02T15:26:00.000-06:00

I remember starting this page expressly wanting to draw an effeminate man with a unibrow, and I'm not sure when that urge will strike again. The rest is pretty standard fare, but I was happy with a reaction to the page: though I usually share my drawings with Jen when I come home from draw night, and she'll casually look over them and give me some acknowledgement, this time she mentioned that she rather liked the figure in the upper right. I'm always curious when something catches her eye that isn't a cartoony little bean character.

Not Quite Right

2011-04-21T15:18:00.001-06:00

I tend to like full pages, so this draw night after my trip was a fun one. I remember enjoying the drawing on the bottom of the guy with markings on his lower lip, and I like looking at the weird skull-thing next to him, as well. There's also a bit of silliness on the page, which I miss in my doodles nowadays. Perhaps the most interesting doodle to me, however, was my attempt to draw an expressionless psychopath breaking down a door with his elbow. There's no story context to make the doodle come to life, but it's fun to try to draw a creep.

My second page is another undated doodle that I'm just grouping here. I was thinking about how I rarely draw the human head from a back-angle, and so I gave it a few shots, and was impressed by how much I struggled with it. I'm not sure I ever got it right, but it won't stop me from posting the evidence.

Bay Doodles

2011-04-12T14:42:00.010-06:00

Jen and I went on a trip to visit her mom in the Bay Area. Jen really loves planes but gets nervous flying -- I think her enthusiasm for planes led to too much reading about what could potentially go wrong on a flight -- so I drew to distract her. In this case, I thought something cute would do the trick, like a kitten stewardess attending to kitten passengers on a kitten flight. Plenty of balls of yarn required.

The vacation was very relaxed, and if it's not a very busy trip, I often find myself enjoying some drawing for myself. As of late, draw nights have gotten quite large, but I feel like my creative side thrives when I'm much more within my comfort zone, and I think doodling on a vacation is a symptom of this comfort. It's nice, and on this page I especially like how the upside-down lady turned out.

This page contains a game, but started out to see what some superheroes would look like. I've mentioned before that I hate how my superheroes turn out because I often draw costumes so awkwardly on them -- that they look about as awkward as real-life Spiderman looks in those tights. I'm sometimes curious whether, understanding this, I can overcome it quickly, instead of the few days of superhero drawing it usually takes.

As the vacation doodles continued, I wanted to have a bit more focus on the female form, and did some fun drawings here. I particularly like the headphone girl, with inexplicable stringy bits floating behind her. The thick-lined doodle is also a bit interesting, and might be more revealing about how I think about the human form, for better or worse.

This page illustrates my point about how rusty my superhero drawings start. The Wolverine here looks goofy, and it would probably take a few days of dedicated superhero drawing before it would look okay to me, let alone to someone else. Since I'm posting it, I can only hope there's something interesting in watching me struggle.

My last page from the trip actually includes a couple (mostly) clothed figures, which is certainly a break from the norm. The trip was great, and I was really happy that a lot of comfy drawings came out of it. Joy.

Gender Balance?

2011-04-05T14:34:00.000-06:00

It looks like this page has a few conscious efforts to include the female form. The reason I fret over the male / female thing at all is because I know I don't enjoy drawing women as much as I draw men because there's no pressure drawing a man. It seems that whether a male figure is grizzled and ugly or has model looks, the drawings are interesting to myself and others but when I draw women, even supposedly grizzled and ugly, I feel there's an unspoken standard of beauty that must still be met to reach a baseline appreciation as a drawing; as though without it, it is not worth the viewer's time. If women feel this same pressure in real life that I do drawing them, they have my heartfelt sympathy.

Sniffin the Pits

2011-03-27T14:28:00.011-06:00

This is the only other doodle from March, but I like with the expressions and figures in it. On the page you can see a comment that reveals some self-consciousness about not drawing enough women. And some pit sniffing, of course.

Ode to Hugo

2011-03-07T14:18:00.000-07:00

I started this doodle on my couch and it vaguely reminded me of Hugo from the Street Fighter series, as a younger wrestler perhaps. I remembered that he always had some ladies around him that looked a bit rough-and-tumble -- that in my mind probably did a lot of the dirty work Hugo wouldn't -- but couldn't remember what they looked like, so I just kind of winged it, going for a mohawk and taped nipples look without ever getting around to drawing the actual mohawk.

________ Fare.

2011-02-22T14:12:00.001-07:00

Standard scribbles from a standard doodle page. It looks like I was in an expressive-cartoony mood as well. "Chillaxe" was a name idea for a cold-themed villain squad Ottley was coming up with, but I don't remember if it made the cut.

I didn't date the next page of doodles (curses!) so I'm lumping it with the previous, especially given its similar content. I never cared about caretaking in my doodles until I started up beeba.net forever-ago, but now I've been particular about caretaking ever since.

Flick It Good

2011-02-08T14:07:00.000-07:00

The center of attention in my first doodles of February, in my opinion, is the tentacle-porn star. I think I didn't feel like drawing junk on 'im, and it morphed into something much more unfortunate. A doodle is bound to draw the short stick now when it comes to private parts. We can't all have nice peckers.

The next page has a bit of collaborative goodness in it. I felt like having someone else come up with the hair for the head in the upper-right on the page, and Ryan Ottley was kind enough to oblige me. After crafting a fabulous 'do, Ryan offered to ink the odd pose in the lower-left. Looking at the inked character after the fact, I decided it could use more purpose, and penciled in some guck to flick around. I will say no more.

Dance!

2011-01-25T13:48:00.002-07:00

Hello everyone. It's about time for another picture dump as I've been hoarding since the new year. Bad me. I usually dump everything into a single post but I want to deviate this time, posting images in smaller groups based on date.

I'm not sure if January was just really busy or if I didn't feel like drawing after a bunch of New Year vacationing, but all I have to show for it is this. At least the drawings seem happy being released from the prison of my pencil. Dance!

200

2011-01-09T18:30:00.000-07:00

I just noticed I'm a hundred followers shy of standing against the Persian armies. Very exciting, and much thanks to everyone who has followed me for all these years. I think I posted my first sketch blog in... checks his hard drive... 1996... yikes. Anyway, it's been really fun to post drawings and meet people, and I appreciate everyone's part in helping me achieve this happy little milestone.

So drawings, right? The holidays have been a predictable mixture of stress and sickness (might they go together?) that have made draw nights irregular, but I plan to visit this upcoming Tue to get 2011 moving along as it should. My doodles doodles pick up a few days before all-powerful Christmas, with some typical fair. It's always typical fair, but this time with a bit of interaction of the hugging variety. Awww, hugging. Little fella may be insecure, and his lady-friend tolerant enough... for now.

The last doodles of 2010 come from New Years Eve, celebrated with Jen's dad and step mom in Park City. After a bit of yummy dinner and drinks everyone got inside to get toasty and warm and rest away some holiday bloat (and jet lag). I thought doodling would be a nice way to pass the time, and this was the result. The 31st of December is also a very special birthday time, which I apparently saw fit to commemorate with a hairy, action-packed version of the Thinker... I guess.

I hope everyone is still kicking after 2010 and has much more kicking in store in 2011. Cheers!

Lady-Butt

2010-12-18T10:46:00.001-07:00

Another week, another gaggle of figures. It seems rare when I'm inspired to draw anything specific of late, and when that happens, I just like to throw figures around. I drew the head in the upper-left and just didn't feel like going anywhere with it. From there, I decided to try an upturned head and it turned into an upper-body drawing (middle-left). Then I started drawing a knee and lower leg that turned into a full body (middle-right). His chest was a little squished, but I decided not to give a fuuuuu... and let it be. The lady-butt (bottom-left) was next, actually inspired by perusing Manara's lady-butts on Google images earlier in the day. Finally, frustrated by the abundance of nothing-but-figures, I did a few expressions, starting with the fella sticking out his tongue (bottom-right), the weird cartoony fella biting his lower lip (left) and the quick profile (right) before it was off for some late-night pizza.

Bizarre-O

2010-12-12T19:57:00.000-07:00

I forgot my clipboard and pencil at drawing this past week. I'm really particular about the pencil I use, which I think is the same one I've used for the past 10 years or so... some generic Pentel with a really big eraser. Ryan Ottley hooked me up with a different pencil but the lead was a bit dark and I felt like it threw my drawing all over the place, although the difference may not be very visible to you. Anyway, the first page was me getting used to pencils until Tim hooked me up with a lead that felt a bit more normal (I usually just use HB), and so I was happy. Out of the doodles, I enjoy the fella that looked a bit like Lion-O. I forgot how buff that cat is, since he always looked like such a doof.

Then, before we took off for eats, I just played around with what started otu as a profile. I imagined some kind of crab-like shape for a mohawk, and decided to make it fingers. That's it!

Let It Hang

2010-12-04T19:32:00.000-07:00

There was supposed to a blizzard the week of Thanksgiving, and even though it was a no show, it stalled doodling for a week. Standard fare here, just random scribbles. The only thing that started with a purpose was the nekkid fella. I was in the bathroom the other day clipping my toenails after showering (soft toenails, yay!) and Jen looked over at me and said, "You should try drawing this from my perspective." Draw night was a few days later, but I gave it a whirl. It's getting a bit personal now, innit?

Chips!

2010-11-25T10:01:00.002-07:00

Happy Thanksgiving!

The voices from comments haunt me, and motivate me to try, for another while at least, to stay regular with updates. Unfortunately, the November month has been a bit hole-filled when it comes to drawing. This past Tuesday, the crew stayed home to avoid an incoming storm, but I hadn't posted my doodle page from last week.

The upper-left drawing I started fiddling with was influenced by Ryan Ottley working on a Eve zombie commission he was working on next to me. Ryan luuuvs drawing the macabre -- it flows naturally for him -- which I can't relate to. I think it's because he loves detail in his drawings, and I usually prefer the opposite. When I was learning to draw, I would look in the mirror and ask myself, How can I duplicate this image with the least number of lines? Not that there's no way to simplify a zombie, just that I haven't tried. Maybe I should try.

Other highlights? I liked the guy with the bag of chips; I drew his left hand and it seemed like a good hand for opening chips and I ran with it. I also enjoyed the kitty shape; I don't feel good at animals, but I'll take random stabs to see if I can evoke the right animal in others' heads (it seemed to work). Finally, I enjoyed the nekkid lady in the background. I actually made a point to avoid the ween this week just because it's all over the place in my doodles but what really interested me about her was the stylization in the face; the non-eyebrows, ultra-long lashes, and lack of lip detail aren't things I fiddle with. Man I can blab a lot about not much.

Stuft Update

2010-11-21T18:44:00.001-07:00

Howdy folks. Been awhile again, and I thought it was high time for another update. I get to begin clear back in... lessee... June, so you'll have to forgive me if my memory about the doodles has faded, or at least I humbly beg you to. This first drawing features one of my furry mammals. I often just let animals form from lines without caring too much what they end up as, and I kind of enjoyed this big-headed rat-dog. His speech bubble is just a random snippet from a conversation nearby, and to help it make sense, I added some beans to assume the roles of its subject.

This guy was just a lonely little doodle on a big empty page, as was the next drawing. They needed some buddies to hang out with, but missed out. Maybe they would have fallen in love with each other. Not drawing them on the same page is shameful. Then again, she looks kinda judgmental. Maybe it's best they never met.

I really enjoyed this next doodle page and the flash of inspiration that led to the drawing on the bottom right. I don't think there was any rhyme or reason to it -- I was just drawing a glassy-eyed critter when it must have reminded me of those weird critter costumes people subject themselves to for any ol' kind of cash. And they all brood in there, I just know it. And it gets hot, so sometimes they have to take off their pants. A page without ween? If only.

This draw night, when I looked over at Rachel Hunter's sketchbook, I noticed this really cute octopus in it. I have kind of a thing for octopuses (suck it, octopi) and asked her to doodle one on my page. When I passed it around at the table, someone thought her critter was what the nekkid guy had tucked under his legs. I hadn't seen that, but thought it was funny. Afterwards, anyone else I showed the drawing to that didn't notice it disappointed me oh so deeply.

I think there are a few flat-as-a-board doodles to round up in this post. I find them fun to draw on the feminine form, perhaps because they allow the "other bits" to catch your attention. *stares* Or perhaps not! It's at least an interesting deviation, as is the little cartoon guy. He seems quite sure of himself. Even my cartoons hate pants, I'm not sure I appreciate the letters he's leaving on the page. Fella needs a toilet.

My next page is a bunch of chicken scratch. It looks like I was in an angular mood that night. It also looks like I was exploring my jealousy of Ryan Ottley's power poses, and that I was trying to see if I could duplicate them in thumbnail form before transferring them over to a more-rendered doodle. Not that I ever got around to rendering here. This desire to acquire some skill at power poses appears later, as well.

I'm not sure what it is about girls with long hair that make me want to add giant flowers to them. There's another older drawing of mine of a dark-haired girl with her long hair covering her breasts holding a giant flower, and this one has some hibiscus-looking thing tucked behind her ear. Maybe that's the clue -- it might be my exposure to a traditional Hawaiian look of long black hair and flowers behind the ears that gets pricked whenever those long strands appear. The knife though? Not so much part of that look.

Ah, and we finally get to the subject of this post's title. I was really looking forward to 24 Hour Comic Day this year because last year's was successful and (as such) gratifying. I was nervous that even hoping to complete a whole comic again was setting myself up for disaster, and that may have been the case. Of course, my ambitious certainly didn't help; whereas I focused on a purely cartoon-looking book a year ago, this time I wanted to tell a more serious story with fully fleshed out figures and some fighting. I let my initial page of doodles kinda tell me what I was in the mood for and I attempted to stick with that theme, as you will see over the next three pages. (The guy in the lower-left reminds me of the Ryu intro to one of the Street Fighter II games -- I can't remember which.)

