Journal, Eh?

I was up late last night. This was due at midnight and I didn't have a cover so I just grabbed the doodle I was working on and slapped it onto of the "cover". I actually really love the way the two colors work. That was not intentional. I was just trying to darken the colors and it didn't work, but I left the darker BEHIND the top and it looks super! 

I might be a bit brain-dead. JUUUUUUST a bit. 

Lotsa Sketches Little Time

I've been sketching NON STOP. I've also been rather busy (nonstop) so I haven't been able to consolidate all the sketches into single files. ANY WHO.

A flying Pig. Its a work in progress (there's another character that needs to be added to the scene - and the feathers need more detail/ sharper shadow) but I like it :). ALSO: check out my new signature! YEAH. 

And then there's this, for the Hawkeye Initiative, it might not be twisty but it sure as hell is broken spined. The best way to tell if the pose is physically possible or not is to flip the image so Batgirl (and Hawkeye) are standing on their tipie-toes. Like, its not physically possible. I know. I tried. So its not seductive, but its also not human. Like, at all. Are superheroes treated in this fashion? I dunno. I dont personally have a large litany of comics to go off of. 

The best part of where I got this pose from: this isn't the worst offender in the issue. There are 2 kick sequences that make NO SENSE and a landing sequence that, if actually performed, would have KILLED Batgirl. And this is in a "Girl Frenzy" issue, done in sort of a "hey girls, look how kick ass our heroines are, please read us !!!" from the late nineties. Except, its totally full of broken body parts and plastic, static poses. 

Value Proposition

UGH. I hate when I forget to change the color settings on Illustrator. It so totally doesn't match up with what gets saved as a JPG. I HATE YOU ILLUSTRATOR. HATE. YOU. The colors are so much more vivid on the file itself. >.>

My Value Prop cover page. I've been working on this since One oclock this afternoon. So... 4 consecutive hours. And I drew the thumbnails for it last night at around One am. haha. WOW. Kismit.

I've been seriously considering (as of last night that is) doing a web-novel version of TSU. The only reason I haven't done the comic is because I cant get the style down. Its a very specific style I have in mind. Crime-Noir. And I cant seem to get what the characters look like. So I think I'll just start writing it and updating it to a web-blog-novel thing instead. With illustrations, of course. What do you think?

Pen Sketches!

I usually say something along the lines of "I like to see how well I know a character by drawing them in ink" but in this case I just didn't have a pencil. And had... FEELINGS.

The return of the "baconator." Except (if you can manage to read my handwriting) its no longer going to be the baconator. Or bacon. Just a rectangular character with BIG EYES. Who may or may not remain wearing that cape. The right side of the drawing was all my feelings in tonights group meeting. It started with the guy above the NO, then became the NO (and stayed there for some time) then became the begrudging acceptance, then slightly confused guy.

I think the expression on this version is better than the one on the page

I have no Idea what I'm doing

I forgot to add this. Probably because I'm still not-working on it. :\

I was just footsying around on Illustrator. I really have no idea what's going on in my own mind... Besides Run Lola Run that is.

Early morning workshop

Thursday and Friday (and Sat. and Sun) I get to sleep in late. Usually at least. But today we had a guest speaker! YAY! And I went to Kim's "Rapid Prototyping" class. SUPER exciting. We were told to workshop a platform game, with the constraints as made up by the class. Our hero was to be "bacon" our villains "hamburgers," "utensils," and "bugs," and our "collectables" to be "oil."

After our first iteration world building exercise, we went on to doing a more refined, aesthetic based shot. Or, well, I did. Rafa drew geckos.

The start of the level. Our aesthetics were to be
"rustic" "earth tones" and "Don Bluth"

I dont think I *quite* got the Don Bluth style yet...

a weeks' worth of sketches

I'm totally out of sketchbook paper guys. Like, 3 sketchbooks POOF! GONE! Just... so much stress. SO MUCH STRESS. I laughed tonight till I was gasping for air. Though I might have been a bit tipsy.

you're going to want to click this too

We're done with Visual Story Project 2!!! WOOO!!! And I think it rocked socks. Even if there were some... eheh... troubleshooting problems. NEXT UP: HTML in one weekend! Ready? SET? NOGO!

I actually have more sketches from this week (from this morning) but I fell asleep while drawing them. Well, not drawing them. I was scratching the pencil across the paper while my face was pressed to it and wondering how I was going to do ANYTHING productive at all because I couldn't keep my eyes open.

Yeah, it was that kinda morning.

notes galore!

hey you can click on this one!

Notes today. Apparently, as my fellow classmates have informed me, I am very entertaining to sit behind. I worry the teachers might begin to notice the class looking at my computer rather than them lecturing... 

