Figure drawings

I just started a figure drawing group at Natsoulas Gallery here in Davis that's being held every other thursday. it's been about 12 years since I've drawn from the model, so my figure drawing chops are very very rusty. For the past 12 years I've been drawing mostly from photographs, and occasionally from life here and there, but I haven't done any serious figure drawing in a long time.

So here are some recent figure drawings, warts and all.

For the first few sessions, most of my drawings were pretty embarrassing, but here's a gesture drawing I was pretty happy with:



These are about 15 minute poses each:



This one has a tiny head, but I still kind of like it:



And here's a longer pose. Everything is more or less in proportion, but it's pretty labored and stiff. You can see where I was fussing with one of the hands.



I've still got a long way to go, but I'll post more so the curious can track my progress.

I've also been taking these video anatomy courses that you can get:

here.

I don't know if he really teaches you to "draw the figure from your mind" as it claims, but if you have patience with it, he definitely teaches you anatomy. here's some work I've done through the course:





Ultimately strong figure drawing requires, most of all, a lot of drawing, observation, drawing from life, and more drawing. I'm trying to be more disciplined with keeping a sketchbook, but it's never been a habit I've been good at maintaining. It's never too late to start, though! Here's a sketch I did in pen on the airplane, flying up to visit my Dad on his 85th:

Comic Book Making Class!

The First Appearance of Dude in a Fishbowl!

These are some of the mini comics that the kids in my comic book making class made. (Excuse the bad digital pics)



This one has some crazy inventive page layouts. No boring rectangles here:



An Alien Cheese:



And who could miss the next issue, introducing: "The First Appearance of Dude in a Fishbowl"?



Some Manga action here:



A story about a detective who identifies with eggplants. Quite a bit of character development in this one:



Excessive coffee drinking, and a comic book making contest:



An Exquisite Corpse!

From the handout:

An “exquisite Corpse” might sound kind of creepy, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with corpses. It’s a technique invented by a group of artists who called themselves “Surrealists”. It was based on a game called “Consequences”. Each player writes on a sheet of paper and then passes it to the next player. Each player then covers up the writing of the previous player so the next player only sees what the last player wrote without being able to see what had been written before.

There are lot of variations of the game, and People have played it using many different art forms. one variation is even done with music.

In 1998, a cartoonist named Art Spiegelman decided to apply the game to comics. 69 cartoonists collaborated on a book called “Narrative Corpse” using the exquisite Corpse technique.

So this is our own version of an "exquisite corpse":

New Logo by Mark Martin! More to Come!

I'm putting together a self-published digitally printed comic for the Alternative Press Expo this year, and Mark Martin and Rick Grimes have generously offered to allow me to publish their work! 18 pages by me, 4 by mark and a whopping 8 from Rick Grimes! I've been a fan of both for years so it's a treat to have them in my book!

I particularly recommend the Rick Grimes Fansite! It needs your love! (warning: some of the art on this site is of an adult nature and may not be work safe.)

Mark Martin designed this amazing logo for the cover! (I decided to embrace the whole "vanity publication" aspect of the thing).



Why No Recent Posts?

I haven't been making any new posts for a while because I've been busy with a lot of stuff--the class I've been teaching, I organized a new figure drawing group (won't be posting any figure drawings for a while--I need more practice before sharing), a Xeric grant application, some anatomy drawing practice, and putting together the new comic. We also took a little vacation to the mountains. Also the Elephant factory was a big undertaking. (Pfew). But maybe I've been a little bit procrastinatey too! No more excuses!

I've Been working on a new Children's lit illustration, this time for "The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle". I've finished inking the background, and so this week I should at least be finished with the ink drawing. Coloring next week and I should be done! In the words of Yule Brenner, "So it shall be written, so it shall be done".

Elephant Factory In Progress

Here are some in progress figures for my elephant factory. I didn't end up using all of these for one reason or another. Originally I was going to put in as many figures as I could come up with, but sometimes less is more or something. I ended up with about a dozen.



Yikes!

Uh, this is my studio. I really need to clean it.



In the process of coloring this thing right now, so it'll be a few more days before i post the final image.

Spongebob Ozpants!

So here's the image that I did for Nickelodeon Magazine for its special issue celebrating Spongebob Squarepants' 10th anniversary. They commissioned different artists to do their own interpretations of the characters, and after seeing my "Road to Oz" picture, the art director, Chris Duffy, asked me to interpret the characters as The Wizard of Oz characters.

Never having worked with licensed characters before, my first interpretation was a little bit conservative, and I made too much of an effort to stay "on model":



Then, when I realized that when Chris said "do your own interpretation" he actually meant it, I did this version:



Chris was pleased, and the image will appear in the August issue, which is coming out sometime in late July. Chris is my favorite art director, not only because he was fun to work with, but because he's responsible for the amazing comics section of Nick Mag. He hires the best small press and alternative cartoonists in the business, people that you'd otherwise never suspect could do kid friendly material. This is what a good art director should be able to do: look beyond the obvious and have confidence that an artist can do work that isn't necessarily reflected in their portfolio, and allow them the freedom to do what they do best.

Unfortunately Nick Mag has ceased publication, which is a big loss to kid magazines in general. Nick mag was a welcome exception to the usual condescending kid magazine fare.The good news is that they'll be publishing through to December, so be sure to get the last remaining issues of the best kids magazine on the stands! And here's a link to the magazine's website:

Nick Mag

Coming Soon:

I'm currently at work on a very large and detailed image inspired by a short story by Haruki Murakami from his anthology, "The Elephant Vanishes". I'll be posting it in a couple of weeks. Murakami's story describes a factory where elephants are manufactured, so I decided to draw what I think an elephant factory would look like.