A particular idea began to form in my head of something a bit more dark. I really enjoy stories that use combat as a marker of spiritual enlightenment, like Star Wars, The Matrix, and Karate Kid. And having recently finished the surprisingly-terrific (and surprisingly-appealing-to-my-girlfriend) Nickelodeon series, Avatar, on Netflix instant streaming recently, I had in mind a moment when the series protagonist, Aang, can't achieve a final step of enlightenment in his mind because he can't leave behind his "material" love for a traveling companion named Katara.

Blending the two ideas, I imagined a character who was captured by some evil baddies, and forced to endure some kind of gladiatorial combat. He succeeds for awhile with his great skill, but eventually needs to reach a more enlightened state that requires giving up his love and fear for his lover, who is hiding in the audience. When she sees his impending death because she knows his internal conflict, she can't bear it and commits suicide in the audience before his eyes. Devastated but freed of his fear for her, he is able to hold back his anguish long enough to tap into his final power, defeat his opponent, and even bring revenge to the arena overlords, who thought they were safe in its upper levels behind countless guards.

I was excited about the idea, but ultimately couldn't bring it out of myself. I was going for a more realistic style, so it was complex, and some of the visual ideas that needed to come through in the narrative were difficult for me to get across, too. I kept fiddling with and fiddling, and time was bleeding, and I became frustrated enough that I knew I was heading for disaster. Doing a 24-hour comic is grueling, and started debating whether it was worth experiencing the gruel when I was off to such a frustrated start. I decided to take it easy and head home. Disappointing. But the past four pages were my only output after 4 hours or so, and I think I made the right decision.

Just a few days later and it was back to regular draw night fare. More bodies as usual. I love the female form as pictured here, and really wish I had more of it on my day-to-day pages. I think I've mentioned before that I feel a lot more pressure for it to be aesthetically pleasing and I think that's why I often avoid it. I feel like the male form lets me get away with more errant lines and bad decisions.

Though this page is just a lot of stick figures, there's some interesting exercises going on here. Since I always lament my inability to swiftly drum-up dynamic superhero poses, I thought I should practice it a bit more. I started with the top-left, just trying to get a good punch, but even looking at it, I felt like it was missing a lot. I didn't think he looked like he was leaning enough into the punch, and the limbs are so straight that a lot of energy are sucked out of them. I had Ottley draw the same pose in blue pencil, and the lower-left is the result. I drew over the pose to get a feel for some of the differences. There's a lot more curvature from the left hand to the right as well as in the back. I also asked him to draw someone throwing an object at another character, and you can see that in the lower-right. That sketch is revisited in an upcoming page.

This page was fun because it features silliness, lots of pubic hair, and some super-pits. I don't remember if it started with the werewolf head or body -- either is completely plausible -- but the woman's pose was just another exercise on the page. At some point it clicked in my head to combine the two, and it became a theme on the page. Even the egghead got in on it. Way to go, doodles.

For the longest time I struggled with bigger broader body types, but I like to think that I've gotten better at it.

I mentioned a few drawings ago that Ottley's throwing pose would come back, and this is where it happened. I still had drawing dynamic figures on my mind, and this was the latest experiment. I had him sketch out the figures for a larger version of a rock toss and then went to work filling it in and made some adjustments as I did. When I asked Ottley to sketch it out, I just mentioned a guy throwing a rock at another guy, and I noticed that he put the focus on the victim, who in this case was catching the rock. I thought, yeah, I should put the focus on impact and tension in the interaction, which is at the catch, or would be on the person being hit. So I tried to place myself in the shoes of the catcher and wanted to get across the feeling of the rock sliding under his fingertips or the weight of the rock forcing his feet to dig in the ground. I changed the placement of arms and legs and tried to foreshorten the tension locations, and I'm not sure it all worked out visually, but I thought it was a good superhero-pose improvement over what I might normally doodle.

After getting Ottley's help, I decided to fly without training wheels, and started to draw one character backhanding another. As previous, I wanted to put the focus on the tension in the scene, so I foreshortened the fist against the other character's face. I tried to get some curvature and not just straightness in the attacker's limbs, and felt fine with the victim's body kind of becoming a twisted noodle, even having the head almost turned around 180-degrees, since I thought it helped emphasize the impact. I fiddled with the drawing a lot -- it wasn't very time efficient -- but I was pleased with the final result.

Then I took a break with a simple doodle...

...before trying again. This time I asked what I should draw and Derek suggested I draw a woman kicking another guy in the face. I chose a side view, but think I should have stuck with the "foreshorten the impact"-approach I had started. Regardless, I thought it still had some good punch. It looks like I focused primarily on getting a nice extreme in the attack with some curve instead of pure straight lines, and I never finished the victim, which sucks. I hate being a lazy bastard.

It was about a month later that I hit my next draw night (what happened?) and it looks like I had forgotten about my exercises, and just focused on tricky poses, with the guy in the lower-right being the most tricky (and compromised, hum). I also threw in a bean because when I show Jenny drawings at home, I always score extra points for them. Prolly my favorite image, though, is the upper-left, all twisty and disheveled. And the text in the upper-left? Notes jotted down while playing through Metroid: Other M.

This doodle is me playing around with visual ideas for the game I've been working on for the past year. It's still a long ways off. Apparently, it's hard to program a complicated game by yourself without prior experience. Silly me. I'm still trying to figure out when to spill the beans on what I'm more-specifically doing, though, so I'm not going to say much more than that.

Almost caught up now. This is from about a month ago. I'm not sure what's up with me and guys that look like Bert, but yeah, there's a guy that looks like Bert there, clawing at his face. I think the girl running was just a superhero-pose thought, just like the guy with the Superman fly-pose. I partly chose that one just because it freaks me out to draw. I always found the pose kinda awkward, so I wanted to see how it would turn out. And the op scribble's interesting to me, because I know I was imagining tons and tons of leg cross sections, trying to swirl a line around his legs as I extended outward from his pelvis in my mind.

Last but not least is a doodle from a few weeks ago now (I'm already falling behind again), which is a nice, chuck-full-o-figures page with different styles on it. I like all the deviations on it, like the three figures in the lower-left corner of the page, the little in-action figures running and catching, and monk penis. Yeah, why not?

Until next time, which I'll try to make sooner than later...

Magic is Stupid

2010-06-26T12:05:00.000-06:00

I've been reading a lot of Drizzt books lately, trying to connect to some of my junior high reading to see if it's still as much fun as I remember it. For the most part, it's been a nice return visit, but at 14 books in, it's managed to burrow far enough into my consciousness to appear on the page a bit. I have no idea what kind of costume elements the characters wear, really, or how to draw any of it, but oh well.

I'm continuously haunted, lately by a reminder someone left me to draw more women, and if I remember correctly, this was one of those intentional endeavors. Believe it or not, I always feel a little self-conscious putting any detail into the most naughty of ladies' naughty bits, even when it's just a line. Weird.

As per the comments from my last post, I knew that I needed to do something more enlightening, and this post was the result. Juuust kidding. Honestly, I was just happy to see a return to commentary and humor, as with the return of the "crowd o' figures"-style pages, just because I miss it from the old blog. That's my kind of enlightenment. In general, I have a lot of disdain for woo-woo, and perhaps that eeks through a little with the bean magician. Beans!

There's a gap in my drawing of about two weeks for some reason or another (part of it was a trip to Portland; a city that has my approval (Hi Emi!)), but this past week produced a crowd o' figures that made me happy. Perhaps my personal fav is the guy in the lower-right, with his shoulders on the ground, but the attempt at an upside-down twisty-dude mid-left keeps catching my attention because it looks a bit off even though I was fairly happy with the result as it was doodled. Shrug.

And wrapping things up was a quickie I did when I ran out of page space, while we were inhaling sushi and tonkatsu. Yummy.

Drawing Gaggle

2010-06-01T10:15:00.000-06:00

My drawing has slowed after spending my days scripting. My brain is mush by the time I get to draw night. For awhile, I thought my creativity was also dying -- that doodling was becoming less interesting to me -- but it was just paranoia and slumping that went away with time. The gap between this and my last "regular" posts was intentional because I missed the comments that seemed less forthcoming when I updated every week. We'll see how my evil plan turned out...

Ever since quitting my job, printer paper has been a bit harder to come by, so I sometimes appear with no paper to doodle on. Luckily the guys spared me this comic page to scribble on. Derek's been doing these amazing "PrintCutPlay" cutouts from IPs that he likes, and when he was working on a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle version, I felt compelled to join in on the action. I used to love the Turtles back in their violent days and different artists would do different interpretations of them, in the days before the more cartoony TMNT appeared. I started doodling Donatello, but didn't feel like fleshing out his Bo staff. Not sure who the guy on the bottom is, but he seems Vampire-y to me.

Next up, nude forms of the male and female variety. Nothing particularly noteworthy about them, except her extremely long neck, and his terrible hair. Actually, the fella's belly reminds me of my own. Must... defeat... belly...

I remember doodling this next one at home, rather than coming to draw night. I must have felt really frazzled after a particularly bad day of coding so I just sat down on the couch at home and fiddled around. Both images are meant to be the same girl, but I'm pretty bad at keeping a head consistent between frames; I simply never practice it. Still, hands, feet, foreshortening, semi-stylized body, weird hair, and some complaining notes from myself make for an interesting page, methinks.

The most interesting thing about this one is the face in the upper-left. The style of drawing is fairly uncharacteristic of me, I think. I usually like pretty squiggly or flowy lines, and the impression the drawing gives me is more angled and precise. It just strikes me as an odd thing to come out of my pencil. The rest are the regular goofy doodles, but the fella with the big arm is fun for me to look at.

Um. So this one is a bit more obscene. I'm not sure why I share everything but there it is... a guy slapping his own penis in wah-wah-wah-waaah disappointment. Thinks just never work out for this hunky garden gnome or his lady, do they? Nope.

I'm not sure if this was in the same draw night, but this was a quick experiment of "space marine" shapes for a game prototype I'm fiddling with. I'm not very good with the sci-fi tech stuff, but it was fun just fiddling, even though it's hard to read what's going on with the doodle. I found it helpful, at least. :-p

It's hard to remember much about this doodle, but I kinda like the "thick" figure of the guy. Most of the figures I draw are pretty wirey. For some reason, the stick figure up top keeps catching my eye. I think I hadn't done any action shots in awhile, and I was trying to imagine a good pose for some kicking forward at someone or something else, and it just lacks that punch. Some people (like Ryan Ottley) consistently churn out the awesome poses, and I'm always, always jealous.

Next up, more space marine junk. Just fiddling with stylized figures trying to find out what kind of stylized body might be fun to look at. The whole realistic-stylized warrior thing seems a pretty common in games since TF2, but meh, I enjoy looking at it, so the exercise was fun.

Where the last two pages came from the couch, this was at another draw night. I'm ashamed that only one teeny doodle came from an entire night of drawing. I must have been yapping about something else. Damn me to hell.

And one week later, still too little to show. I think it was after this night that I was starting to wonder if "art" was just slipping from my bones. The drawing on top is one of those "create something creepy on purpose"-type doodles, and the bottom effort to fiddle around with a "gritty" Link, just turned out all wrong. I think I was starting to feel discouraged with both output and quality.

Next week didn't do much to assuage my fears but didn't send me spiraling further downward, either. I got to do a bit more space-marine-y stuff, and I think someone was asking me about how I think about shapes in the body based on the figure in the lower right. If the drawing makes you curious about how I approach it, feel free to torment yourself with my ramblings on google video.

But things started to feel better for me. I had fun with this page of figures, and was happy to do the "full page of doodles again." I think I came late and drew fast this night, and since we've been adding lots of new people to draw night, I think it actually inspires me to put more interesting things on the page than I might with the pressure-free zone my close friends provide. Who knew the pressure would help?

Still feeling the full page thing, I did a repeat performance a couple weeks later, and had Rachel rate my figures in order of preference. I like seeing what other people respond to, and I should remember to do this more often. There are sometimes interesting surprises between what I like and others like. I'm not sure the drawing she rated with a "3" would have earned it without the appendage she added and signed.

Last up is another montage. I remember more about this page since it's the most recent. The character at top-right has head and body hair inspired by the excellent Geoff Shupe. And I particularly liked the lower-left and cartoony-middle guys, because they were very abstract, follow-the-line drawings with interesting results. Hope you enjoyed browsing the latest haul.

Missing Links

2010-05-31T17:19:00.007-06:00

Heya. I'm in the middle of a much bigger update and found a few drawings from last December that tried to slip through the cracks. I'll have none of that, even if they're hard to make sense of. First up is a doodle that features a nice pair of bewbs surprisingly overshadowed by whatever-the-hell is on the male character's head. I think I imagined some kind of corn husk or something, but every time I see the drawing my brain says "banana." Faulty wiring, no doubt.

Next up is some Christmas doodling, made "Christmas" by the "Mele Kalikemaka" bowl-cut on blondie up top. I suppose the most eye-catching part of the page is the mass of flesh in the upper-left, contributed by the signer, but my personal fav is the fella with the helmt. I was trying to explain what a Hawaiian helmet looked like, and doing so from memory was bound to be accompanied by a certain amount of fail. Still, it's interesting for being out of my safety zone. I also like the monkey-looking fella and the egg-yolk-fire-headed guy. Fuller pages of doodles are fun.

Last but not least, a quick doodle on the edge of a work-page from my desk. The rest of it (not shown here) is full of hand-written notes about one of my game prototypes.

Bad Robot

2010-02-27T12:17:00.003-07:00

Just a quick page this week. Inspired by some robot-looking guy Ottley always draws in the Invincible comic (sorry for not knowing his name), I wanted to doodle a robot of my own. Kinda meh, and for some reason the swirly-arms really bug the piss out of me. You know what? I hate drawing robots. I think it's because I want my lines to be grounded in reality, and I just don't know enough about how robot joints would be assemble to allow for proper mobility, etc., etc. Enough about that. The other doodle of the girl is me swiping a cool drawing from Rachel Hunter's page (she was sitting next to me) and doing my version of it. I should do that more often; it's fun.

