Inspried from real life

Here's a drawing from earlier today. It's based off of people I know. Basically it's mother and son pair of creatures. They're still connected via umbilical cord. She's strapped to him via thorny vines that dig into both of them and his legs are chained to large bricks so that he can't run away. Additionally, they're attracted to money but the reason for it is unknown since they don't actually spend it. They live together in a small cottage or home in the woods that's far too tiny for the both of them. Neither of them like each other, yet they still stay together.

Overall, it could have turned out better. I like the concept of the character so I'll probably revisit it at some point, but the drawing itself was basically a rough sketch that I decided to detail more. Done in Manga Studio 4.

St Elmo's Fire colored

So here it is, the colored up version of St Elmo's Fire. It's been a while since I've done a piece from pencils to colors. It turned out pretty decently if I do say so myself.. and I will if no one else says it :)

I'm also including the trial color tests that I did to try and figure stuff out ( I pretty much just ended up doing a mash-up of it all in the end).

St. Elmo's Fire inked

So.. I guess I lied. I didn't want to ink it, but I had recently purchased Manga Studio 4 and needed to justify my purchase a bit. Plus keeping it digital would keep me from completely botching up my pencilwork.

I originally wanted more line variation, but in the end I'm okay with how it turned out and the overall line weight choices that I ended up making. Manga Studio is a pretty great program. It even has features that fixes up your lines. I ended up toggling that off a lot though because lines that were too perfect didn't look like I did them. Heh.

St. Elmo's Fire

So, most of the time when I do work on the computer, I usually run Netflix or Hulu or video podcasts on the secondary monitor. Of course, earlier this year, AT&T decides to impose a 150gb bandwidth limit per month citing that it's a necessary step in keeping people from sucking up all the bandwidth. Personally, I think it's just a money grab since bandwidth isn't a finite resource, but whatever.

Anyway, as the amount of free bandwidth I have decreases, I end up hitting Spotify and listening to my random playlists. At one point I got St. Elmo's Fire stuck in my head. Being the big fan of cheesy wordplay that I am, I had draw this image with the muppet Elmo. I tied him in with the weather phenomenon rather than the song, since I actually don't really know what the song's about.

I'm not sure if I'll ink it though since I tend to crunk things up a lot when I ink my own work.

I picked up some Copic markers over the past few weeks. I've wanted to try working with them for a while now, but never got around to it since they were a bit pricey. In restrospect, I should have done it sooner since they recently increased the price of them. Ah well, live and learn.

Anywho, I had some free time today so I decided to play around with them.

Bah, I'm not even going to bother..

There's really no point in promising to do more posts. Things come up and I just completely forget. I can't even really think of a great excuse for it all at this point. But.. here's some drawings that were done in the past few months in hopes of making it up a little?

The first six images are the pencils and inks for Sheila's upcoming book. Overall they turned out decent. There are some aspects of the inking I'm unhappy with, but that's where the growth comes in I guess. The fifth and sixth images were from the story "Mrs. Ambrose". I had the hardest time coming up with that one, but it probably turned out the best overall.

 

 The following image was done as a gift to Sheila for her birthday. I actually liked how it turned out overall. It's a shame that my strongest is oftentimes reserved for the personal works. I'd love to consistently bring this level on everything.

And so another month goes by..

Remember when I updated this page regularly? Yeah, me neither. So here we re in February. 6 more weeks of winter has been predicted. Here's some drawings that I did a few weeks back. Nothing too fancy, but I really enjoy messing around with the Cintiq.

The image below was a reworking of an old doodle I did just for fun. I was just playing around with it and aging the character in the image.

The image below was just a painting form the ground up of a clown. I originally wanted to do a clown riding on a spider, but that's a bit beyond my skill level right now. I got lazy.

The next image is a painted version of  a drawing I had in my sketchbook (you might remember it from several months back). The original sketch did have it snowing, but I didn't like how that looked once it was painted over (probably because I did it poorly).

And this one was just me playing around with movement and color choices.

Finally, just for shits and giggles, here's the uploaded process of the Woodsman painting.

And.. that's all for now.