Junkyard Dolls flyer

Here are the sketches I did for the Dr. Sketchy’s Baltimore flyer for the Junkyard Dolls session. I don’t like them (the sketches), but they served their purpose I suppose.

I then grabbed a 3D model of an old truck from Google Warehouse and . . .

I ended up flipping the last drawing horizontally—it didn’t occur to me until the flyer was posted around town that I’d flipped the seven backwards. 🙂

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Comics, meeting doodles, & Creative Alliance sketches

First up, here’s the new versions of the first four pages of the comic. Lot of stuff got changed—couple more edits in the text as well.

Page 4 is obviously in progress. Page 3 needs a tie-piece added to the last panel and some wordage to the wine bottle in the first panel.

Next up, some sketches from a Creative Alliance life drawing session. They’re every Saturday at 10, $10 if you’re not a member, $3 if you are.

As usual, the first drawing or two sucked. (Got there at the start of the ten minute poses, 5 minutes into the first pose—it ended before I got too far along.)

Next couple were a little better.

And after that, I was tired/bored, so the last one was crap.

Here’s a tipsy sketch done of a friend while leisurely having a couple beers at the Blarneystone.

BTW, he doesn’t look this rough in real life—I purposefully went that direction since I knew a more nuanced sketch rarely works well in a distracting environment. Oh, and the “light” spots are due to the scanner.

Last up, two doodles from a meeting at work. The first was the usual random junk that gets scribbled during these affairs; the second is an altogether matter. It started as a simple off-hand sketch of a comic-stylized side-view of an eye – and then suddenly the meeting just went on FOREVER. As the meeting dragged on, I absent-mindedly added a detail here, a detail there, and it eventually grew to the point where I ran out of page. I’ll probably put it in Painter sometime this week and see if I can add the bits I wanted to add but couldn’t, since, well, you know, the paper ran out.

By the way, the next Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School Baltimore life-drawing session is next Monday, September 27, 2010 at the Windup Space.

Best damn life-drawing you’ll find in town. If I wasn’t helping run it, I’d be there drawing. BTW, check out this LAZERBITCH video if you want a feel for what they’re like. (The Windup Space is in there at the end too.)

Comic book pages.

Here’s the two comic book pages I spent most of Thursday working on.

Couple random notes –

1  Picked up _Scarlett_ #1 by Brian Bendis and Alex Maleev about an hour after I finished doing that second page.  Maleev’s work inside it is so absolutely amazing that it immediately made me feel about one inch tall.  (The issue was also very good – I highly recommend it.)

2  If you look carefully the bar above is the same bar I’ve been tinkering with in Sketchup for over a year now.   If you scroll through old posts, you’ll see it all over the place.  It’s been heavily modified . . . using the Wacom tablet with Sketchup is almost as much fun as sex.  Tasks that used to take ten minutes can be done in seconds.  If you have a tablet, you really should download Google Sketchup (it’s free) and fool around with it.

3  I’m not sure, I’m afraid to check, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to change the font size.  It looks like it might be too big.

4  The main character should probably be named on page 1, and the bartender by the end of page 2.  I’ll probably go back, fix that, and fuss around with the dialogue in general.

5 After reading _Scarlett_, I’m rethinking that whole “not using color” thing.

Dwarves, Sketchup, & Photoshop

I’m currently in the process of building a website for a fantasy novel I’ve been working on (I’m editing the last few chapters of it now…of course, I said I was on the last edit two edits ago) and I’ve been fooling around with various sketches for the header.

(That’s not completely true . . . I’m also toying with cover ideas and layouts for a cover, which is kinda silly since I know no publisher would ever let me design the cover, but whatever, it’s fun.)

In any case, the novel is set in a low/nonexistent magic world just beginning to it’s industrial age.  Think top-hats and locomotives.  One of the main characters, Donth, is a dwarf who spends a lot time sitting in various cafes playing chess. 

Here are the first two doodles I did on a memo pad at lunch while bored.

Next I found a cafe table and a chess set in Google Sketchup.  (I could draw a table if I want, but I’m just playing and have absolutely no desire to draw a cafe table.  The point wasn’t to create a “piece of art” but to get an idea of how to layout a painting or drawing to be done later.  I still might use the last picture in a header though.  We’ll see.)