Stabby King Ottley

2010-02-20T17:36:00.000-07:00

Since the last update was so huge for stalling, I thought I would try to get more consistent again, to keep updates digestible. I scribbled on a couple pages this past week, and noticed that my mind was complete toast from scripting all day, and that my drawings were a lot more jerky and thin as a result. When I can't control my pencil as well, the lines turn out more angular and sparse, which is kinda interesting. The first page is full of typical scribbles, but Ryan Ottley did a penis and hand/head pass that I had him initial, so that everyone could see exactly where he improved what was on the page.

The next one seems a bit more orderly and purposeful, but I was just trying to see what I could do if I embraced my out-of-control lines. It made kind of a cool female figure, a little more dynamic than usual, perhaps; which in turn inspired me to ask for a pose from the King of Dynamic, heir Ottley. He gave me a rough figure of the guy on the bottom, and I went to town on it. When I showed him the drawing, he complained that the stabby-bits "were swords." Whiner.

Big Update

2010-02-14T18:17:00.001-07:00

More of my time has been spent on my LittleBot blog, one of the unfortunate byproducts of which is reduced inclination to spend time on this blog. But I keep drawing, and the desire to update grows with each one; though the more drawings pile up, the more work it involves. Screw it! It's a long weekend, and I need to get some doodles out of my system.

Most of the doodles are typical of what I do on Tuesdays, and this first one doesn't break the mold; mostly exercises in the human figure and line flow. The drawings in this one are fun for me, though, and I particularly enjoy the drawings numbered "2" and "3." The other day I saw someone with a bizarre figure, and I'm often stunned at how different everyone can look, and I wish my figures were as diverse, sometimes.

This next drawing is just odd. I must have been thinking about the exercise Ottley often does of drawing a nice rack and putting the most despicable head on it. Looking back, I also like the guy sitting on his hand. It kinda works for me.

I usually don't press down and drive for dark lines, but this page was an unusual exception. I don't really draw figures with swords as much as I used to, so it's interesting to see a bit of a throwback here. I think I used to care a lot more about the overall flow of a page, and used to add a lot of swirls and smoke to help balance whatever was on it, but this time the swirls are just breath, I suppose. I like swirls.

Ahhh, a nice busy page. I really like busy pages, and am sad that I don't make them as often. November 10th was clearly a prolific draw night, though; my page count has been about "one" on average, for the past few months, so it's nice to see something with more content on it. This page also reminds me of Tom, now departed to Seattle (and dearly missed), because I asked him to rate each drawing from 1 to 5 "dots." He liked the boobs, but my personal favorite is the guy in the lower left. I like the extreme angles.

The voting continued onto this page, and I liked a lot of stuff on it. I don't draw women often enough, but I've been a little more interested in fat on them of late (I think?), and I like the drawing with the interesting distribution of it, bottom-middle. I also like the cartoony nature of the guy in lower-left and the guy at top-middle, but probably my favorite is lower-right. It's just got some good motion to it, methinks.

And the drawings (and ratings) just kept on coming. I remember that when I drew the top-middle girl, I purposefully had eight strands-with-curls coming off of her head, like an octopus, and I added eyes to it even if they wouldn't normally go there. The skull-guy is fun, and someone mentioned a character it reminded them of, but I don't recall the name. I hate drawing Batman and Superman, so I drew them both (low ratings!) and the minimal-lined fella with hearts is kinda fun to me.

This next one was an Ottley pose that I drew over. I've said it a million times, but I'll say it again -- I love how much more striking his poses are. I just have a hard time thinking in those silhouettes, probably partly because I love pushing myself with awkward poses, but it's really fun to do a strong figure now and then, and pal Ottley is great for it. He's always happy to share poses with me. (Thanks!)

The product of this next one might not be that interesting, but I thought the process was after drawing the eyes, I handed the drawing to someone else to have a feature added. So different parts -- furry gut, chicken legs, pig ears, beard, nose -- were all added by someone else, subject to some "editing" by me. But I don't know everyone's signatures by sight, so I don't know all of the contributors! Hmmm...

The next page is just scrap, though the guy with the monkey-features is kinda interesting to me. At top-middle, it looks like some fine young lady is giving herself a good time. And I don't usually fuss over drawings, but I remember spending a lot of time fussing over the gal right in the center of everything . I kept adjusting her breasts in particular, trying to get them to read right to me. I probably could have spent more time on other elements, but all-in-all, it was a fun angle to doodle.

This next page is a little more creative to me. An ode to Tom is top-left. (I guess the little peanut-doll reminds him of Tom?) This page has a little more emotion, which is nice. Happy gal in the lower-left, and the guy in the upper-right is a little interesting, even if his arms are distractingly bulgy. The guy in the upper-right totally has that Star Trek-alien vibe. Just throw some makeup on his forehead and the sucker's clearly built for space-faring. :-p

And hooray for another full page. The silliest thing I remember drawing is the cube with musculature at top-middle. On paper, the guy with the pursed lips at middle-top-left is the one that pops the most, but I probably enjoy looking at the girl in the skirt (lower-left) and the little devil (middle-bottom) the most. I just like the dynamic stuffs most.

Pages like this one are also rare but enjoyable. It's not often that a doodle comes together looking as though it started with some grander vision. If I recall correctly, I began with the girl's head, just trying to make it pretty with simple features. After that, I threw some dirt all over her for contrast, and that made me want to add some nasty friend. In this case it's some oversized rodent with markings over its eyes. I like the blend. It's a little faded, but I kept it true to the lines scanned from the page, which were pretty light, too.

The past couple of months have less content in general. I'm usually knee-deep in some coding for my prototype when drawing night comes around, and since I moved in with the girlfriend (<3) the drive to our regular doodle site got longer. I always have fun, but I tend to get there too late for substantial doodling. I need to fix that. On this page, I rather like the girl middle-left and the guy top-right. It has a lot of hands on it because I felt like my hand drawing has gotten kind of crappy of late, so I wanted to spend a bit looking at my own hands to get a feel for them. Still kinda stiff, but hopefully just the exercise helps improve things.

This next one is a quick goodie. I like the flow on the drawing, even though I can't decide if someone could actually do that with their arm. But good, flowing lines and expressions are fun. I drew the guy on the right first, and wanted to give him some to conspire with, so I added the older guy on the left. His fist is super-lazy, but I like the box-shape of it.

Though the spiky-haired shirtless guy is usual fair, I really like this version of it. There was something about the angle or tightness of the lines that reall appealed to me, making it at least a happy version of "more of the same." I just can't help myself from drawing the same ol' damned thing. Ha.

This was a one-pager that was quite fun. It started with the guy on the left, with his completely wonky eyebrows and mustache. I went with the flow, and felt like he needed a furry collar, so he got one with a puffy jacket. But all of my energy was spent on clothing his upper-body, and so I had no left for below. Poor fella. The lady next to him began with her face, and I got Rachel Hunter to add some hair and design some clothes for her. I like her style, and maybe ruined by adding seaweed (or something) to her hair. The last drawing of note is on the right, which looks like a programmer I worked with, Pete Wilkins, completely by accident. If you know him, I hope you also see the similarity.

Another nice page-o-figures. I remember feeling like I was doodling too many guys again, and purposefully started adding women. You can see that I was aiming for some stronger poses here, at least with the upper-right drawing, and the more angular flow in the doodles. The twisty pose of the gal in the lower-left was pretty fun to draw. I just love how the flesh of tangled figures mushes together sometimes; it's a lot more fun to draw than always-separated limbs.

This drawing is the kind I begin right before everyone picks up their drawing stuffs for sushi. I often start a doodle that I want to finish, so I just throw on a few features and call it good. I remember spending quite some time to get the features on her face as clean as I wanted, and I also remember giving her bigger eyes than I might normally draw, which is odd, since big eyes tend to make drawings more likable (re: Disney). But the drawing was a bit plain, so I added a candy-cane question mark with a pepper-mint point. Yum.

When I come home from drawing, I usually toss my clipboard of printer paper onto the arm of the couch and forget about it. Whenever I glanced at it, my attention was always caught by the figure in the lower-left. I think I just like the way his features turned out. I usually don't bother to define ribs at all, but that single line was kinda compelling. *Shrug* who knows?

Sorry again for doing this all in bulk! It would be a lot easier to read (and update!) if I would just post more often. It's on my mind, and I'll try to post closer to Tuesday this week. Oh, and Happy V-Day!

24-Hour Comic: The Zombie Bean

2009-10-19T18:39:00.010-06:00

So I did a crazy thing. After spending last week vacationing, I drew a 24-page comic in 24 hours. It was painful (physically, even) but produced my very first finished comic, ever. Below is a detailed account of what the experience was like.

Before I start, I first want Derek and Rachel to know how much I appreciate them for opening up their home for this experiment. The environment was awesome and I'm not sure I could have produced this in a less comfortable one. So hats off.

Second, you probably want to read the comic. I think reading all of my thoughts will ruin things a bit, so come back when you're done.

All done reading? Okay, let's talk about the process. When I arrived, I didn't fully understand what I was getting into. A few years ago I dropped in late on a 24-Hour Comic Day to visit Derek and Ryan. somewhere between 10 P.M. and midnight and was able to pencil about 7 pages in 6 hours or so. Not bad, but I remember it being a grueling experience. Those wee morning hours are rough -- I'm not the spring chicken I once was -- and I just didn't have the stamina to keep going without the investment of earlier pages. But the experience was good because it gave me an idea of how crappy those hours and that pace can be, and how hard the entire thing is.

So I went in with a few rules born from experience. One, I would come with lots of coffee and food. No time for breaks. This is rough stuff and I needed as much time as possible. Two, I wouldn't draw any humans (I clearly broke this rule, but just a little). I wanted something easy to draw, like the beans I always do, or the bot I made for the indie game studio I'm getting off the ground. Third, I would spend time plotting everything out. As much as I enjoyed random plot from one page to the next, I felt like the effort petered out and became increasingly incoherent with exhaustion. I knew I would spend some time developing characters and plot, and then catch up when penciling pages. Fourth, I would follow a traditional three-act structure for the story. I actually had the Hero's Journey in my head when I did the random comic, and I felt like following the structure roughly helped me when I was stuck. Armed with these few rules, I went for it.

The first page is some scribbles demonstrating these rules. Ignore the checklist, that's just some scratch from the paper I'm using. I started my night doodling the beans I thought I might go with. I already had the bean with the cape in my head, and I knew I wanted to play with some characters based on stereotypes because you don't have to spend as much time describing their character to the audience because you already "get" them. After a minute, I had a rough idea of a bigger bean and a little bean in the Looney Tune's relationship with the "tough dog" that acts like boss, but is really afraid, and a "little dog" that is tougher but doesn't realize it yet. Since I knew "acting tough" would be the big bean's weakness, I figured some bad situation and pressure from the little bean would have to give him the impetus to overcome his fear and save the day. At first the beans were going to be nude, but once I drew them, I saw that I would have trouble telling them apart, so I went with the cape on the big bean since I was already familiar with that accoutrement (see profile image), and my profile picture featured a grumpy bean. I wasn't sure what to do with the small bean. At first I gave him a Ninja Turtle cowl (whatever those are called) and some nun chucks, but I didn't like the cowl on such an "ordinary kid" personality, since it seemed too much like a traditional comic hero on paper. Just then, I had the thought that he could have a hairdo that was like a bean sprouting; you could see the leaves coming off the top of my head, and some readers might "get" that, so I went with it. Finally, I knew I wanted LittleBot in the comic since I had recently worked out how to draw him. Upon doodling him, though, I saw that he looked too much like the beans, so I used some of the ideas during my LittleBot brainstorming to make him seem less bean-like and more mechanical, including lines for his arms and legs, wide-set eyes, and a split head (like a South Park Canadian). Up top are my quick notes on what big bean's arc would be, and you can see some Hero's Journey ideas (the laser pointer "gift," although it being found ended up being the "inciting incident." The numbered chart on the left was so I could keep track of progress and time. each number is an hour, and when it hit, I knew that piece of time was lost forever. This chart freaked me out frequently, and was a boon throughout the night. The last drawing was the cat, which popped in my head, when I tried to think of characters that could threaten the beans.

At this point I glanced over at Derek and saw that he had a ton of information about what his comic would be about, and I freaked out. He had a bunch of plot points in order that he would go through, and I thought it would be a good idea to go through mine. A rough structure was coming to mind, and it was really useful to make notes about certain beats that needed to be hit as the story moved forward. Knowing that showing big bean's fears early, or having the robot endear himself to big bean so he would feel bad later were important notes to have. Looking over the list, it seems like almost all of it was used, which is cool.

With that worked out, I thought it would be a good idea to do some thumbnail breakdowns of the pages. I started with the 2nd page, but soon realized that I would need an establishing shot, and so added it later. But I only made it to page 5 or 6 before I worried that too much investment in thumbnails may not work out when actually applied to paper. So with my story notes and first 5-6 pages, I decided it was time to give things a whirl. I only returned to thumbnails later (around page 15, apparently) when I was worried time was running out, and that I would have too few pages to resolve the ideas in my head. More on that later.

I decided to post this page since it was in the scanning pile. Shortly after setting out to draw the comic, I realized I had no idea what dimensions a comic was. Asking around, I got 2x3, so I copied someone else and measured 6" x 9" on my printer paper. Once I had that, I just connected the points with the brush pen Ryan gave me for my birthday so I could see the borders through any page I put over it. I used this to roughly denote where to draw and separate panels, and didn't care about straightness, since 24 hours is too short for being anal. I didn't add the "third" lines until about halfway through my comic, when I got tired of eyeballing it. Everything was in place for the first page.

