We've run aground!

Busy week.

This is my dad, totally drawn on purpose and in no way shape or form at all just a doodle that might have ended up looking like him. The ship is from imagination, an homage to the Queen of Melanesia, really.


This is Hinge, who is a barbarian anthropologist, for a game of D&D. He doesn't like water. I tried to make his hair greasy.


This is Hinge ready for action with his hatchets, which make him look kind of like a native american (the mohawk helps), so I think maybe instead he will have warhammers. The little scary Spanish kind. Ouch.


Go and see Hot Fuzz if you haven't. I thought it was kind of like Kill Bill, except ridiculously awesome and well set up instead of JUST gore.

Batgod the second

cintiq doodles

My eyes kind of hurt from sitting there with my face inches away from teh cintiq all day - I need to get new glasses so that I can actually see things again.

I'm finding that it's easier to work out composition on the cintiq, because of all the cutting and dragging you can do with the lasso tool and the transform tool... but poses are still easier to work out with a pen or pencil on plain paper. I think it's got to be because the cintiq cursor never quite matches up with the pen tip, no matter how many times you calibrate it. It gets really close, but not as close as actually drawing on something.

Here are some doodles from Photoshop... playing around with shapes, a little bit of color, and a totally rockin polo shirt. Evidence of restraint : collar is not popped, and the cute chick does not have a fauxhawk. I don't want to alienate anyone or anything.

Buncha stuff

Sticking with my sketchbook.

There's an improv class at work that I've been going to, and it's been really amazing. Apparently improv is playing, for grownups. There was a game today where we just paired up and did scenes from the wild west, and about halfway through I realized that it was just about exactly like the games I would play as a little kid, except that today when I said "shhhh! what's that in the bushes?!" my partner didn't get scared and start crying (or go "nuh-UH, this is a game about PICNICS").

I guess at some point we stop riffing on everything - because really improv is just like playing with action figures. What you do suggests what happens next, and then you just act like it happened, and as long as everyone knows what's going on, that's what happened. I kind of suck at it because I sometimes go blank and sometimes I laugh (and it's way better if you play it straight, cause then the audience laughs instead)... but I'm getting better. Maybe?

It's really interesting, and fantastic to see what you can think up once you force your mind to work faster than your planning parts do.

BUT ON TO THE PICTURES.




I have never gotten a duck for my birthday, but I did give my littlest brother half a duck for Christmas when I was working in the meat department and kind of short on cash. He was really excited, which is major points for him - I would not have been so happy to get half a duck for Christmas when I was nine. "Can I open it? Should I do it over the sink?"




Farscape is THE BEST.

Some guy

I gotta work more on consistency, being able to move the guy around while keeping him the same guy. Sometimes it's almost like you can get a character in your head, and then all you gotta do is life drawings (which works the best), but sometimes it's like you've got a mannequin drawn in white on your page, and you're just trying to tug it into something vaguely resembling emotion with all the black lines you put down...

also some monsters!

Aww yeah.

Searching out the face of a character for a comic project. This is really easy to do when the face is blank and staring, with the body in a relatively neutral pose. This is called CHEATING.

It's cheating because it's easy to make it look neato, but how many times in this comic is she going to be staring blankly out of the panel? Not too many, or else it's going to be really really really boring. Melodramatic mugshots all the way!

More stuff on this project will be forthcoming... and forthcoming and forthcoming until nobody wants to see any more of it.