People I Saw Today: P.I.S.T.

What an unfortunate acronym.

It's tough to get people from the front... All they have to do is glance up and see me staring at their face and neck and chest. But it's not what it looks like; I'm not checking you out! I'm just stealing your body parts and putting them into my brain so I can re-build you as a bloodthirsty monster. So it's even creepier than checking you out! Word.

Just spend more time on stuff.

Tuesday afternoon BLUES

I need to hit the tutorials again. I've been coasting on the fumes from Cato's stuff and am in dire need of additional instruction. In the interim, here's some scribbles from today. Gonna go see what I can see. 

Looking at some of this stuff now I'm realizing that all I need to do in many instances is just push stuff further. There's some good stuff, just incomplete and not in need of genius artistry- simply elbow grease. Hmm.

OVER THE RIVER AND THROUGH THE WOOODDDSSS

I instantly came to the limits of my skills when I tried to color this. ARGH. I knew from personal observation over the weekend that the sky is darker higher up, so I did that. But the rest was disastrous! I just give you this poorly colored one.

BONUS: "A Brutal Mêlée" and others (November 03 Deluxe Anthology Edition)

Hey, guys. I just found out that "A post may have at most 20 labels". So tons of stuff isn't getting labeled here! ARGH!

Morning sketch

Just trying to apply things I've learned over the last week.

Started with Prisma, threw some tones on and then some color.

I should have more tonight. 

I used this Bilal as reference (I just wanted to steal that smirk!):

Blurgh

I finished the Bob Cato training today. I'll have to watch it again. Or at least pick up some different tools. It's weird to make a jump from traditional to digital media. I never realized how useful a pencil could be in terms of texture and layering. I just don't have a white Prismacolor pencil. Some nice gray markers would be nice, too. But here's what I did. I was gonna upload something else but I'm still workin' on it... It was a really rough sketch I was going to add value to in Photoshop but it's proving harder than I expected. So here's some more exploration in value on the human head. In the one on the right I couldn't decide on a light source, so it's kinda silly.

Inktober Day 32

Haha! Just kidding. Shout out to the people in my blog feed who did 31 days of Inktober: Nate and Ashley, good job, y'all. Yeah, those are the only people I saw who made it. Maybe I'm not following your art? Sorry, we'll fix it.

I'm at a friend's house and it's 8:45 and it's early and I'm tired and I don't have my tablet and coloring/editing/stuff on a computer is hard without it! I've been trying a lot more sketching with stuff that's not pen in the interest of working through understanding light and shadow and loosening up in general. So it's rough, but if you remember back to Day 1, this blog is all about growth. Attempted growth.

So the movie Gravity? I never saw it (which is odd for me because I do love the Sai-Fai) but I'm curious to see how it would fare with the addition of giant space sharks. You might think that's absurd, but clearly I have an eye for detail. Look! I didn't put gills on them because there's no flowing water in space for them to breath. So watch out for space sharks, s'all I'm sayin'. I'm adding the "Aliens" and "Animal" tag to this post because I think that giant space sharks are both. Oh, and "PHEAR" and "Scary" because they would be terrifying (and "Hairless", etc. Giant space sharks are many things).

Some noodlin n doodlin

BONUS: I posted too soon!

Right after I uploaded that last one I put down the computer and picked up a prismacolor pencil and started some sketching. I started like normal (see the really dark lines on the right side of the image) but remember what Bob Kato has taught me in the last couple days I tried again, just keeping really loose and remembering a few key measurements and to darken things I want to accentuate this happened, and it turned out well, I think! I do think I could work on making the eyes smaller, because they always turn out too big.

I might work more on this later, but now I have to go to work :(

Spooky!

Dungeon delving and a confession

A guy going into the cave to get the trayshure.

And other sketchbook stuff from today:

 In this first one, I was trying to get the hands right for the guy at the top who was supposed to be holding a sword. In the process it inadvertently became JoJo-esque, with after images in an arc shape. I DID NOT DRAW THE BLACK AND WHITE IMAGE, I just placed it there so you could see what JoJo stuff I was talking about! Also, my sister was talking to me about tardigrades. She showed me a picture and I sketched one out. I thought it looked like a squatting dog and so I drew that too. Also a nude man.

Some perspective stuff and then working on the human head. I've been trying to figure this stuff out with the aid of some Gnomon tutorials. 

So yeah, confession time: I didn't draw at all yesterday. I have been a little lazy as far as posting goes this month, and yesterday I wasn't feeling great... Art has been slow and it has felt like I haven't been learning anything. I hope that growth is taking place but it's tough to see. But all that kind of came crashing down on my face and I just felt kind of poopy. I played video games for an hour or so and did some reading and was just kind of lazy in general. I'll try to do better. 