The establishing shot worried me right away because it seemed a bit more detailed and I wasn't sure if I could pull out a house from memory. But I just went for it, and it worked out okay. I knew the house would be raised a bit because from the rough plot in my head and notes, I knew I wanted to exploring under it with a laser pointer. The houses where I grew up in Hawaii were always raised from the ground, unlike Utah (here) where everyone has a basement. After finishing the pencils for the page, I grabbed my pen and inked it. In hindsight, I'm surprised I did that. I think I was just excited to use Ottley's pen, but I don't remember thinking inking was important, and it adds a lot of time to the work you have to get done. But I'm really glad I just went with it. In addition to this being the first complete comic I've ever penciled, it's also the first complete comic I've ever inked. Those of you that visit the site often know I'm not very experienced with inks, so this was quite the leap. There were many times when I was filling in blacks when I became terrified of what I was doing. The guys kept saying I could add it later, but it didn't seem in the spirit of 24-Hour Comic Day to me, so I just went for it. It's probably worth mentioning, too, that I was stressed out of my mind from pretty much start to finish on the event. I perpetually felt behind, even when Derek was encouraging. I think I was about 3 hours in when I finished the first page, and that scared me. I hoped it was because I was drawing stuff that made me uncomfortable (environments).

In this page. I know that the inks are all over the place, since I used three different pens. I could have tightened up the images for release, but I thought it would be cooler to capture the look you get when you just stare at the paper, like I try to do with all of my sketches and inks. The main pen I used was the one Ottley gave to me for my birthday. The second were two more he let me borrow. I used one to create fade-off brush effects, and the other to fill in space (towards the end, since I didn't check it out until the 20th hour or so). I also left in pencil, since I was too afraid to erase it, and didn't care that it was there.

On this page, I just wanted to show the characters' default relationship with each other, and introduce the cool device. The laser pointer design was actually based on a laser pointer my roommate used to have, and tortured his cat with. Later, Elias came up, looked at a page, and said, "is that supposed to be a penis?" I had no idea he was referring to the laser pointer at first, and initially got super frustrated at the idea that my beans looked like penises. What was I going to do about that? But it turned out he was talking about the pointer, which is true. It does look kind of like a penis (especially later, since the division line in the drawing kept moving upward and making the "head" to "shaft" ratio more penis-like). But it was based on a real pointer (from memory), so I decided it didn't matter. Besides, each page up to this point was inked as soon as I finished penciling it.

This was the panel I had to start coming up with names. My girlfriend, Jenny, has a sister that was thinking up names for their incoming baby recently, and while out to dinner brainstorming (i.e., conjuring joke names) with them, the name "Mars" popped in my head as a really great, unusual name for a boy. So I decided it was a good name for the small bean. Another note is in the dialog. I never use the word "sick," but I notice kids using it all the time. (I sound so old. Anyway...) It seemed like a good way to differentiate between the two characters in style. I also show in this page that the big bean is basically a scaredy-cat, which I repeat again when they go under the house. Finally, I thought it was interesting trying to figure out how to represent the laser pointer, and that evolved over the comic. But one of the things I liked was little particles of dust being represented around the light. It may not read that way, but that's the mental imagery that conjured the "effect." Ryan asked me later why their was a panel division here. I'm not sure. I think I felt like suggesting some passage of time was helpful in getting across that slowed-down moment when big bean thinks he's being impaled by something.

The beans' familiarity with technology is something that wobbled quickly. The last page suggests that the big bean had never seen a device like this before, but in this page, the small bean is quick to pick up on its laser pointer status. But making the beans somewhat familiar with technology was important, because I knew they'd be dialing a phone later. This is also really the first point where the stereotype of big bean becomes really clear, since he's being kind of a cocky ass here. When small bean talks about things they could do with the laser pointer, the last thing he said was something about exploring in the dark, but it kinda ruined the next page's setup, so I struggled to think of things you could do with a pointer, and remembered that making your fingers glow is fun.

This page was a little interesting just because of the perspective flip on the beans. Over the years, I've learned about how people perceive characters in a line on a 2D plane, and that flipping the perspective around can be really disorienting without the right setup. To offset the effect, I had the speech bubbles connect and look like they're twisting between panels, I had the characters make contact with each other, had an interaction playing out (the choking), and used light and dark to help flip it. When I finished inking the darkness in the last panel, I thought it was a little empty, so I grabbed my birthday pen and added some creepy squiggles that could be dirt and rocks. Kinda rushed, but I liked the effect on the page.

So this is another "weakness" moment for big bean. Part of the idea was to emphasize it with some shock from small bean about his hesitance, and making that pressure big bean into getting into a scarier (i.e., more pressured) situation that could force more extreme emotions from him. Looking back, I think these earlier pages had more interesting expressions (e.g., tongue out, adjusting cape) because my brain was still fresh. It's amazing how much your mental capacity deteriorates over the course of the night. I was really nervous about drawing the laser pointer in the dark. I had no idea how I would approach that in inking, and was conscious of where I was inconsistent with darkness lines (e.g., no darkness on the beans' bodies / faces) for fear that I would fuck up the inks.

Some of the dialog here is interesting I think. When writing big bean, I would just think of myself in a casual conversation with a "little brother" type. So stuff like "nerd" came out. I figured if that wasn't in-style right now, it would just reflect big bean's age. I'm not horribly out of style but not that in, either. I hate funky handshakes as much as I ever did. Exploring under the house was interesting because I used to dig around under my house when I was a kid. I still have this powerful imagery of bird feathers and bones that I think our cats made a mess of, perhaps after pressuring birds under the house to pounce on them (I don't know). Since there was a cat in the story, I got to include it to make big bean a bit more scared. I think I conquered the pointer-in-the-darkness inking okay, despite my raging terror. The one frame in light might be a little weird, but I felt like I got away with it okay. That's the target in 24-Hour Comic Day -- getting away with it.

Around this point I remember getting pretty scared of breakdowns. In my head, at the time, I thought of the robot as the inciting incident, and near the end of Act I, when really the laser pointer was it. But the bottom line is I felt over a third of the way through the story and still not to Act I. Not only that, but I wasn't sure how to make the robot appear in the story. The idea came to me by accident. I imagined myself in big bean's situation and I know I would feel like I was attracting danger to me if I had a laser pointer on, so I felt like he would want to turn it off. That also made for a fun moment with small bean, because I could have big bean over-explain himself by asking small bean not to freak while small bean is innocently cool with it the entire time.

The darkness gave me the happy accident of giving me a way to make LittleBot appear. And it also let me get a page done faster without me intentionally trying to "cheat." This made me very happy. I really enjoyed drawing Pete, the big bean, in the last panel. I remember nudging Derek and asking him if he looked properly terrified. It's fun to draw a character and just feel what they're feeling, and imagine the expression I'm forcing through my face at that moment, and trying to capture that feeling. I wish that process didn't fade as the night goes on, because it makes the character moments seem that much more fun to draw.

If you look back at the first sketches of the characters pre-comic, you'll see that I used the same pose of LittleBot and Mars, the small bean here. This also happened by accident. When I showed Derek the early sketches of characters, I pitched the idea that it was an image of Mars' reaction to finding a robot. It seemed funny, so I kept that in mind for the actual moment and used it. I thought Pete, the big bean's dialog was a little odd in the last panel since finding a robot might be cool (even if scary) at first, but in my head, the entire comic had already unfolded and it seemed like they had known each other for awhile. Problems in story presentation as a result of being the story creator, like this, was a new thing for me, and it was really intriguing. This is one of a few pages that I finished doing "block" inks for, later. I felt like things worked without the blocked-in shadow, but set it aside to add later, since I thought showing light leave Pete as he sat there alone would add a little subconscious tension to his situation.

If you go back to the earlier thumbnail sketches, you'll notice a lot of pages missing, including this one. For pages 7ish-15, I just sketched in my breakdowns directly on the page and tightened them up on the fly before inking them. At this page, I was really worried because I had no idea how to get the characters into the house. From what I remember, there was no "cement" area for parts of the house (i.e., I could crawl from one end of "under-the-house" to the other (I think)), but I didn't think this would bother the reader, so I just went with it. I was worried, too, that the hole wasn't apparent, so Mars points it out. I dislike it when I use text to overcome problems in story, since I've heard the best stories can be followed without dialog, but I did this in a few pages. Not that this is a serious transgression. There is a hole kinda drawn there, and both characters are looking and pointing at it. But I digress... This page was also set aside to block in inks later. The top panel, even all white, seemed pretty alone and desolate, even without the black.

I wasn't sure how robot would make it out, but the arms-thing worked well. Later, I noticed that you never actually see him leaving, and I hope this comes across okay. I also wasn't sure how the standing-on-the-laser-pointer idea would read, but I think that turned out okay, too. This page was actually really important for Pete, the big bean. If he only hated the robot, then he wouldn't have a reason to overcome his fears, so I knew I needed a moment like this, where LittleBot was doing him a few solids, and buying him some points with Mars (hence the Mars encouragement). Good ol' LittleBot. What a pal. At this point, it was rather late in the evening, and I still had a lot of work ahead of me (12 pages!), so I started to freak out, and decided not to ink the last two panels or anything after them until I had the rest of the comic penciled, for two reasons. One, I'd rather have a complete comic in pencil than an incomplete one in ink, since I could always ink it later if desired. Two, I knew my art would keep deteriorating as the night went on and I tried to make up for lost time, so I had to put energy into "creating" since I could always "trace" later.

This is where I start to break the no-humans rule, but not egregiously. I actually spent awhile trying to figure out where the characters would appear in the house. At first I thought it should be a scientist's workroom to explain where LittleBot might have come from, but I was too worried about drawing it, and wasn't sure how to get across the scientist's demise. I still wasn't sure if I could (or ever did) get the latter across, but I felt more confident drawing a bedroom than a workroom, and just ran with it.

Due to my uncertainty, I decided it was time to revisit the thumbnails. I roughed in the rest of the comic in thumbnail form and you can see how I followed it closely, except for this page. In the thumbnails, this is actually pages 15 and 16 kludged together because I was so worried about not having enough space to end the story properly. Sadly, I did free up a page nicely here, but didn't work out the final page the way I had hoped (see below). Coming back for inks, all my aches and pains.

There's not much to say about this page, except that I was worried about the beans' location, and the drawer being clear without dialog. This was another of those spots where I was mildly frustrated to have to "explain" the situation rather than show it, but others thought it wasn't hard to tell what was going on. Earlier, I mentioned putting off inks until the pencils were done. At this point, I was speeding through the pencils the fastest I could to make up for lost time. I don't say this in defense of quality because I'm happy with how things turned out; it's just that the stress at this point was memorable.

For some reason I had a really fun time writing out what LittleBot was saying. It was easy to imagine noises as he walked around doing things, and I thought it made him cute. I struggled a bit with the beans' expressions over what they were looking at, but had a fun time drawing Pete, the big bean's drooped-down mouth in the last panel, even if it looks kinda weird. I think my favorite panels in drawing comics have been the ones where you can follow the action like frames in a movie, and the transitional "BOINK!" jump from LittleBot from panel two to three gives me that feeling. I always thought Katsuhiro Otomo's books were amazing this way -- they always had a cinematic feeling reading them. They also underlined how sad the plight of the comic artist is, where they spend tons and tons of time producing art that readers would speed through in seconds. Otomo's books were also fast (but fun) reads.

I actually finished the comic about a little over an hour ahead of time, and got home before time was up, so I added red to this page where there was none to begin with. It was really hard for me to convey what was in my head here. The comic was pretty cute, and I just love juxtaposing some morbidity with it, kind of like a dead body in Stand By Me, because it makes the characters seem like they're in that much more of a real situation. In my favorite family entertainment, it's not "family" because it's got tame content, so much as it's real content spoken through a more innocent lens. Not that this is family entertainment, as the language here indicates. But anyway, I had this thought in my head of LittleBot trying to help out his dead creator by giving him batteries. I thought the image of a dead guy with a cat purring next to him, with LittleBot trying to help, would be a way to make the whole thing freaky and cute at the same time. But alas, what was in the creator's head and what landed on the page didn't quite work out, I think. I used a red sharpie on the pool when I got home because it was hard to read what was happening in black and white.

And so here's LittleBot trying to give his dead creator batteries to get him active again. It's also another moment where the characters are saying things that I wish were better illustrated in action. I worried about how it was all coming across, but this wasn't the point to stop and think about it. I was still really stressing for time. It was also around inking this page (after finishing pencils and circling around to ink in bulk) that I noticed how much physical pain I was experiencing. My neck was killing me (and still hurts 2 days later) from craning it over the table for 24 hours straight, the tip of my thumb felt like I had been bashing it on wood like a martial artist strengthening their bones by slamming them against something over and over (and it still feels smooth, like the fingerprints were mushed off), and my drawing callus (on my middle finger) felt like I had a very-sharp burning / stinging sensation that made me grit my teeth every time I squeezed a pen into my fingers. But I ignored the pain completely; I just had to finish 24 Hour Comic Day once in my life. I wanted to draw a comic!

This is the setup for the clash of characters, and where Pete is put to the test -- my comic's baby version of where everything has gone wrong for the protagonist and he will need to change his ways to get through some impassable situation. I kept trying to press the sadness of LittleBot trying to start his owner with a battery but I'm not sure it ever registers in the confusion of things. That's probably where I should have used some "tell" in lieu of failed "show," but again, things really break down at this time in the night. I think most people would tell you that everything is cool up until about 3-4 A.M., where things really start getting loopy. Everything is funny, and there were plenty of laughing fits going on throughout the night over the dumbest things. Speaking of dumb things (that might secretly be not-so-dumb) Jason Alderman introduced to a song that I became obsessed with about a combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell that needs some listening. I think we listened to it about 6 times that night. Apparently, I have Scott McCloud to thank for this pass-along.

Here is where Mars unloads on poor fraidy-Pete, and gives him the resolve to do something about the situation. It may have been around here that Derek broke for a much needed nap. At the end of the night, he mentioned that using a brush-pen might have slowed him down since it requires a lot more focus, saying that using two set-thickness pens would have made the process much faster, and at that moment I thought back to the pain I was feeling in my hands from gripping my brush pen so tightly as I visibly winced inking my final pages, and wondered at how useful that information would have been earlier. I don't have regrets because I like the results, but I'm not sure I would have done it the way I did, knowing what I did post-24.

This is the cat page. I worried a lot about this because in the thumbnails I had very little space for Pete to get the cat to dial 911. I think it ended up okay, but this is totally a "tell" moment instead of a "show" moment. Still, time. I had to keep going, and even if it doesn't come across, the cat montage panel was kind of fun to draw, clearly without reference. Also, as another example of stupid things being funny / acceptable at such a late hour, I totally didn't mind having a bad-pun one-liner from Pete in the last panel.

