Apologies.

Yeah, it's been a while. I'm in Canada and HATING every moment of it. I have no internet so despite drawing everyday I really have no way of bringing them here, to you, the 3 people that might occasionally browse this blog. But trust me, the drawings you are not seeing are all masterpieces that would blow your mind and would inspire droves of animation wannabes throughout the industry and spark a revolution. Or they just might suck. Whatever. You'll never seen them! HA!

Oh yeah, I was apologizing for not updating. Right.... Sorry folks.

Dr. Sketchy's and others.

Drawings from Dr. Sketchy's Burlesque Anti-Art School Life Drawing "classes." Really it's just sexy girls in Burlesque outfits posing for artists at the M Bar in Hollywood and that's never a bad thing. These were done with a Fabercastel gray-tone brush pen, watercolor and a VERY noxious industrial marker. Seems the more toxic a marker is, the better they work. It's a shame a lot of them are no longer being made so artists have to make do with poor quality yet eco-friendly markers...





Yes, she really was making those weird faces.


More random marker spot exercises, this time NOT drawn on the bus, but actually sitting at a table concentrating. These came out pretty good so I guess it's really working!

This might be my last post for a while since I'm moving to Canada and won't have the internet until we find a good place to settle in.

sketchies revisited...

More bus practice. I've found that these come out a lot better when I'm riding on the bus as opposed to sitting at a table. I guess the increased concentration required to counter all the rocking and jerking movements of an MTA bus (that were all apparently built without shock absorbers) means every line I put down was thought out instead of just put down any old place. I have a nasty habit of rushing through drawings, so drawing on the bus, in ink, forces me to slow down...






It also gives me some awesome shapes I'd never have come up with on my own. Oddly enough they remind me of the Hubley/Schribner work that John K's been posting on his blog.

Also, I apologize for not updating the aristocrat piece, I've been too busy earning money. :P

The boy ain't right.

Here's some stuff from my sketchbook.

Colorful dragons...



And I've been watching too many rap videos in the morning....

...they make me wanna drank.

Slow but steady....

Started laying in the flats and some gradients. Directing it so that the eye can move around the image and focus mainly on the Aristocrat himself.

composition.

Because I hadn't thumnailed any compositions for the characters to be within an environment, I spent some time doing some black and white compositional studies. I didn't post all the ones I did as I'd saved over them without realizing, but you can see where I was trying out vertical and horizontal positions and different ideas for background elements. Because I did them in gray tones it should help me out when I get to the colors. Now I need to decide if I want to paint them in photoshop or going into flash and use a flat colored style...

Here's an early comp. Pretty plain, pretty boring. I hadn't yet warmed up.


Here's what I have now. I like it a lot, although now it's more about the Background than the characters. At this point I can live with that.

sweet, sweet music.

Sorry for the lack of updates. For about a month now my iTunes hasn't been working properly, crashing as soon as I open it up. And well... it's pretty dang hard for me to just sit down without my music going so I just haven't been as motivated to draw as usual. Well that and I've been buying a bunch of used xbox games which I guess didn't exactly help either, haha.


Anyway, Robert Iza and I have been trying to do some exercises where one guy gives a random adjective and the other person gives a noun and we end up drawing whatever the pair makes. We ended up with Fanciful Knight for our first bit. Well, to me, fanciful translate to "foppish" and by Knight, I think nobleman *snicker*. Otherwise I would've just drawn some gay looking knight and that's kinda not original or fun so I took some liberties. The exercise is really just about coming up with something interesting to draw so cheating is allowed I think.

Since this drawing is actually turning out to be better and more fun that I thought, and because I won't be finished with it tonight, I decided to post some WIP images to show the steps in my process. After going through a few thumbnails in my sketchbook, I hit something I liked, then I roughed it a bit more and scanned it into photoshop where I then started using my wacom and layers to solidify the figure and tighten it up a bit.


You can see that I'm making corrections and changes as I go along, being mindful of composition, character, shape and size relations, etc. I also went back and redrew the faces, giving them more personality and trying hard not to make them look generic. Of course, this is NOT a tutorial. I may not know what the hell I'm doing, I'm just using educated guesses and trying to methodical about my work. It helps myself more than anything to write the process down so that it sticks in my head and ultimately allows me to get to where I want to go faster in my drawing rather than drawing and redrawing over and over again going nowhere.

Tomorrow... colors! Err, if I get around to it. I might wake up and suddenly decide that I don't care anymore. hahaha! J/k. I'll finish this, I promise.

opposing styles

Spent Sunday Night at Dr. Sketchy's Burlesque life drawing session then the group of artists I was with headed over to the Cat and Fiddle in Hollywood where Dave Johnson was hosting another Drink and Draw get together. Lotta' cool people and great artists there. I managed to crap these out in my slightly buzzed state...

This is a Frankenstein character from my friend John Devilman's comic idea. It's been a while since I've done this kind of comic style, anime-esque stuff. I kinda left that behind in highschool, but I think I still got it despite some proportional mistakes here and there. Aaaaand, a dude. straight from my head. I don't know who he is, but he probably wants you to stop looking at him.

Das Vedanya, Comrade!

EMP and an adversary ready to rumble.

More BG work.

Lines By Thibault LaPorte.

Colors by me, done in Flash 8.rawr.

hmm.

I liked the way this came out. The original pencils are by my former schoolmate and current co-worker Matt Siditsky.

And the colors are by me. Done in Flash 8.
Really trying to take advantage of Flash's gradient tool to give BG's a somewhat sculpted, painted look. I used to hate the gradient tool as much as I hated using photoshop's lensflare, but in the right hands it can look pretty good I think. I'd like to take this a step further into Pshop and add some brush effects to give it a more "hand painted" look. But as it is, it's nice.

Sketchies...

Been doing these on the bus this last week. I like the way they're going. I'm Gonna try and keep up with these kinds of exercises.

Sputnik?

Some experimentation with another character of mine. A hero who talks to his scarf that can do cool things. Another comic idea.

My character, drawn at the Alternative Press Expo for Dez over at OCAD (Online Comic Artist Directory). I've been planning to do a book about this character for some time now and plan on start after I get a few other things out of the way.

The 8-bit Show

Photos from the 8-bit show using my sister's camera that I apparently can't use very well. There was a lot of great work there, although it doesn't look like any of the artists were there. Maybe next year yours truly will be apart of it? I'll be working hard to make it happen.

Clash of Worlds!

Painted this in Photoshop while at my buddy Shane Corn's house learning how to paint and teaching him and our awesome friend Ratna Pappert some Flash animation stuff.


Dragon vs. Alien Spider Robot UFO

Too fast for you.

racer number 77.

Raw Sketches...

I was going to go ahead and clean these up for the portfolio, but I have decided that they do not meet my high falootin' standards, so here they are in their naked, un-altered, glory.



I've been trying to find a focus in my art, everything up until now have just been plain-jane character designs with no real context to any of them. These are related to a story I have, but I think I need to specifically focus on art that tells a story.

Nature, heck yeah!

Decided to try my hand at some watercolors for the first time since elementry school. I walked up to Griffith park and did my best... Unfortunately my scanner doesn't pick up colors very well and they both ended up being very desaturated. I did what I could to regain some of the color but they still look terrible.

Long time, no see.

It's been a while. I apologize to all 3 of you that possibly check this blog every once in a while for the incredible lack of posts within the last year. Anyway, I'm gonna TRY to post more. So here it is... ART! First off is some stuff from a story I'm working on...

And some girls because drawing them never gets old.