Listening to advice

Preamble: For some reason, up until I was about 19 or 20, I never took anyone's advice seriously. It was only after noticing other people I was going to school with, people like Eric Meister, Andy Conroy, Emily Warren, et cetera were making my drawings look like they were drawn by a ten year old. Someone being a year older than you is not an excuse for you being entirely out of their league, so I hit the old grindstone, using John K's drawing lessons as a jumping off point and going from there. It took me a long time to get passable, and to this day I'm confused as to why Calabash Animation hired me right out of school to do independent contract work.
Noteworthy advice I passed up: attempting to differentiate my females and males more; observing how people moved; DRAWING EYEBROWS (I seriously didn't draw eyebrows until I was like 17, and even then I just had them mirror what the top of the eyelid did); keep a good attitude on a group project, even if you don't like the group or the project; stop playing video games and just draw


Noteworthy: zoomed out the drawing of the girl on the very left resembles who I was drawing pretty well. I was actually shocked by it when I saw it.

Noteworthy: The middle picture has a terrible sense of balance, the far right has a really bad composition, and a bad background. The character has no mass and seems to be painted on a brick wall. (Thinking about that now kind of makes me wish I'd have redrawn it that way.) In the middle picture the ground crags are deeply confusing. It looks more like a desert than CRACKLING ENERGY DESTROYING THE EARTH. ALSO I only seemed to be able to draw fists in high school, which is something I'm still guilty of. Which is weird because if anything I move a little limp-wristed.


Click for a bigger version. NOTE - I seemed to have fetishized this whole old style comic thing too much, and I'm seriously going to stop at some point. HOWEVER, adding texture to flat colors seems to be a good way to keep the picture visually interesting without having to fully render it. Also I really like the line quality in some of these.
Noteworthy: I'm still not good at drawing snakes.
ALSO noteworthy: while trying to draw the girl on the very left, I shifted her jaw and cheeks too much and it ended up looking like a picture of Hilary Clinton controlling a snake, which, were I to not love both the Clintons, would have been a decently realized political cartoon. Of course saying this girl kind of DOES actually look like Hilary Clinton is not an insult

See what you made me do?

PREAMBLE: I make no bones about the idea that artists should improve at such a rate that anything over a year old shouldn't make you happy. Not that you shouldn't be proud of it, or that you don't like it, but that you see places you could have improved it. Things that you were OK with initially. Maybe even your very favorite thing about it is now something that you wish you hadn't done at all! I've had people tell me, almost with alarm in their voice, how quickly I improve while motivated. I don't think it's because I'm particularly good, just that there's so many places that I need improvement on, that as I inch along, becoming more and more valuable as an artist (hopefully!) that pieces slowly come together. Now, a good question is - how many pieces did I start the road to becoming a competent artist with put in place? I'll let you, the reader, be the judge. I'm spreading this across several posts, so as to appear active blogging, for once.

My friend Ali posted these on Facebook, unknowing that posting things I did from highschool is a sure fire way to get me to stop whatever it is that I'm doing and redraw it out of anger. FIRST Let's start with the back of an illustration board that I did for her:

Like many of these pictures I have no f'n clue what's going on here. So I just tried to reconstruct what I think I was trying to do. AS A NOTE all of this is on bristol or illustration board, but done with Sharpie. Rough illustration board, which would be great for my microns and rapidiograph pens now, worked surprisingly well with Sharpie, though they bleed too much and I wouldn't use them now, except for filling in large areas of black.
ALSO baggy pants, all the time. ALSO most of the characters have almost no balance or line of action.
I don't consider it cheating that I added another robot.

Colored pencils have never been my strong suit, but I'd venture to say that I was in my painting class in high school. It's noteworthy that I only painted one picture in that class. At the time it was irritating, but now I understand why the teacher did it. The teacher's name was Mr. Schnook, which one of the less intelligent, more meth addicted members of our class used to call Mr. Schmuck, unknowing that schnook is already an insult. That's what happens when you don't watch enough Foghorn Leghorn!
That said, the balance in this picture isn't actually all that bad, all things considered. While the monster looks awful, the composition of this piece isn't the worst thing I've ever seen and. I think that head was supposed to BE someone and I messed up, and then drew the rest of the picture around it. I MAY have done some degree of under-drawing.


I liked the nonchalantness of the old picture, but decided to up it a little bit. Also this has one of the better uses of line of action I ever used.
As a side note I highly recommend at least trying Paint Tool Sai for drawing - it's really a nice program. I got a nice line weight with it that can be hard to get with Photoshop. There's definitely a limit on what it can do, but what it does it does well.

Today's work

I don't know why I am still drawing La Pucelle fanart. Either/or this one is way better (and took less time somehow) than the last one.
This is KIND OF close to what this person looks like. I didn't exaggerate things enough, but I always feel weird about exaggerating stuff on other races because I feel like I can be labeled as racist because of it. I think that's actually a huge problem in the animation community, where they "whiten up" the features of other races for fear of being offensive. In my defense, my friend IS half Irish.

CRASSNESS ALERT: What do both of the focal points of these drawings have in common? They were both the product of a Japanese man's boner. Happy Birthday Patricia.

Hey look

It's fanart from that game no one played that has way too many protagonists in it. Man the Japanese sure love to give their videogame and cartoon characters complicated and/or confusing clothing.