Cleanest of the Roughs

Sometimes I get into a drawing and I just keep working at it beyond a rough sketch. It gets pseudo-complete (as far as my sketchbook standards are), but it's surrounded by other drawings that I was doing before. Those warm-up drawings invariably acted as blockades to my better ones. Too bad for them; I've got Photoshop.

I want to get better at drawing cartoony ladies. Mastering that technique seems like a small rite of passage into animation-dom.

This was done on a marbleized notecard. Curse my lack of foresight.

Until Next Time.

Moleskinnia

Dug out some more of the drawings in my most petite of sketchbooks. Drawing in the moleskine makes you feel so much more officially artsy. Or, at least that's how you may appear to certain people on the train.

Must've been talking about cicadas...and crippled dogs :(

Sometimes the drawings that take 2/10ths of a second are better than something you labor away on for 20 minutes. As far as my standards go, this is one of them.

Until Next Time.

More Cowgirls

So after reviewing the drawings I'd done on my first pass I decided they could really be worked over a great deal more. I pushed the boundaries of how cartoony she could look...and they were sometimes frightening. Luckily I think I'm finding a good balance between cartoony and too realistic and boring.

I had no idea how easy it was to get trapped in that GI Joe style of cartooning. It's hard to break out of because you still want the cartoon to actually look like the person you're caricaturing.

Without going on too much of a rant here, this does look incredibly boring.

Fearing the GI Joe trap, I went in a totally opposite direction. Too much?

What I consider to be a nice balance of the 2 styles. Now she's a Real American Hero in my eyes.

Until Next Time.

Cowgirl Power

So I've been lucky enough to contribute some fantasy segments to a short film about an actress living in Los Angeles. My first task was to nail down a working, competent version of the main character in animated form. The fantasy thing involves a lot of western themes, so I get to make her into an awesome cowgirl. Yay!!

Thanks to a wonderful crash course in caricature from Joe M, (http://www.joeseats.blogspot.com/)
I was off and running. Here's a compilation of a few ideas.
More on this as it develops.






















Until Next Time.

Oh, you Cheaterfish!!!!

A dream was described to me wherein a small fish kept stealing money from the tip jar of a local coffeehouse. The staff was constantly catching him in the act, but he kept doing it. Stealing more and more money for his own personal fish needs (Maybe he had fish gambling debts). They would yell, "CURSE YOU,CHEATERFISH!!!!!!!!!" He was a cheating, thieving goldfish.

Needless to say, the story was striking to me...striking enough to illustrate.









Until Next Time.

Many, Many Concepts

Here are quite a few more concepts for the various pieces I'm working on. I find a lot of the most productive stuff on here was done on the train. Maybe it's because I wanted to focus all my attention away from the gaggles of hyper children.

Character sketches for my dialog piece.

Character sketches for my ball roll assignment. The idea of a little T. Rex stuck immediately and I just went to town with the variations.

Aaaaand some rough planning for the ball roll itself, cute T. Rex included.

Until Next Time.

So yeah...

Wow, that last month was really a bust. At least I'm running to catch up exactly a month later...and a day. And I've got a barrel o' new stuff here!!!

I suppose I'll start where I left off, before my laptop was carried away by the twin demons Dead Motherboard and Tech Support.


I hate them so much.
Here's some sketches.

This is what happens when I put graffiti on my own drawings. Bad things happen.

More sketches from the train. Some really early character ideas from my dialog piece.

Lastly, a window into my warmup drawings.

Until Next Time.