But now I have to go fold laundry and get ready for bed. 

Drawing

It's hilarious how hard it is for me to draw from below looking up at the human head. For whatever reason that outside edge of the face is outrageous. I need to practice more. I try to draw the jawline and then I move up to do the outline of the face and it all falls apart.

Been drawing heads. Sorry for my absence, it has been a busy weekend. I have a paper to type tomorrow. I hope all these lame drawings add up to something soon!

Welcome to the Circus of VALUEEEEEE

Playing with hard form and soft form. I really like the blue guy and the punching guy. It says "Hadrian's Wall" because I was taking notes in art history, and that was something I wanted to look at. And I guess I didn't erase it? The bottom picture feels a little soft around the edges. Those dern edges. I do like the robot on the bottom in the center, though.

I'm tired, going to bed. 

An alien, in perspective, eating all of his Dad's lunch pasta

This was a special request.

Shopkeeper

Ugh. I'm secretly very proud of how this top one turned out. It's a robot shopkeeper, selling goodies to adventurers. "Hail!", he calls out as you enter his shop. He's got some knives, grenades, boxes of ammunition (even though you can't really tell that's what it is) and a gun. Let me tell you, that gun was awful to draw in perspective and as a result is not going to be ergonomic and comfortable to hold. I don't know what he's charging for it, but you're probably better off going to a different store to buy your firearms to fight the villains. There's also a totally unrelated assassin holding a grenade launcher having a phone call. He's busy.

This next guy fired off a buncha round from his shotgun. He's sizing things up before moving on to blast more aliens. Also a guy firing like a maniac.

Oh, and since you scrolled all the way down here to read my words, I'll talk to you about anime. Friday night a buddy of mine recommended  FLCL to me. I'd heard about it, but never seen it. It's only six episodes.

I watched it.

I loved it, and will watch it again soon. It's off the wall and doesn't look like butt, like most anime does. So yeah, it's awesome. Loved it. 

Grenade Cookin' 2: In For a [trick or] Treat

Murtcurf credited me for his most recent post over here, so I do this in exchange: might noodle on this a little more, it doesn't feel done. But I have too much to do right nao

It's late and I'm tired.

 This next one has a guy saying "Action." Or maybe his shoulder is saying that. I want to use the guy in the banner for the website, we're due for an update, aren't we?

I've been listening to my favorite band Protest the Hero's new CD, Volition. It was supposed to release on the 29th, but it leaked on the 16th and the band sent everybody who helped fund the CD on indiegogo an e-mail with download links saying that since the CD leaked they'd rather have everyone listening to the best quality. There's some good stuff, but the last track on the album, "Skies" is totally amazing. The first time I heard the chorus (which is weird for Protest; their songwriting is bizarre and typically chorus-less) I was blown away. Great song, great album. Favorite band. Nice work, guys. The song isn't about a hideous orc-looking mutant, but I was listening to Skies as I drew it and it subconsciously got onto the paper.

Perspective and fan art. LOL!

First up I got a sand worm from ARRAKIS! Joking, but not really. Then there's like a door to the dungeon. Reminds me of the entrance to The Depths in Dark Souls. Again, I'm doing tons more perspective noodling but I'm scared to upload... It's hard for me to get.

Next up we got a team of guys, just preparing to mess some bad guys up.

 Next it's some Hayao Miyazaki fan art with No Face. Ha! And a guy wearing a snapping turtle helmet. Turtles have shells, so their defensive value is high. So make equipment look like turtles. No Face doesn't give out gold nuggets in my fan art, he just gives out bombs and entire gold bars. So yeah, that would be nice. Can I also say how hard it is for me not to draw bullet casings pouring out of that gun? Any time I draw a gun, I feel obligated to have shells flying everywhere. Even if the character is reloading, shooting a revolver or not shooting at all. I read Kohta Hirano's Hellsing in high school and combined with Yasuhiro Nightow's Trigun (my favorite comic ever, if I haven't mentioned that here) I was a bullet happy little boy. Lastly, if you read the word "Trigun" and thought, "Yeah, I love that anime!" do yourself a favor and read Trigun and Trigun Maximum. The anime cannot even begin to hold a candle to the comic. Seriously. Anime is wicked boring. Comic talks about wave phasing, deep space travel and other cool sci-fi garbage.

Okay, here's some perspective stuff.

I just drew this for you! Just kidding, I drew it for me. But I'll let you look, if you promise to be good.