The last "tell vs. show" moment is in this page. C'est la vie. At this point in sketching, I was still freaking out over how much inks I had left to do, but relieved that I had hit the "pages are penciled"-stage of the evening. Ray had beat me to the punch, and maybe Geoff did, too. He had a smaller (13 page?) but completed comic that was fun to read. At this point in inking (later), I was really anxious to read what everyone had made. Derek had some hilarious stuff going on next to me, and I heard rumors of some really creative word balloon-stuff going on from Jason (that I later loved), and I hadn't even glanced at Ray, Ottley, or Elias' stuff because I felt so much pressure to hit the deadline. It was incredibly intense.

And if I have one regret, it's that I was too wasted to eek out a proper resolution to the story, since it cuts out after the climax. At the time, I instead thought it would be funny / meaningful to juxtapose the "robot is okay" message with a big "R.I.P." image on page-turn. The "meaningful" part comes as a thank you to 24-Hour Comic Day, since the epitaph reads as these characters being alive for that space in time only. If I had my wits about me, I would have showed how Pete & Mars left the laser pointer to divert the cat, escaped from under the house, and walked away happy as the police / ambulance arrived. And the R.I.P. would have taken up a ninth of the page, instead. But I'm still happy I finished.

After the last page, Ryan reported that I had an hour and fifteen minutes left and jokingly said I could make a cover. I spent 15 minutes on it. (In hindsight, I should have re-done page 24.) After finishing, I had the most amazing sense of accomplishment and relief wash over me. It was a real high. I concentrated so hard throughout the night that I think there was perhaps 5 occasions Derek asked me to comment on some discussion the group had had for several minutes and I had to look up and admit that I had no idea what everyone had been talking about. An I-N-T-E-N-S-E time. If they haven't already, hopefully others have their 24-hour comics posted. It was amazing seeing what everyone did. Geoff and Jason's were deep, Rachel's was titillating, and Derek and Ryan's were comedy gold. My thanks for an amazing, exhausting experience. I hope you enjoyed the show!

Tattoos and Whales

2009-10-07T13:34:00.002-06:00

Hey gang. It's been awhile (again). Sorry about that; I've been busy with quitting and starting a new indie thing. It's been long enough since my last post so I won't really remember everything about this batch, but there's some fun stuff, and stuff from just last night. Anyone excited about new drahns should thank Emi from the marvelous Emitown for the well-timed prod. ;) So let's dive in... First up, I have no idea... Just some typical figure stuff, probably to get warmed up for the evening. Oh wait!!! That's completely wrong! I drew these while Jen was getting her tattoo done. I've been accompanying her to her tattoo sessions over the last few months for a big ol' awesome tattoo on her back, and since this particular session was an all-day one, I brought some drawing stuff that I could do one-handed while keeping the other hand on her leg for comforting purposes. I remember struggling with the figure on the bottom as I tried to sort through his right and left arms. I erased his left arm several times. But I liked the top-right figure.

After doing a page of guys, I thought it good to try a few ladies. I think I was self conscious in front of another (in this case, tattoo) artist, so I started out trying to focus on pretty features. The first one up was the only one with a face. I really wanted to play with some bodies, though (I feel less invested by poses, so they're a bit more relaxing) and spent the rest of the page on those. Pleasant enough...

...But not fair to the beans in this world. They needed their turn in the spotlight. Beans are the most fun to draw, so I went to town with different expressions and such. I liked the guy eating a burger on a pillow, the one bowing, and the one with the flowers. I wish I could eat a burger in bed. I mean, without making a mess. It would be fun to take a page of beans and mess with poses, then translate them into human figures, just to see if it makes the figures more expressive.

Ottley kind of jumps me now and then without my understanding why he's getting my advice. I love his stuff so much. But this time he was curious how I would tweak a figure he had loosely drawn. I was curious what he was aiming for, since without being able to describe the difference, what he had drawn was in my opinion a body with perfect "superhero proportions," as laid out (I think) somewhere in How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. He apparently hadn't heard of the different proportions, so I just vaguely described something about smaller heads, wider shoulders, and long legs. But we chatted through some things that I might affect to make it more "normal" proportioned (though I assume most of my junk is superhero-y, too since that style reared my drawing), but I don't remember what changed on the drawing. It was awhile ago. Other drawings were explaining weight and tilt in the body, and how it can create the illusion of standing more firmly on something.

I also ended up talking about placing limbs in space and drawing a body backwards from them as an exercise to get better at winging tough anatomy situations, and drew a right foot and left hand in space, noting that those two things "could exist" in those spots in relation to each other, and that drawing back from them can be hard and fun. So he told me to finish the drawing. Ugh. I finished it, and then he encouraged me to ink it. Then he gave me one of those cool ink pens he's let me play with as a birthday (9/6) gift! Way cool. For those of you curious about the pen, Ryan says it's from jetpens.com, and the ID on the pen is pk2-10. I screwed up the action lines, but dig the pen.

The next draw night was a bit sparse, but I enjoyed the drawings I did. They seemed a bit more "complete," at least to me. When I was drawing the head on the page, someone mentioned that it was shaping up to look like Quentin Tarantino. I've seen a few interviews with the guy but there's no way I could just hit him from memory, but I tried to finish him with the memory of him in my head. I was happy with how it turned out, but when I handed the drawing back to the guy that made the comment, he said, "now he looks nothing like him." Yay me.

This last batch of drawings was for LittleBot. I wanted to play around with some character ideas as a kind of logo / mascot. The very first one I did (upper left) was the one I ended up liking most. I tested a bunch of different poses of the guy on this page, as well as some thoughts for how to pair him with a LittleBot logo. The only variation was some H.E.L.P.eR-inspired doodles in the upper-right.

I got a bit more variety on the next page, but none of it led to the final design. I rather liked the little guy that used the space in between his head and body to suggest a mouth, but I felt like it would take too much sound and animation to sell. I tried a few other body shapes, and even a "pixel" version of a character just to see what would happen. Perhaps my favorite for giggles was the top-left, which I drew after Jon Diesta suggested I drop some of the facial features to make it more "cute." I took it a bit far, perhaps.

The final page was taking the cute idea more seriously, this time inspired by Disney's new Pook-a-Looz line of plushies coming out whenever. But it was too cutesy for my tastes.

Last night I only did this page of stuff. It was idle doodling while I caught up with friends and chatted about what it was like to be self-employed (busy!). But I rather enjoyed the character in the upper right, and especially enjoyed the cartoony-looking feller in the lower-right. Someone said the lines on his jaw made him look a bit like a whale, so when Tom asked me what his name was, "Whale McSpy" came to mind. Actually, what came to mind was more like "Whale McSperm," but that seemed a bit much.

Garbage 'Do

2009-09-02T14:52:00.006-06:00

When I sat down for drawing, Ottley was excited to share a bunch of new drawing tools (ink pens, pencils, etc.) he got from some site online. After oohing and ahhing over them, he asked if I wanted to try the inks. Long story short, I loved his ink pen. It was only slightly bendy, allowing for control of the line, but really rather stiff, so I could almost sketch with it. And everything I just said comes from the mouth of an ink pen noob. I really don't know much about them, just that I always suck with ink pens and this was one of the most natural-feeling ones I've ever had my hands on. And he said they're $4. But I digress. I drew the guy in the upper-left first, and I might like him the best. I wondered if the pen was getting looser as I used it because I felt a little less control as I went on... but it's probably all garbage to someone experienced in inks.

In the next page of drawings, I tried to "sketch" with the pen, using lines to define shapes and everything, just to see what it would look like in the end. To this day I'm haunted by Robert Kirkman telling me he didn't like my comic stuff as much as my sketch stuff when I put together my comic portfolio to shop around at Comic Con '04, and I always thought there was something about the way I drew when sketching that was looser that I should try to capture if inking (which again, to be very clear on, I suck at). The girl in particular looks pretty bad with those lines, but it was a fun experiment. I think male bits are easier to save, particularly when drawing random people, since you can use more lines to balance a sketch and still retain "beauty," which is not my experience drawing women. After struggling with figures, I tried my hands at some more cartoony stuff (my bean) and enjoyed the results.

The third draw-page was the only one that started with pencils. I did some up (wish I could have scanned it first) and inked over them to see what it would look like once the pencils were erased, and I was rather disgusted with how empty and hollow and stiff the lines looked to me. It really lost a lot of life. So I started "drawing" on the inks with the ink pen to "fill" it up and get it looking more like something I would draw. I was relatively happy with the results, despite the fact that the dude's thumb is missing. And his hairdo is garbage-y.

I didn't want to leave the night without a pencil sketch, so I drummed up this last one before leaving for sushi. It was a freeflow kind of thing, and I enjoyed the whatever-it-is (match?) on fire in his mouth. It seemed more interesting than just a cigarette. No idea what he's wearing either. What the fuck am I drawing???

Draw Posey, Ink Posey

2009-08-30T10:20:00.002-06:00

Just one drawing this week since I spent too much time talking worky-worky. I really need a good "shut up and draw" session soon. But right when I got to our drawfest, Ryan handed me some poses that I couldn't pass up. I love drawing over others' poses. Derek (or Ryan?) encouraged me to try inking it, and that was fun. One of my better jobs with his pen, I think. Peace out.

Big Toothpaste

2009-08-23T21:50:00.010-06:00

For the last while, draw night has been interrupted or less frequent. Ever since my project at work was canceled, my spirits have been very low, and I haven't felt like myself. I think it's been difficult to muster up the energy for creative things. It feels a bit like a breakup. Luckily, that's been turning around as I look onward and consider my options -- I'm really looking to feed my soul and get my passion going again -- but the pictures below represent less content over a sadder time. Still, the first drawing does little to show it. His eyes may be a bit hollow, but he has a smile. One simple drawing for this draw night.

The next image is from over a month later, and I'm surprised by the gap. I need to dig around and see if I can find some missing doodles. But I kind of like the funny-looking guy in the mid-center. He reminds me of the big toothpaste guy in the final drawing of this post with his weird hairline and long hair.

It looks like the week after was a little more inspired. I think I started with the figure on the left, and it has a bit more of that "care" to it that devolves over the course of drawing.

The next two drawings represent a more spirited draw night, since the content is a bit more playful. I rather enjoyed doodling the guy with the robes on. Clothes are so much fun to doodle because they're simple and show a lot of motion. The hairy guy was a fun doodle, too, with lots of weird, disrespectful shapes.

And I think I drew this other guy just to wrap up the evening before going to eat. It's a weird, unfinished doodle, but they all get their share in the limelight...

I did this last one recently. I really wanted the main drawing to be unscrewing a cap of some sort but his arms didn't align the way I expected so I decided against a jar and went with something that could be more twisty. It was hard to see what he was manipulating, though, so I had to label it. The rest are just common figures. Cyaz. :-)

For mOm...

2009-05-17T17:58:00.024-06:00

It's been awhile, no? Things have been a bit stupid at work so draw nights have been more infrequent, but I have a bunch more doodles to talk about. The first... hrm... maybe there's not much to say after all. Sometimes I miss having Mike May at draw night because when he was around it was fun to draw to elicit his big, friendly laugh. I think a lot of the humor from drawings on my old site were a result of that dynamic and without the silliness there's plenty of twisty people with spiky hair to look at, but not enough zaniness. Maybe it's not fair to pin on Mike, since I think part of it is just getting back into a regular drawing groove and exploring, and things have been infrequent enough that that's been harder to do. Conclusion: more drahns.

See, this one is at least a little silly. I think I drew this on some scratch paper Ryan was using to prepare a cover the sketchbook he put together for Comic Con this year. That's gonna be some hot shit I tell ya. I love drawing hair. I just love it.

There are some interesting figures in this drawing, but the real standout bit is the poorly-drawn monkey. I felt like drawing something from reference, so I found an image of a monkey and started roughing it in. Then I lost patience for it and it turned out blarg. Ah well. I'll let it stand as a testament to my impatience.

So I've been playing a shit-ton of Street Fighter IV (PS3, PSNID Erlanter) since it came out. I'm about 6-7 games (Resident Evil 5, Afro Samurai, Madworld, Punch Out, Infamous, Prototype, Ghostbusters, and Wolverine, to name a few) behind because I'm always paying SFIV. When I was doodling, I tried to recall what the character I play (Gen) looks like, and failed. The character in the lower-lelft reminds me of something Jon Diesta would draw for some reason. I really have no idea what that means.

I think I was thinking of Synj when I drew this one.

This page has a few interesting things on it, but I really hate that hairy man-beast thing. It was weird because right after finishing it, Ryan asked if I ever draw stuff that I really hate. I just kinda looked down and pointed at it, thinking "yeah, look!" There's just something really wrong about it I can't put my finger on.

I'm not sure why I torture myself trying to draw superheroes, and this is particularly true with Batman. This is one of the better turnouts, but there's such a strange thing that happens when I draw superheroes. It reminds me of when you transfer superheroes to the big screen and try to be faithful with their costumes. Typically, people just look really weird with superhero clothing on; when you make it real, it just seems bizarre. I don't know if it's because I think of actual cloth and costumes on human beings or not, but it's this same effect that I think takes place when I draw superheroes. I have to consciously go into a drawing trying to make their body their costume and not separate the two ideas to start getting it right. I wonder if other people have this problem.

This page is mostly feeling out some figures, but I enjoy the skinny-armed, long-fingered hands. The guy with antennae-arms and Merman ears was fun to draw. Oddly enough, the drawing is both likeable and aesthetically awkward to me.

I really enjoyed this drawing for some reason. I think I wanted to do something with a lot of clean, efficient lines and strength behind it, and the weird wing wreath with stars in 3D behind him was fun to produce. I asked Tom if he would paint it and he just wanted me to scan it. Now that 2 months have passed, I'm not sure if it's lost its luster. That reminds me, I have some color work to put on display...!

More figures. I think when I don't know what to draw it's fun to just spit out figures in random positions. They seem to turn out decent looking and make me feel like I'm exercising.

