Bird drawing

This was a drawing I did a bribe to one of the administrators of the gallery where we hold figure drawing sessions. She very graciously offered to close up the gallery for me and I offered her a baked good in exchange, but she turned it down in favor of a drawing. Though the baked good would have been easier, it's nice to know that my work is appreciated enough for someone to turn down cake. She asked for a bird as this is what she'll be getting.

Edit: Just notice this image is larger than I intended. On my screen it appears about twice the size I drew it. Surprised how well it holds up. it's actually on an 8x10 piece of paper.

Toomai of the Elephants!

So here's the first of three illustrations for Rudyard Kipling's Toomai of the Elephants from The Jungle Books. This would be a double page spread allowing for a column of text to the left. This is a scene briefly mentioned early in the story where it describes how the elephant Kali Nag (black snake) bats away a wounded tiger with his head. I thought of this as my one opportunity to show Kali Nag as a bad ass, a flashback to his younger years.

My object here is to put together some sample illustrations for a possible dummy for a proposed Toomai book.



And a couple of details:



As before, I worked in pieces, inking each individual element and recombining the whole mess on the computer. In this one there's a bird I didn't end up using, but I used pretty much everything else.












Some textures I scanned in. All the color aside from a few highlights is cloned from watercolor and pastel textures. Here are a few examples:





The only texture I didn't make was the texture on the red cushion which I borrowed from A Dover pattern book and then tweaked using "spherize" and "distort" on Photoshop until it fit. Usually I like to hand draw everything including patterns like this, but it was easier and simpler just to use a preexisting image. It's not so jarringly different than the rest of the line art that it's distracting so I figured it was a fair enough cheat.

And some reference:



Me, acting like a maniac for some reference:




I print out all my reference in black and white to save ink because I print out a lot of reference and ink is expensive. Since I don't add color till everything's scanned this works out pretty well.

More Wednesday figure drawings

More Wednesday figure studies. I'm noticing some problematic trends. One thing I'm noticing is my deficits in anatomy showing. I have got the shoulders and clavicle head and torso covered, Feet aren't bad, hands need a little work but lower arms and some aspects of the leg need serious study. It's been a while since I've done my anatomy lessons and it looks like it's time to revisit them.