New Color Kid's Strip

This is a comic I submitted to a kid's magazine. Unfortunately the magazine isn't accepting submissions at the moment. The magazine in question publishes some of the best comics for kids in the business, so it's pretty competitive.

Edit: The magazine in question was Nickelodeon magazine, for whom I did a recent illustration (August issue). Unfortunately Nickelodeon has been recently cancelled. It will be missed, as will the great work of Chris Duffy, the editor responsible for the deservedly celebrated comics section! I'll be posting the illustration I did for Nick Mag in late July when it should hit the stands.

At any rate, I'm looking for a home for this one, so if anyone knows or can suggest a kid's magazine that might be interested please let me know.





And here are some of the characters, inks and pencils.

Art Opening at Barista Brew on May 8th!

I'll be having a show at Barista Brew on May 8th for the Davis Art Walk. They have really great food, and from what I hear, some of the best coffee in Davis. I just had a pesto chicken wrap with sun-dried tomato spread that was awesome! And the prices are really really reasonable. My wrap was only $4.50 and was one the best sandwiches I've had in town.

I'll be showing a few originals and selling prints, and the show will be up till the 31st. Things should start around 6:00 pm.




More info about Barista Brew:

Here.

And more info about the Davis Art Walk:

Here.

James and the Giant Peach

So here's my giant James and the Giant Peach picture. I've always been a fan of the book by Roald Dahl, and love the imagery. My favorite illustrations are the ones done by Lane Smith, who also did the designs for the stop motion movie, one of the best book to movie adaptations I've seen. Lane Smith was the third official artist to take a crack at it, and though I like Quentin Blake, I was never satisfied with his images for the story, and the original illustrations weren't quite there, so I guess the third times the charm.

So my objective was to stay as true to the book as possible. This is the scene just before my favorite image in the book, when they tie the seagulls to the stem and the peach is lifted up into the air.

In my new illustration style my aim is to leave nothing to the imagination, and to cram as much as possible in there, so I have the sharks, the seagulls, all the main characters from the book with relatively accurate insect anatomy, and James. I gave James a couple of patches on his shirt because he was much abused by Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker, and my guess is that he didn't have the best clothes.

The descriptions of the characters in the book are sparse, which leaves a lot of leeway for interpretation, but I stayed pretty literal. James was the biggest bitch to nail. I drew James I don't know how many times. I"m still struggling with my kid drawings, but received much good advice from Mark Martin and Angelique Benicio.

So this one's all about the peach, so I gave the peach the most room in the composition.

So click on this one for the bigger version:



And a detail:



And last, the ridiculously huge version:



As before, I drew and inked each element of the picture separately. First the background with the water, the peach and the sharks, then each character and seagull. Here a few of those figures:





I drew a lot more seagulls than I ended up using though. If I had used all of them you wouldn't be able to see the ocean, so I kept it to a few.

Once again I made watercolor textures and scanned them in, then cloned them into the drawing as needed.



I very seldom use anything but the clone tool for color to give it more of a wet media look, adding only a few highlights here and there with the regular brushes. As a final touch, I printed out some of the seagulls in light blue, painted each individually and scanned them.

I'm most proud of the water in this one. Water is a very weird thing to draw with a clean contour line, since it doesn't really have any hard edges. You're sort of making it all up, coming up with your own vocabulary to describe this moving substance. Drawing things like sea foam and waves with lines is a real challenge.

So that's it. This one also took about three weeks to draw. On to the next one!

Click Here to Buy the Poster!

Road to Oz Redux

The same image, more saturation and contrast.

The Road To Oz

So I've been trying to figure out for a long time how to make a living making pictures. I tried editorial work for a while, but I was never too terribly good at it. I didn't have the same feel for it that a lot of people I admire have. I've never been that interested in journalism or politics, and solving those kinds of illustration problems didn't come naturally to me, but I had it stuck in my head that if I wanted to be successful in the field, that was what I'd have to do.

So, in an attempt to emulate the people I admired, I tried to cultivate a very graphic, eye-catching style that I thought would appeal to that market. But somewhere I lost track of why I wanted to do this in the first place.

So David Maxine of Hungry Tiger Press asked me to do an Oz picture for his fanzine, just a one-off black and white picture based on the book, "The Road to Oz" for the magazine. I had always liked the Oz books as a teenager, and it seemed like a fun project, so I decided to make a color image instead (I could always grayscale it later), something that I'd have liked looking at as a kid. Looking at a lot of Winsor McCay, I decided to do something really lush and detailed. I've always been much more interested in traditional storytelling than editorial, and as a kid I really liked fantasy, and I had always wanted to make picture books and comic books.

And this is as close as I think I've ever come to something I would have liked to be able to make when I was a kid:



On my browser the colors always seem a little more muted on these blogger posts, so the real colors may be more brilliant than what you see here.

And here are some details:







Process

Doing an image as complex as this would have been intimidating if I didn't approach it in pieces, and lately I've been drawing my figures separately from my backgrounds. I drew and inked each figure individually and then composited them into the picture later.












Perspective has always driven me nuts, and I've never been particularly good at it, but recently I've been using google sketch-up to put together primitive backgrounds that I can then work up and add details to:




And the finished background:



I've always been heavily reliant on photo reference, and usually take a number of photos of myself posing for each figure, but this time I didn't. Most of the reference I used was for for costuming and to get a general idea of fabric folds, but this time all the poses came mostly from my imagination. Here's an example of some of the reference I used:



I colored in on the computer, cloning in watercolor and dry brush textures on photoshop that I had scanned for things like the marble, the rust, and Polychrome's dress.



So I don't know where this is going to lead, but this seems to be the general direction that I'm headed in, with a new focus on Children's markets. We'll see how it goes. I'm kind of excited.

Click Here to Buy the Poster!