More superheroes? Why? It's because I imagined Wolverine with a huge lumberjack beard and wanted to see it. I'm sure it's already been done in comics, but I haven't seen it. I like the cartoon Wolverine in the lower-right the most, with his wee beady eyes. I started with the center one, which has that "weird-looking costume on real guy" look. Then I tried the cartoon version to see if that fixed the problem, but his shapes weren't that satisfying. So then I went for a silhouette, which is in the lower-left. And finally, another stab on the upper-right, which doesn't feel right to me, either. Superheroes are just tricky for me. It takes a long time for me to get in the swing of things.

Tom had put a whole bunch of scribbles on my page, and I wasn't sure if I was supposed to make something out of it. I felt beaten, though; they were just too complex, so I decided to just mush it into something abstract and go with the flow. I rather enjoy how the whole thing turned out.

I like girls in bikinis. I wish I remembered to draw the ladies more often, even if they end up with weird robot mask-helmet-things. Hoo-rah.

I was enjoying the shapes on this female figure quite a bit. She had kind of a homely vibe but a nice figure, and then Ryan decided she need to be a bit more stacked and added the line for an underboob. I demanded that he sign his contribution.

More figures. I really don't have much to say about them except that I like the female body in this one. I don't know that I've done that pose very often and it was fun to look at in the end. More please.

So I ask for more women, but deliver more men. If you are a drawing night attendee, please remind me that I want to post more ladies. But still, I had fun with these figures. Some of them look a little awkwardly drawn, but c'est la vie.

My last in this update is the weirdest. I drew some creature -- kinda doggish -- and stuck him in an inner-tube of sorts. I don't remember if this was a quick one on the way out to dinner or what. All I know is that I <3 it.

Peace out! Hopefully more to come shortly.

TMNS

2009-03-08T17:32:00.024-06:00

Sorry for going AWOL for a bit, but I finally got around to an update, and I hope there's something worthwhile to look at. I don't remember what inspired this first brain fart. I think I just wanted to draw a star and for some reason the scarf on it made sense, so the rest just deteriorated from there. I wanted to do a TMNT ripoff and so I went a little Mad Libs on the whole deal. I figured instead of famous artists I'd go with kinds of pasta, their favorite Italian dish changed, their enemy is another kind of office supply, and their human partner has the same name as the month I did this drawing in.

That same night, I saw Dave Chisholm finish a dish and I wanted to try my hand at preserving his style, despite the fact that I can't even preserve my own style with an ink pen. It was fun to do, though. Dave has a really loose style, even in inks, and I wish I had a fraction of the talent he and other artists at the table display whenever they ink. I need more patience and practice!

I think for the last drawing of the night of November the 18th, I decided to do a quick doodle before dinner. I grabbed Jon Diesta's pencil (hence the red) and made something that reminded me of G'Nort.

The first Tuesday of December was one of several rather anemic drawing nights. I'm not sure why, but my output really went down for awhile. I think it was because work was really busy and stressful. I find I can either chill out and chat or draw, not both. I know men, compared to women, are horrible at multitasking, but I consider myself unusually bad, even among men. Or maybe I'm just fickle about my multitasking. I know I keep far too much detail about my projects at work in there. But I digress. I like the guy with the big mustache and curly whirly, and I like the fact that I'm encourage everyone to do drugs.

A week later and another anemic night, but I really, really liked the output for some reason. The simple, slender, sometimes wobbly lines made me happy. It's weird how napkin scribble is often some of my favorite stuff; it just removes the pressure to perform, I suppose.

I think I was feeling guilty about my lack of doodles each week, so I spent a little more time this week. Sometimes when I start drawing I try to get in a "flow" and just follow the lines of my pencil, and I remember feeling that way about the first drawing here, when I added "O"s and "T"s to the guy with the long, swirly hair. But everything seems so sketchy that I maybe lost the sense of flow. Or maybe I just wanted to fill up a page to assuage my guilt.

But the flow seemed to come back on this page from the same night, because I really like the bodies here. I think I drew this at a pizza parlor we dig downtown called Stoneground. After a couple beers, I must have relaxed on the page. I mean, the figures are a bit incomplete, but I like the shapes they're making. :-)

A couple missing weeks later and things were looking scribbly again, but there's a lot of fun on this one. I really prefer pages that are full, even if it's with scribble, and I don't know why. The little silhouette figures jumping and twirling for the UFO are interesting to me, as is the hairy fella with the "burst" lines. I think the list in the bottom-right is of bands I should listen to or something; I don't remember!

The second page from the evening was based on a character called Pitt. I don't know him, just "of" him, so Ryan drew us some reference so we could doodle him on our own. Ryan drew the body shape of him in the upper right and I filled it with a bit of detail, then tried to get into the spirit of things. The Pitt is awesome because he's basically designed to be the cheesiest version of "badass" you've ever seen. Chains on the arms and legs, Hulk-bulk, and a biker's jacket, as far as I can tell. If the comic was successful, I truly admire the tastes of those who consider themselves fans. It reminds me of "He-Man." God, I love that name. It's like calling a new burger store "Hamburger Store."

I can't remember why most of the drawings on this page wound up looking so wobbly. Was it a problem with the pencil or the surface I was drawing on? Anyway, looking back I enjoy the texture on the figures. These were fun, simple doodles.

Haha. Oh dear. On this week I decided to pick up a newspaper and do a characature, and I am truly bad at them. Every face on this same page is the same guy. He's of some politician in Utah whose name has already slipped my mind (which is also an indicator of how badly I follow politics). I can only hope my characature is bad enough that those who would recognize an important local politician are incapable of recognizing him from my drawings, and subsequently of incapable of shaming me. I merely shame myself with bad characatures.

This was a page with some fun in it. I like the bearded guy. I had a disembodied head on the page that I wanted to incorporate, and that's how it ended up headless. The fact that it was happy only made things more fun, and I added a disembodied hand to add to the expression. I just always enjoy a little incongruity, don't I?

The week after was a lot of fun because it was the first time Jenny showed up to drawing night and hung with the draw-night crowd. She doesn't consider herself an artist despite my insistence that everyone is, but I got her to make some stick-figures as poses and I tried to get some "real" human anatomy over them. It was a fun excercise that led to a nice day at the beach. Ah, the beach; salt in your mouth, sand in your butt, sunburns, and portugese man-o-wars. Thank you, Jenny!

I think there was more to this week but I must have misplaced the drawings. I'll have to update when I find them. These two were drawings over poses done by Ryan Ottley and Jason Kim. Jason is a fabulous artist that has been drawing with us more and more. I hope he keeps coming; I'll have to add him to the list of links.

This was the first drawing from this past Tuesday. Jenny visited again, which was awesome. This time I was just going with the flow and found myself with a muscley guy in a bathrobe, with roses, in a forest pond, with a Joust birdie. I just don't know where it comes from. It all started with wanting to do an upturned head with a distinguished nose. I drew the bird before thinking it was a Joust birdie, but after doodling a silhouette figure on it, someone else thought the jousting stick was a good idea, and who am I to disagree? The speech bubble comes courtesy of Derek Hunter. This was a snippet of conversation taken out of context, probably about puppies. I don't remember.

The next was more go-with-the-flow stuff as well. At first the fella reminded me of a garden troll, then it reminded me of someone who eats too many donuts, then I wanted to add some old stumpy legs, and I stuck with the garden theme. After doodling the mushroom, I felt like something was missing, so I added an apple. And to top it all off, I stuck with the quote theme, this time quoting Derek's wife, Rachel, who is a marvelous artist as well.

But the last page may be my favorite. Ryan Ottley gave me four poses to work from so I gave him four as well. I felt rather inspired by the first and last drawings I did -- the two male figures -- because his lines were so strong. I really enjoyed the middle character because he had such an odd shape but it was so flowy and muscley with very little line definition, and the lines at the ends of his limbs made for interesting "shading," if you will. But the last one -- the guy in the upper-left -- was the best. There was something about the lines Ryan had set down that just spoke to a squiggly shape, and the confident-yet-squiggly lines made for an interesting doodle. IMO, anyway.

So I may have missed a few drawings lying around that need scanning. If so, I hope they turn up soon. Plus, I have more kind colorist items I need to update! (God I love those.) See you shortly, I hope!

eat!

2008-11-09T19:57:00.007-07:00

Sorry again for the slow updates. I was in Florida for a week, went to an election party, work has been a bit more stressful lately, and I'm enjoying the submission of my spare time to a lovely lady that makes me very happy. So let's start with Florida. For the trip, I was asked to do piece of art that described how I got into my particular creative field (of game design). I decided to tackle the project on the plane trip down, and was pleasantly surprised by how little turbulence there was. I started with a page of warm-up drawing. The thumbnails in the upper-left hand corner were me playing with ideas for the project.

For the project I decided to focus on a moment in my life when I was pinned down and forced to eat a grasshopper before I could go home. Yes, this happened. I grew up haole in Hawaii, and at some point the local kids I grew up with learned their prejudices and this sort of thing was becoming the norm. But it was a formative moment, where I remember deciding it was a good idea to learn how to have fun indoors. Hence drawing, playing video games, and doing a plethora of other nerdy things that helped me become the *cough* man I am today. A friend had some pens across the isle from me on the plane, so I was even able to ink it. Hooray!

The Tuesday after I got back was drawing night, but I almost didn't go because I came down with an awful cold. I decided I should at least say hello to the folk that were there, and when I showed up, I ended up sticking around for some reason. This was my hazy warm-up page. I remember very little about it.

I had showed up for drawing late, though, and we went off to a pizza parlour for dinner. Not being to into the social aspects of the evening in my condition, I just kept doodling. I started doing a cartoonish face, but was too tired to come up with details, so I scanned the tables around us and started doodling the hairstyle, jewelry, and clothes from a girl at a nearby table that looked like she was on a first date. After finishing her, I felt like drawing a hag. I guess I just like doodling hags around Halloween.

But I think my mind started wasting away and insanity set in. This last drawing started with the giant gnome thing, or whatever the hell it is. I then drew some figures to distract me from the gnome, who kind of freaked me out. The next most obvious thing to draw was Pac Man for some reason, and I drew a trail of pac pellets (what are they called?) pushing right into the gnome's stomach. Really, the only sane thing that could be added was "HOLY FUCKING SHIT."

"What is hhhhhat?"

2008-10-15T23:33:00.002-06:00

Another fun draw night with a smaller crew. This time it was Tom, Dave, and Manfred in addition to me. The first page was common warm-up. Not much to say, except I started out feeling pretty uncomfortable with my pencil. I felt kind of tight and immobile starting with the top-mid guy, and didn't start feeling loosened up until part of the way through the girl. But getting loose also made my drawings sketchy this go-round, as the top-right and bottom-left drawings show.

But it was good prep for this witch-like lady. I enjoyed this drawing quite a bit. I started with the brows, just making a lot of lines come to a point, and just tried to go with flowing lines. I felt light defining the silhouette but not filling in the cloth around her out of some mixture of aesthetic and laziness, and once I started seeing a division between the simplicity of the cloth and the complexity of her flesh, I decided to make it kind of like a hoody-cloak, filled in her neckline area, and the whole drawing came across as pretty fun and creepy to me. I liked the end result, and added "HH" to my signature for "Happy Halloween," which confused Manred and Tom (and inspired the title of this post).

Tom always does these thumbnail environment pics with really interesting shapes, so I decided to do a Tom impression, and drew a box, and started filling an environment into it. It's probably confusing as hell, especially with the figure I drew behind it afterward, but I started with a figure, decided he was standing on a treetop, that a limb of leaves would swing out from it, with a trunk behind it, with lots of tentacle-like roots descending from the trunk for water below, and lots of clouds beneath the entire thing. Maybe it would be fun to paint.

Last but not least, I went in to drawing night thinking about Jenny, who's endured a destructive migraine for about a week now. She bid me adieu earlier, asking me to draw someone who could kick the ass of migraines, so I started imagining "Migraine" as a character who sat on and crushed peoples heads, so I could make another character kicking Migraine's ass. But once I had a character sitting on a head, the head turned out all weird and almost alien, and Migraine's hands were up in the air instead of down squeezing, and I couldn't think of a way to also have Migraine's ass being kicked while conveying the squeezing information. It all happened fast and without planning, so I found myself adding a hammer, and wondered at how I managed only to convey pain and suffering in lieu of relief. Arg.

And in response to someone who asked if the guy on the bottom was Manfred, I labeled him "Manfred," the Migraine "Alan," and the hammer "Tom's Nutsack" for laughs. Manfred thought it was a good scene for the Exorcist V, and Tom suggested that Burt Reynolds -- and various Burt Reynolds body parts -- play us. Manfred added "Dave's Spirit." This was an entertaining, epic fail (in purpose and maturity) of a drawing, presented for your viewing pleasure.

Naughty Chopper (Chop! Chop!)

2008-10-08T01:23:00.011-06:00

At draw night this week I decided to focus on faster, sketchier figures again. The first page began with the eye in the lower corner, and then I started loosely drawing an image of Spidey in my head, focusing on his wirey-yet-muscley look. It was all over the place, so I tried again without erasing or doubling up lines to define line weight or commit to shapes. But I didn't care if it actually ended up Spidey and didn't know where I was going with it, so I just made it a nobody. But he still had his head intact. The rest were just scribbles, but I rather liked the scribble in the top-left, where I wanted to draw someone grabbing his own feet. I'm sure it's got messy bits in there, but for a quick sketch I thought it looked pretty nice. Jon Diesta was talking about some anatomy lessons he had picked up on from a fellow artists, and feeling jealous that I had nothing to teach, I showed Jon the anatomy of a flower while drawing one behind the squatting fella.

Realizing I had just did yet another page of man figures, I decided to do a page of ladies. Drawing ladies is really fun because of all the different shapes and sizes that are still in the beautiful form range, and I love the way their hips work; I really have no idea why I don't doodle them more often, whether its the fact that everyone always doodles ladies, or because few of the superhero books I followed as a kid had women as the lead hero. Either way, it's a bit of sadness. But I digress.

