Pulling a fast one

Haven't continued along the angelic-drawing-route at all. Instead, I've updated my profile picture. I'm also going to shamelessly distract everyone with a few cute animal doodles. You should be able to identify a rabbit, a seal, a dog and a cat. I really need to start drawing bigger pictures. I had to enlarge this picture by 20% to make it at least a little bit more readable. I tend to start with really small drawing sizes, like 100 - 200px, when I could easily draw larger pictures and just adjust my brush size accordingly. I guess I subconsciously dislike the notion of having to scroll around the drawing, but that's just an issue I can simply tackle with the all-powerful zoom tool. The animals are drawn to over-emphasize their supposed cuteness, as my more realistic trials would probably yield something horrific as opposed to aww-inspiring ...

Animals 2

Multifaceted

Last post I mentioned something about wanting to draw more faces, so I did! On four different days, I drew a face. What was quite surprising was the progression of time taken on each picture. The first one took about three hours to make, with the rest of the pictures steadily taking less and less time to make. The fourth and final face took  roughly half an hour to finish! The first face is actually fully colored (a fact which I blame the unseemly amount of time taken to finish the damn thing on), but I decided on greyscaling it so that it doesn't pop out. For each picture I drew a quick sketch of the face first, then filled in the blanks, so to speak. Structurally I placed the shape or outline of the face, the facial features and the hair on different layers. Drawing each face was surprisingly enjoyable. As a bonus, I threw in a work-in-progress (well, sort of...) of the next scribble I want to work on.

Faces 3

WIP 1

To Infinity, and Beyond!

Here's a piece I began three or four weeks ago. I've worked on it for a total of three or four days, coming to a total of 6-8 hours worth of artistic effort. It's a reminder for me of why I started doing all this drawing in the first place: to be able to draw awesome mechs and other nifty mechanical contraptions! It's supposed to be a Szlamandra Tactical Armored Gear, from the boardgame Infinity. I've never played the game itself, but I happened to browse through the miniature catalog at one time and the Slamandra TAGs were among the coolest things in there. As for the drawing effort itself, I think I concentrated more on the shadows this time around, as opposed to any fine details.

Mech 1

Interlude

Games and work have been actively and very persuasively keeping me from my artistic efforts.The problem is, that getting better at this sort of thing would require much more... How should I put this... Cannon fodder? I think it's a bit like learning math (for some people, like me for example), that one just has to keep crunching numbers together rather than searching for an quicker way out. I'm clearly not doing this. I tried portraying some basic emotions this time around. Nothing fancy, just line-art with some shadows. I want to do more faces! I should start working on clothes as well.

Emotions 1

Heavy Metal

Here's another piece I started about a week ago and never bothered to finish it in time. It took some 4 to 6 hours to finish, with quite a bit of that time going into fiddling about with the line-art and coloring. I need to optimize those tasks somehow. Paint-bucketing uncolored areas wasn't such a hot idea after all, since it roughens the fill area edges rather crudely. One idea would be to quickly duplicate the line-art layer (or a portion of it), bucket it as normal, then merge it back onto the original line-art layer (or another duplicate) thus preserving the nice, gradual stepping that the lines often have. Anyway, this piece is a fictional WW2-era tank I wanted to try drawing. I drew it completely by hand, not using any line- or shape tools in it.

Vehicles 1

All systems 100% and feeling jolly good

Haha! So I'm finally rightfully reunited with my beloved desktop 'puter. It's amazing how faster I can get stuff done. Well, at least surfing the Net seems a lot faster! The lack of downtime updates is explained by my refusal to attempt another drawing with my laptop mouse. That was such an excersize in frustration that I felt it better to do without another such venture. This week's drawing portays my two household 'puters. I don't think I tried anything new with this one, but felt inspired to draw it nonetheless. And yes, my laptop is a bit on the aged and senile side of things.

Life 2

Technical Difficulties

My desktop computer blew up last week. A power-out occured, resulting in an electric surge that most likely fried the power supply along with the motherboard. It's been a week since I took it to the tech shop to have it repaired. Still no clue as to the true extent of the damage. I've been living in processing-power-limbo on my laptop in the mean time. Funny how doing anything with the ol' 'puter suddenly feels so slooow... I did the picture with Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI (dig the name...) and my lil' laptop mousie. I nearly lost my temper until I discovered the pen-tool and how to draw lines with it. Drawing with a low-DPI mouse is suprizingly frustrating. Here's to hoping I can get my beloved CPU back next week, hopefully in working condition.