Where was I?  Oh, the table….

Next, I lighted the image of the table and then printed it out as large as I could, drew Donth sitting at the table, scanned it back in and used Sketchup to throw a cobbled floor unerneath everything. 

 

I then opened the image in Photoshop, erased the overlap lines, through a graded tint on the whole thing, then used the burn and dodge tools to add some tonal work.

 

In about a month, I’m hoping to have a Powerbook along with a tablet, which, in theory, should allow me to go a lot further with this sort of thing….working with a mouse is just too damn difficult, not only that, but my computer is so old that Photoshop slows it to a crawl.

Hell, Tweetdeck slows it to a crawl. 

At that point (when I get a Mac), I’ll probably revisit this for real instead of just toying with it.

(I don’t quite like the angle…..something doesn’t look right, but I’ve got a bit to figure it out, not to mention what to fill the rest of the space with.)

Bored sketches.

More sketches from life-drawing class.

At this point, I was bored out of my mind.  One, some kid had stolen my seat while I was playing with the snack machine, and two, the model’s next pose was basically his big ol’ butt pointed right at me.

Just really not a lot to draw there.  I suppose I could have, but I just wasn’t excited about doing a giant carefully shaded sketch of a butt.

So I doodled instead.

I stopped halfway through when the model changed poses.  Sometime this weekend I’ll probably go back and finish it and then see how it looks against a Sketchup background or something.  Maybe have the little fellow falling off a barstool.

(The sketch was pretty much doodled for that purpose…and the thought of doing a faerie-bar comic book sometime shortly.  We’ll see.)

This was the last pose…

Now I was really bored……….I think the model was napping too.  When it was time for the break we gave up and left a little early, figuring a pizza and a beer were definitely called for.

Speaking of, unless I get called into work, I’ll probably get some bar patrons sketched this weekend.

Oops, ride is here.

Fooling around with computer animation.

I’ve spent the last couple of days fooling around with computer animation….this post would have actually been up last week but there’s been a lot of annoying hindrances to embedding the video, so I’m just giving up and posting an image and a direct link to the animation on Photobucket.

Boing Boing posted an article last week a kid out in the midwest who taught himself at 16 how to do animation with a lot of free tools on the internet.  I had some spare time so I started fooling around with tools and tutorials he reccommended.  It’s not as difficult as you might think…

http://s15.photobucket.com/albums/a358/BushAaron/?action=view¤t=birdmovie4.flv

If you notice, that’s an exterior shot of the bar I built in Sketchup.  Sometime this week I’m going to see if I can set up a few animated characters in the bar having a beer or two.

And yes, I know this doesn’t have a lot to do with sketching.

[shuffles feet] 

Google Sketchup -ing a bar.

About 8 months ago I started playing around with Google Sketchup with the intention of possibly using it as a shortcut to generate backgrounds for comics.  Apparently this is fairly common in comics right now….for example, DC spent several months building a model of Metropolis to speed up background renderings in its various Superman comics.

Leinil Yu (the artist for The New Avengers) did this model for Doctor Strange’s house which is currently being used in a variety of Marvel comics.

You can find more of his stuff at http://leinilyu.deviantart.com/

Anyways, I started by downloading a pre-built restraurant from Google Warehouse…….

 

Next, I started adding other models, things like cash registers and ash trays (you can see a few above).

 

It was way too spacious (I wanted a rowhome bar), so I deleted 80% of the model and added new walls to close in the space.  No matter what I did, I couldn’t find a proper set of bar taps, so I built my own and added those in.  The space behind the bar was bare, so I deleted that and started adding objects as well.

That back wall was knocked out and replaced with a closer wall with windows, which you can see in the comic below.

At the moment, the latest iteration of the bar looks like this…

It was a concept mockup to attempt and get the “look” right for a pulpish comic book.  (Half the reason I started this site was to get my figure drawing ability back up to par so I would have better figures to play with in Sketchup.) 

Yes, I know I misspelled “possessed.”

Definitely could have done without the lens flare too, in my opinion.