I started with the top sitting lady, then the standing lady, then the back-scratching lady, whose right arm sticks out to me as not a good headrest at the moment, and then I thought of the guy grabbing his feet and wanted a female version of it, so I did a nude figure putting on her shoe. That was fun. Then I looked over at what Jon was doing -- a much larger female figure -- that was looking really cool, so I drew a fan (like his figure had), and then started fronting:

"My girl has a fan, so now what? Huh? Huh?"
"Now she needs a sword," Jon replies.
"Now mine has a sword. What now?"
Tom jumps in with, "Shoes. Made of goat."
"Now she has goat shoes! What up?"
"She needs a HairdoodZ," says Jon.
"And a monkey-hat," interjects Tom.
After scribbling, I announce, "She has a monk HairdoodZ with a monkey-hat. Unnh!"
"Mine is going to have a print on her clothes," announces Jon.
I'm screwed, I think. "Dammit, she has no clothes! Maybe I can do a tattoo..."

So I finished up with the tattoo and was pleased enough to note all of the contributions everyone made to the drawing. Continuing with figures, I added the bottom sitting girl, and ended with the girl in the upper-left corner. By the time I finished her body, I didn't want to draw her head, so I just moved it to the side and added a "CHOP!" All of a sudden, I worried it would come across as a sexist chop, so I went back to the first drawing and took off the head of the male figure there, too. And since I had a culprit with a sword, I decided to call her design The Chopper's Costume.

The last page was me drawing lots of legs and feet, just trying to impart some thoughts about the way I draw feet to Jon. I thought I'd include it, in case someone, somehow, found a way to derive information from it.

I Hate Unicorns.

2008-10-06T19:17:00.011-06:00

My apologies for less-frequent updates. Life has been busier with an awesome new someone in my life, so my previous "update night" has been steamrolled somewhat. But "draw night" is still in full swing, so no complaining.

The first drawing is from a couple weeks ago, and I've been cramming more figures onto a single page, so it ends up feeling like less art. Well, that, and there probably is less art. But I wanted to focus a bit more on the female form this go 'round. The spread pose in the upper-right might seem like much, but I avoid positions like it too often, so I just went for it. Someone at the table was reading some artist's sketchbook and pointed to a very curved leg in standing position they liked, so I did one of my own (connected to the disconnected male head), and the girl with the bunny-hop hands needed a hat, so I asked Tom to for an environment-hat, and he obliged (thank you, Tom). I added the clouds around it.

Next up from that night was some inks by Ryan Ottley on a drawing from the week prior. I of course love it when he or any other drawing pal decides to ink some of my pencils. It's really neat to see the way they interpret the lines. And the drawing was so weird to begin with that it doubled my pleasure. DOUBLED!

I was more prolific last week, with poop if not quality. I just started with a bunch of little sketchy figures while I caught up with folks. My favorite drawing was the guy that fell asleep waiting for me to draw him. And my least favorite is the unicorn, because I hate unicorns. A lot.

Next up was this twisted figure. If I remember correctly it originated as a pose from Ottley. I asked him to give me an "Alan Tew" pose, and he came up with something pretty twisted. When I tried to shape it into a "real" form best-I-could, I gave him a questionably turned leg. I can stand up and make my leg swing that way, but it looks pretty wonky with the rest of the body so straight. But I decided to leave it and post it for all to see. Silly me.

I really enjoyed the drawings on this page. They were a lot more flowy. I started with the cartoon head with the Rachel Summers Phoneix-scars on its face. Next was the weird little fella with the half-tendon face, probably drawn while we were talking about Bodyworlds (in town at the moment) at the table. Then came the bald fella, who had a fun, angular look, and lastly the long-fingered gal on the left.

And last up was this strange fellow. I drew him right before we bailed for food. Not too many lines, a lot of flowing, and a bit of a weird look. Not sure what else to say.

The Worst Thing About...

2008-09-21T18:41:00.006-06:00

This week began with Ryan and I swapping poses to pencil in. My ability to take a really cool pose from Ryan Ottley and make it into something so horrifying is kinda fascinating, really. Inspiration for this drawing comes from the pose itself (of course), and Dave Chisholm talking about rollerblades.

The drawing of the guy in the second drawing was actually the first drawing of the evening before Ryan and I swapped poses. And to balance out the guy-bits, I decided to do some girl-bits. Usually when I do fast poses it's always guys, so I thought this would be a nice change-of-pace. I should do more of this sort of thing, methinks.

The third pic was a stream-of-consciousness drawing that really weirded me out. I just thought of this white, stretchy, clothy guy with a wig on, and just kept farting around with it until his body was finished. Then I added some bubbles, and threw in the fish. At least, I think it's a fish.I thought a skull in the eye of the fish would be more interesting than just random reflections.

The last drawing was just something I doodled on my kitchen counter before heading out to work one morning. It was sitting there with the other drawings, so I scanned it in for all to see.

Cheers!

Great Minds...

2008-09-13T18:51:00.005-06:00

I'm curious what karmic disaster awaits me after getting three awesome coloring jobs from folks in the same week. This was the most awesomest of surprises. The first is from Tom Scholes, our drawing night regular. I'm just so happy he chose to bless HairdoodZ with his mighty powers. His name will live on in infamy.

Adam Ford chose a rather obscure drawing and dressed it up into the masterpiece you see here. I absolutely love the tattoos, and the addition of a fabulous mustache. If you aren't already familiar with Mr. Ford's fine talents, I recommend doing so.

And just when I thought I was the most fortunate fella around, another color work popped up, this time from Dario Reyes. He did it in a more comic style, which is appropriate given the character is from Dave Chisholm's Let's Go to Utah comic. I'm not sure whether Dave imagined blond hair, but it's so cool to see popping off the page.

Thanks sooooo much! I adore seeing this stuff colored...

Multi-Week Miscellany

2008-09-13T18:40:00.004-06:00

It's been a couple weeks since a proper update, but both draw nights produced skim offerings. I decided to post them along with a random doodle while waiting around at the office. First up is the office doodle, done with a ballpoint pen lying around. Not much to say about it since I was burning time, but there ya go.

Next up is the results of last week's drawing night. I had a really fun time, and just crammed all of the figures into one page, so it might be a little more anemic than normal, but there's fun stuffs to look at. I remember particularly enjoying the skull-looking figure, where I erased out all of the body lines that were present in the black of his costume. In the end, I thought he looked a bit like a Castle Crasher's character by Dan Paladin, but maybe that's just me. I also really enjoyed the fish-head for some reason, and maybe my favorite on the page is the goggle-bearing goat-boy (not sure why that's his name, it just fits) with the hearts behind him. Fun stuffs.

The offerings from this week were definitely meager, though. Roz showed back up after a trip to South America and some hide-and-go-seek at school, and catching up caught more of my attention. Still, I really enjoyed the dude with the 'stache and the weird hairdo. He looks both ugly and stylish to me somehow. I had Roz doodle in the dotted-line bubble, and she did more freeform stuff. The other stuff on the page was Dave explaining how some of the music-writing symbols work (he was composing that night), and me explaining ("path/goal") to someone my take on the advantage and disadvantage of optimistic and pessimistic outlooks on life. Fun to yap about, but doesn't make for the most interesting doodles. I'll make up for it with others' work (more colored sketches coming!).

Figars

2008-08-29T00:50:00.007-06:00

I didn't get through too many drawings this week; I got to drawing night a bit late and wanted to leave a bit early to watch Dave play some trumpet in his band. He's freakin' amazing! Seriously! I was content just doodling endlessly on one page. The first stuff was the regular old spiky-haired fella holding the girl, followed by the weird cartoony guy with the wiggly ears, and that was followed by a whole bunch of figures. I enjoyed sharing them with Jason Kim (!!!), who decided to join us tonight, because he always does these killer figures at work. I hope he comes back for more. I particularly liked the guy lying on his stomach, and the other guy with his back facing the viewer. Figars aer fun!

Numbah two was something I started and never finished. There wasn't any meat to it, but I decided to date it and put it up anyhoo.

Contemplative Projectile Aliens

2008-08-25T00:08:00.006-06:00

I'm starting this week with older updates. I think it was a week ago I did this collab with Tom, but he had the drawing and was being all lazy-scanner fella, so I yoinked this drawing and another little guy (see below) from him. I know in this drawing I felt like I was ruining his beautiful drawings with a figure that never really worked, but after enough fudging I decided it was passable.

And now for the super-exciting stuff. Dave said he would ink the babylanche and he came through! It's so much fun to see stuff inked, and that was especially true with this drawing. I was curious how he would fill in some of the sketchy details that I just mooshed in there, and he did a great job that I hope enjoy too.

So my stuff this week began with the pointy-headed fella on the left, followed by the bald guy on the bottom. I was just going with the flow, and I wanted to come up with a way to combine them. The smoke was used to tie them together, but I started describing it to Virginia as a Nightcrawler teleportation effect and used "BUMF!" to make give it a impressively original spin. With powers brought to the mix, I thought it would be interesting to make the first character an actual superpower. Fun. The kid at the end with the cape was just me idling with a pencil.

Next up was another quicky with Tom. Actually, I'm not sure if it was actually next up, but that's the order I scanned it in, so there. I added a figure on a swing to one of his trees, and ruined another beautiful piece of artwork. (Why do I feel guilty for doing collabs with Tom?!? Weird.)

I wanted to do a unibrow on a girl, and this was the result. I think I tried to mix a few less idealized features with some pretty ones, and I like the drawing in the end. I'm not sure why she has hair coming from her hand, except to setup my signature in a weird way.

Last up was another doodling-figures-while-drunk drawing that I did at the pizza place. I don't know why quick figures go with drunkedness, but I thought these fellas were interesting, with their pointy limb-ends. I can see doing more of them later.

Babylanche!

2008-08-12T23:21:00.005-06:00

Tonight was a fun draw night. I only got through a couple drawings at the coffee shop, but we continued doodling at the sushi place, so I was able to squeeze a couple more fun drawings in. I think the mood of the crew was really good, and it was a fun turnout, including a few "occasionals," like Brent and Virginia Critchfield, and a guy named Jeff that I still don't know that well. Anyway, I did a collab with Tom, but don't have the results of it. Hopefully he'll post it on his doodle blog. The other coffee shop drawing is the babylanche drawing. After doodling the girl, I just felt like drawing her slipping on a landslide of babies, and my wish is my command. It was a fun one, and Dave Chisholm sez he's gonna ink it next week. That would be sweeeeet!

But I really enjoyed the sushi restaurant-doodles, too. The first doodle of the girl had really fun hair, a cool angle, and fun fingers; it was just a flowy drawing. And I tried to keep the flow with the next guy, who had to be a vampire. After doodling him, I imagined him looking best underwater, so I add some bubbles and fishies, and was a slave to my wishes once again; what a taskmaster.

I wanted to get off one last drawing before bailing, so I squeezed this one out before we took off. His legs are almost fawn-legs, but that's cool by me. I wanted to keep drawing, but I decided it was a better idea to get some sleep for an evening with hawtness tomorry.

Cheers!

!tghiN sdrawkcaB

2008-08-07T01:09:00.026-06:00

This was a fun draw night. I downed three beers before arriving, and I was completely loopy when I arrived. I started by doodling a really big head thinking it would impress everyone at the table, and Dave offered to ink it! What a bunch of rad; I thought it turned out awesome. He added a bunch of menace and kicked it up a notch. I really like all of the lines he added around the eyes, and I like the way he made the fingers and hand look. I just like inks, and wish I could be better at them without putting in the time. ;-)

I included two versions of the next page, one rotated 180-degrees, to show all of the madness that went on. I started drawing lots of little figures like the last time I was drawing with a buzz, and got through the first two (the spiky, dark-haired yelling guy and the fella to the right of him) when I needed to use the bathroom. While I was out, Ryan drew the guy beneath the spiky, dark-haired yelling guy to see if I would recognize whether I drew it. It threw me for a loop for a second, but I wasn't that out of it, and so I added the lady holding his hand. Later, Ryan drew her head in and made her saying something funny. I think I drew a couple more peeps (the guy to the right of the girl, and the one on the bottom of the page stomping or something) and then handed the page over to Gheybin asking for something superhero-like, and she said all she could do was a guy flexing. She gave me a stick figure, though, and I filled it in. At this point, Hannah showed, but she was just hanging out, so I got her to give me a series of stick figures, all of which she drew upside-down on the page. You can inspect her stuff with the flipped version of the art. Last up was a "man-mer" inspired by the "mer-maid" I made out of one of Hannah's stick figures. Oh, and Ryan showed me how to draw the Kool-Aid guy.

So Dave had a really neat pen that he used to ink my drawing, and I got to fiddle around with it. It clicked better than other brush pens I've used, and it looked really similar to what Paul Pope used to create my Con sketch. I might have to fiddle with it more later, because it was rather fun to use.

Next up was a squiggle Hannah seemed to give me out of nowhere (or I don't remember asking for it.) I inked the line so I could remember it, and you can see that I still have no control over the inks, really. I kept spinning the page trying to see if I could come up with a cleverer use of the line, but I ended up doing something rather similar to my last squiggly awhile back. It was a fun drawing.

We kept drawing at the sushi place, and Gheybin let me use her blue pen. I screwed up the guy's hand, so I decided to make it a "thought" and tried again. While I was doodling, Gheybin showed us her art-book, where she writes backwards when she gets really frustrated. I was completely intrigued by it, and wondered how well I could write backwards. I thought I did well even though I would screw up my "d"s and "b"s a lot. So I added some backwards text, and even signed my name backwards. I included a mirror of the drawing so you could see how I fared.