Life 1

Schedules and such

I think I missed a deadline here... Hopefully no-one will notice since I did two pictures last week to compensate. There's not a whole lot to say about this week's piece. I want to get better at drawing faces, before I can concentrate on drawing other parts of the body. I think I got the basic outline of the face rather well this time. The eyes need more work. The hair appears to jut out from behind the ear. I think I should do a purely grayscale piece one of these days where I'll concentrate more on the face and less on everything else. Anyway, here it is.

Faces 2

Burst of Inspiration

Following up yesterdays creative work, here's a pop-artish, rather psychedelic piece. It conveys a distinct sense of disapproval, as portrayed by quite a stern-looking creature. This piece took, again, way more time than it should have. I originally intended to do something quick and fun, but I ended up fiddling with all the neat features of Photoshop Elements 6, mainly how to simulate color-range selection. Sadly I failed in my mission on how to figure out how to delete white-to-gray shades around the edges of the creature. I ended up simply blurring the creature a bit, then adjusting its colors to a more darker shade. Since Elements doesn't have nearly as much features as the "regular" version of PS, this was an experiment in ad-hoc, much as the very idea of this blog. Fun fact: the creature was originally doodled on notepad in roughly five seconds. Such was its charm that I had to scan and immortalize it to a digital medium.

Abstract 1

Holiday artistry

This is the first piece that I took my time making, taking a total of three days to make. Each day I worked on the image for about two to three hours, making the total workload 6 - 9 hrs. It's a spaceship cannon of sorts, with a revolverish barrel, power cells and a few exhaust vents. The background art was definitely the most fun part, especially coming up with humdrum descriptions and a graph related to the weapon. The fonts used in the piece are DS-Digital and Pixeldust Expanded. I initially drew a pipe-ring contraption attached to the midsection, but didn't turn out so well so I scrapped it from the finished piece rather mercilessly. I mainly learned that similar colors don't pop up quite that well with transparency. This resulted in some of the detail flourishes disappearing from the blueprint-style wiring at the back.

Weaponry 1

Barely there

Another 30 minutes or so and I'd have missed my blog-updating-schedule... *Phew* That said, it's not as easy to have a weekly update routine going, lax as though it might seem. This week's picture is an attempt at a baby seal, chilling on an iceberg (pun intended). I wanted to finally do something futuristic or weaponish, but maybe I can do that next week. I set out to do a comic-styled seal, as I can exaggerate the cuteness-factor more than I could if I'd have tried a more realistic approach. It would have also taken a lot more time, and I want to keep these attempts relatively short at the beginning (e.g. 1-3 hours or so per piece).

Animals 1

Distraught week

Somehow a lot of negative things managed to pile up on this week. I concentrated too much energy on things that actually required very little, such as this week's art piece. Had some trouble with my drawing tablet. The thing seemed to have lost all my carefully laid-out appliaction-spesific hotkeys, that I spent an hour or two setting up. I made a backup file this time, which will hopefully prevent tragedies like this from occurring in the future. Anyway, about the picture. I had this vision of drawing the wooden plank acting as the "front gate" into the mine in much more detail than I actually managed. I drew this landscape with my usual blurry style, and exaggerated the effect by adding light wind filters here and there.

Scenery 2

Also, here's a special bonus picture a certain visitor drew. 

Guest 1

Humble beginnings

So I watched a tutorial at Youtube on how to draw a basic portrait. The result of today's effort is this... mutant thing. Yes, she is female (I think). The eyes were pretty fun to play with. I had the most trouble with the mouth, though. I almost cheated by cutting and pasting the mouth area to different locations, but felt somehow dirty afterward for doing so. Thus the mouth stayed where it was. I also touched up the background for the first "Tools" picture, because I felt it was rather plain. On another note entirely, I've decided to abandon the use of Corel Painter Sketchpad for the foreseeable future... Far too plain in it's functionality for my tastes.

Faces 1

Home away from Home

I was not at home this weekend, but I happened across a drawing tablet (Bamboo Fun) at the residence of my Significant Other. This, combined with PhotoShop Elements 6, allowed the creation of the following piece of blurry scenery. This work is done mainly with all sorts of brush types combined with different brush modes / blending options (whatever they're called...). I learned that you can also attach a blending method to an entire layer! How cool is that?

Scenery 1

Hello World!

Hey and welcome to the blog! Let the good times roll.

Fair warning: The "art" contained in this blog is of very, very low quality. Please wash your eyes afterward.

The purpose of this blog is to follow my progress from a complete and utter novice in the illustrating arts to ... well ... something other than a complete and utter novice, I hope. I've never been much of an artist, and I can barely draw stick figures and simple symbols. This blog is attempt to fill this void in my skillset. I've always envied people who can draw, and it's time I did something about it. The blog will mostly contain pictures and brief yammering on daily events. Updates will be on a weekly basis, excluding holidays and such.

Tools 1