The last page was a fun disaster. Gheybin asked for a drawing of her, and I was too intimidated to draw anything other than something simple. (She's the one in the thought-bubble.) Then Dave asked me to do him, and I went for a simple version of him, too (with glasses, in center). I feel like I screwed up his lips, though, which is a bummer, since I think they are one of the more interesting things about his look. So he grabbed the page and did one of me (left of him, with bags under eyes). When he handed it back, I decided to give myself a meatier body, and added hair at Ryan's request. Everyone was laughing at the weirdness on the page, and asked me to do Dave's body, so I made him extra skinny (he is wiry), and then put my arm around it. Dave kept saying "beautiful," so I added it as a word bubble. Dave then mentioned having a sheen on my body, so I added the sparkles. And then, to get a laugh out of everyone, despite my arm being around Dave, I decided to have me thinking about Gheybin, and drew the thought-bubble around her. After that, I tried to draw a mean guy for Ryan that had a mouth that reminded everyone of Beaker, which compelled me to draw my best beaker and doctor (name?) from memory. Dave did a Kermit from memory that was impressive, so I added a body, and then tried Cookie Monster (but messed up a bit). The last one I tried was Gonzo, but couldn't figure it out. The higher Gonzo Dave was much better. The end result is a mess, but making it was very fun.

Paul Pope!

2008-08-07T00:53:00.005-06:00

I wanted to meet up with Dave at Comic Con and knew he was trying to see Paul Pope, so I headed over, expecting him to be in a long-ass line. I absolutely love Paul Pope, but avoid lines altogether, and when I got over there, Dave was nowhere to be found because he'd come and gone; Pope only had three people in front of him! I completely flipped out. How could so few people be waiting in line to see him?!? The world is weird. So I begged Emi -- who graciously tagged along -- for some paper, and got the world's best con sketch from him. Pope said it was a character he had dreamed up in high school, but I bet he had know idea his character's fork would have things to say about me.

Naked Wolverine!

2008-08-07T00:39:00.006-06:00

On a later night at the con, we found ourselves doodling again, and nudity was in effect, perhaps because Cory Walker made a comment to me (that day?) about my lack of shyness around "man-wang," or something to that effect. I had to celebrate. First up was some warm ups, a fella in his birthday suit that had his hands positioned for "numbchuck" action (so I added 'em), and another kinda cool pose that was kicked up a notch with a dash of scrote, thrown in with a BAM!

The next page started innocently. I drew a guy (left) with up-sweeping, left-to-right lines on his face that ended up looking a bit like Wolverine. Someone commented on it, so I drew a "real" Wolverine in the upper-right. And since his costume annoys me and hair doesn't, I decided in the buff was best. But there were no ladies in the mix, so I tried to fix the problem while drawing a woman leaning on one straight leg, since someone in the room mentioned having a hard time drawing that and was curious how we did it.

Hotel California

2008-08-07T00:29:00.007-06:00

On 1008-07-25 I was at the Comic-Con, and Ryan Ottley and Derek Hunter were hanging with my friends Joe and Kris in the hotel room. Ottley was doing commissions for his fans and I decided to be festive and doodle a bit, too. For warm up came the grumpy looking fella. I notice I often juxtapose cheerful, expressive women with a mister grumpy-pants. I'm not sure why.

Some of you know that I sometimes get frustrated with how my superheroes turn out, so I decided to press on it and do an Invincible, since Ottley was drawing a lot of them that evening. I just tried to let the lines take things places instead of over-thinking how the costume would fit on a human body, and I thought it turned out a little better than my normal fare. Invincible really looked like he needed to be holding something, so I gave him a mouse. :-)

And last up was a figure-chain, something I just enjoy making every once in awhile. It's fun to decide on a connecting point on a figure and just draw another figure from there, and even more fun to try to get them to match up. Not sure how good of a job I did in my exercise of getting figures positioned in space and drawing them from uncomfortable starting points. The first drawing was the guy on the left, and it went counterclockwise from there.

Posies

2008-08-07T00:10:00.012-06:00

Most of the drawings of the evening of 2008-07-15 were pose-trades with the drawing crew. I only remember a few of who attended by the poses here. But first up was just some generic doodling as warm up and I liked how they turned out. The hair and the pose on the upper-left guy were fun, trying a guy in repose while ignoring what he is sitting on is just plain lazy, and I guess hiding a lot of anatomy in perspective is, too. 1/3 non-lazy drawings isn't bad.

Next up was a pose from the wondrous Rachel Hunter. You can kinda see her lines underneath mine and the liberties I took with them. The weird flat BVDs were my remembering what they look like, because Rachel asked about it for a drawing she did.

Third up was a completely strange pose by Ryan Ottley. The figure was so demented looking that I didn't bother trying to fit a normal figure on it. It made the drawing really dynamic and crazy and pretty fun, though. I liked all the interesting shapes on the figure. Thank you, Ryan!

I had to get Dave Chisholm in the act, and he gave me a very long figure that at first, I wasn't 100% sure was a man or a woman. I decided to push it to an alien / monster-looking thing in the end.

Thomas Schole's pose for me was the toughest, though. He said he didn't want me to do anything with it because he thought he screwed up or something, but I started seeing an old guy with a bit of a gut going at it, and it was fun enough that I went for it. The pose thing is fun to do because it can be real random at times.

The last drawing I didn't actually do at drawing night, but I did at my apartment later. I was thinking of the hairstyle of this girl I met at Hannah's birthday party, and wanted to draw it on a face. I ended up rather liking the doodle. There's something pleasant about it for me.

Far Hairz

2008-07-10T01:01:00.016-06:00

I missed Derek, Ray, and Ottley this week. It was another very flowy night. Lately it has been fun to try letting go a little to see what comes out of it, and I've been enjoying the results. I started with this stinky critter's slanted eyelids, burgeoning eyes, and spiny skin. I enjoyed making his floppy ears, his spiny protrusions, and the flies surrounding him. I focused a lot on line edges while he was being doodled, and filled in details after the fact.

Pic two was also started with the eyes. I particularly enjoyed giving him his bow-legs, and I liked having a cat, dog, and then mouse all in one pic. Bandit cat and gun dog are cool. And "far hairz" is yokel for "fire hairs." The text was just there to wrap it all together with some loose theme.

I started this just trying to draw a pretty yet somewhat unusual gal, and after she was finished I was jokingly asked if she had a sister, so I added her sister. Super sisterz foreverz.

My last pic at the cafe was a quicky before going out to eat. I liked his expression, and that he thinks his stars are awesome, but they really aren't that great. I showed this drawing to our hostess when we went out eat later, and she was unimpressed by his stars. She wanted to show us how good she was at drawing stars, and the top two are hers.

After we ate I still felt like doodling, so I drew a hairy elf-guy running. He's a stinker. I like hair.

Last up was a lazy one after drinking for a bit. I was a little buzzed, and I just let go. The head is quite assy, but I enjoyed all the figures.

I think I see more humor getting back into my drawings. That makes me happy.

Hairy Dragginzes

2008-07-02T22:16:00.006-06:00

This week I wanted to see if I could "follow my nose" a little and break out of the usual style. I started with the eyes of the long-eared rodent, and when I got to his neck, I started seeing him in a space suit. I had no reference, but I vaguely remembered drawing a space suit a long time ago, and now it's fun to see where the differences are. I wanted an evil eye to start the next part of the drawing, and after following lines the eye became part of a hairy dragon. I didn't bother too much with defining its shapes, and just had a lot of fun with the hair. I love hair. Long body hair is really fun to draw.

Next up were some big-eyed girls. I had no idea what Jon Diesta was drawing next to me, but I think Ray mentioned something about cartooning with him, and it made me want to try something a little more cartoony-looking, and that's why they turned out the way I did. Girl number two had a weird pose that was fun to draw.

So I find that when I draw consistently for awhile, I start wanting to push out of the norm a bit, and even though I assume it still looks very much like my work, to me cartoony guys, dragons, and big eyes are different. I'm not sure if it's consistent drawing nights or if it was just a hiccup, but the difference was fun.

Batman and Hairy Arm Lady

2008-06-29T00:41:00.007-06:00

Sorry about the late update. It's weird... I felt like the last drawing night was pretty fruitful but there really weren't many drawings. I spent forever with the first doodle of Batman. Ottley was there and he is, of course, good at drawing superheroes whereas I always feel like I do a bad job them; they just don't come naturally. I fiddled and fiddled and fiddled with Batman but he just kept look really corny and weird to me. The end result looked better than a lot of the in-betweens, but still... meh.

The second page was a little more fun for me; it's just random stuff as usual. The first fella was the one with the long hair, then I drew the next guy from his left hand, which I really liked. Next up, I think, was the guy on the bottom-right, who got a treasure trail after Ryan drew a stubby-haired chin-treasure trail (just visit his site to see that madness). I disapproved, since I love drawing longer hair. Last up was the lady friend. She was fun to doodle, and her arm blended nicely into the guy's hair, so I embraced the weirdness there. Then it looked like the hand guy was trying to claw at her chest, so I went with that, too.

Oh, and I wrote a message on the guy's arm so I wouldn't forget. I need to burn some Fleet Foxes for Dave Chisholm to give a listen. They're freakin' amazing.

Mr. Grumpy-Pants

2008-06-19T00:51:00.011-06:00

I was in an unusually terrible mood last draw night. Arriving, I didn't plan to draw anything, but I managed to get out some unfocused doodles, some of which reflected my mood. First up was some stuff I did on a scrap piece of paper with Derek's pen. Angry brows, gritting teeth, storm clouds, and dark eyes. That was a good reflection of all the irkness inside-a-me.

The next one may look worse than I meant it. Rachel drew a guy sitting down and I wanted him to be sitting on someone, so I doodled in the guy beneath him, but someone else at the table reasonably asked whether the guy on top or bottom was the aggressor. I leave it for you to decide.

Another loosey-goosey drawing. I rather liked this one.

And a final loose one before I left early. I think I bummed some people out taking off so early; my apologies.

Friday the Weird and 13th

2008-06-19T00:42:00.003-06:00

A little Friday the 13th doodle done at the house of a friend. I have no idea what the hell is going on aside from the fact that he has two left hands. (That seems to be the least of his problems.)

Four-Legged Friends

2008-06-12T00:36:00.004-06:00

So this week began with the usual warmup. I was feeling a little loose, so I knew I would be struggling a bit for inspiration, and decided the best thing was just to let the lines flow. Things started with a couple heads, but I was feeling like I should be trying to cram some bodies in there, and it prompted the collection of lines that make up the naked fella in the lower left.

It's been awhile since I sat next to Ryan Ottley and I miss goofing off during the session, trading poses and stuff, so I asked Ryan if he would give me a more superhero-y pose. Whenever I give a pose back to Ryan he laments how filled in the shapes already are, so I need to figure out a way to give him better figures. But to be fair, once the basic shapes are in, the basic shapes are in, and I mostly follow the lines he leaves for me, too. I just love filling his strong poses. I was feeling a little goofy on the head, but the shiny-headed baby man is all good in my book.

On the next page I started with the head on the left, thinking about some very flat, block-like shapes. After filling him and feeling a little uninspired, I just started doodling circles that become the next guy's eyes. His shapes started appearing in my head pretty quickly -- the rather round features mixed with small, poky bits of nose and lips that made him seem kind of nerdy and pale. I wanted the eyebrows to poke out more, so I really thickened and darkened them, and that inspired the really dense chest hair that he has. I really liked him.

Doing very flow-like lines made me think about the recent endeavors drawing animals from my head, since I find it fascinating that everyone knows when a drawing looks right, but they can't actually draw it themselves. So I decided to try some from-my-head animals. First up was the bunny, which "feels" a little off, but works. Next up was the turtle, which I thought was pretty decent, but I had a couple turtles growing up, so no fair, maybe. The last disaster was an attempt at a giraffe. I knew it didn't look right but I couldn't figure out how to fix it. I since looked it up, and it might have looked like a decent approximation if I could have figured out the front of the face. Giraffes have a lot pointier look. But rather than hide my mess, I figured it would be fun for everyone to see how far off a giraffe from my head can be.

I started the next drawing with the right eye and eyebrow when Jon Diesta asked if I would finish his drawing. I agreed, and figured he could finish mine. So this is Jon Diesta's completion of my right eye and eyebrow. Cool stuff in my book. I really like what he turned the guy into, and especially love his lei. The drawing I did on Jon Diesta's roughs is out there somewhere. Once again, I recommend you hassle him to scan it if you want to see what that ended up looking like.

The last one was the most flow of conscious drawing, and it turned out pretty fun, if not completely nuts. I started with the upper eyebrows, did the circles that later became eyelids, then the frog thing started popping in my head, and I started drawing out the edges of the mouth that the mustache sat on. From there it was just getting the kind of flabby underskin that frogs have and just started drawing legs. And more legs. Then some weird skin marks and tennis shoes, and whatever-the-hell-it-is seemed ready to go. Fun stuff.

Diesta Tew'd

2008-06-08T09:02:00.000-06:00

This was a drawing from a month ago that I mentioned at the start of May. The face and start of hair was a drawing by Jon Diesta that he handed over for me to complete. I love the flow of his lines -- I really wish he would post more of his work -- and they were fun to follow. I don't like the length of the torso that I chose, but I pictured the flow of her hair turning into these weird hair-hand claws that were fun to doodle even though they were strange. I hope you enjoy this fun collab.

Technology Kills Time

2008-06-05T21:58:00.002-06:00

Not too many drawings this week, and I think it was because of the tech in my first doodle. The drawings are also a little lighter because I ran out of lead and the only kind available at the table was 2H (thank you, Derek!). I started with the head in the upper-left -- yet another one of my drawings trying hard for the worst hairdo trophy. Next up was some big almond eyes that turned into a fella with a mohawk. I drew his hand out like he was holding out a ring for a kiss, and I wanted to do something more interesting with his left, so I decided to try a big gun. I absolutely despise drawing technology because I feel uncomfortable making up so much shape from ignorance, but I just went for it. I do the same with animals, really. But tech takes a lot more time despite it being nonsense, and I ate up most of the night dicking with shapes on it. I think it turned out decent, even if it makes no sense. I started drawing down the torso and considered drawing further, but instead replaced "further" with one more head, and embellished that with some word balloons.

Frustrated that the night was spent on the other drawing, and knowing I would have very little to post, I decided to just throw down one more doodle before everyone bailed. I say two posts this week is better than one.