My Mantra

I know I tend to get critical of myself (after all, I am my own worst critic!) and complain about the nit-picky things I dont like with my art... but I just wanted to share my mantra. Its something I forget to tell people, so I think they walk away thinking I'm one of those "woe is me I'm a bad artist but please look at my art and re-affirm my self esteem" artists. Not that I've ever heard that. I just, I worry I dont express myself well.

Anyway.

It's quite simple, really, but it goes like this: I am young. I have time to get better. I must get better. I will get better. I will always get better. I will never stop drawing (and in some cases, writing). Never. Stop. Drawing. I may not be there yet, but I'm getting there. I will get there.

So yeah. Thats about it. I mean it too, this stuff I tell myself when looking at other artists. You know, the really super good ones. The ones that are 18 or 19 or 30+ or 50+. I say, I may not be as good as them, I may not have their style, but I have my own style. And it may not be super great or anything, but it will be. One day.

So I may be critical of myself, but I do it so I can get better.

*and by "there" I mean the point when you look back on your art: a week, month, year, or years after drawing it and go "mmm. Not bad. Not bad at all." and stroke your magnificent invisible villain beard.

no joke, colored in MS PAINT and drawn in middle school.

did this tonight to show how far I've come

and just a colored sketch

If this is how far I've come, imagine how far I'll go.

Me Vs Color

... I wish I didn't have such troubles with color. I know, I really do, I should stick to the style I can do (as in: the boy sitting) but still, I branch out. I say, hey, I can color like other artists do.

You know what? I cant. Not right now. Not at my level. I just, I feel like I dont understand color.

I just keep going at it like a semi-blind person in a cave somewhere miles beneath the earth where the only light is coming in from a pinprick in the ceiling. UGH. COLOR. I swing wildly about and hope I hit something good. For the most part, its bat guano. But sometimes (with the help of Kuler - thanks Adobe!) I can get close (but not... not really there). I think its a mixture of color and painting techniques: I'm getting the techniques a lot quicker than I am the color. Just look at my gray scales! I think they're BALLIN. (to me, for me; maybe not to other more professional artists...) but COLOR – UGH.

... which doesn't work as an illustrator who needs to color their images... or a comic artist... UGH. COLOR.

this is me failing at complementary shadows

not necessarily failing, in this case, but its just not doing what I want it to.

and a close up. I really REALLY like the textures the color at the bottom of the jacket gives.

UGH. I just dont know man. BUT! I did discover a ballin pass-through (thats what those things are called, right? the drop down box with "normal, multiply, opacity, etc" right?) called "divide" and when you paint with greys and blacks on a white background does that wicked thing with the hair there. ITS SO WHITE!

Female Doctor Who

So, my facebook friends are fairly aware of an ongoing conversation about who we'd like to see play Doctor Who next. We are in general agreement that Tom Hiddleston should be the 12th, and that Idris Ebla should be the 13th - but a friend suggested that it would be interesting to for there to be a female Doctor Who. As, according to him, nowhere in the cannon does it say he has to be a white male. He just *happens* to be that. Then, kismitly, I stumbled upon this article: Helen Mirren As Doctor Who?

And I got really excited, because I finally had an image of what a Female Doctor Who could look like. Older (as in, over 30), bad-ass, and, in Helen Mirren's case, hellava curvy.

... and then I decided I'd prefer Tilda Swinton as the female Doctor Who, for reasons I cannot explain. I think she'd make a ballin' doctor but its not quite the statement it could be if Helen Mirren were the Doctor. Cause Helen Mirren is CURVY. Tilda Swinton has that androgynous look that I think is FAN-FRICKIN-TASTIC but... if there were to be a woman doctor, shouldn't at least the FIRST one be all curves? I dunno, I really dont. I'm super conflicted.

Anyway, mini-ramble aside: I spent the next two days drawing sketches and looking up reference photos for what I think the Tilda-Swinton Doctor would look like.

Work in progress. I want to color it.

Oh, yeah, and you're not mis-reading anything - I've already started beating away at a basic plot structure for a "mini-series"/ Sir Arthur Canon Doyle Sherlock Holmes styled story involving this not-doctor-who and her not-companion; in which our not-doctor calls herself The Master (which, I am totally aware, is a villain in Doctor Who). Once I'm done with the posters (2, I think, this one, and then one of The Doctor looking right at us) I'll work on her companion.

Some Not-Work and Thoughts

Instead of doing my work this morning (or - rather - in the middle of doing my work this morning) I got to doodling. Which isn't unusual. Some more VOR sketches and a profile view of someone who isn't me but probably, to other people, looks like me. (I dont think it looks like me at all - esp since its not a self/portrait / I've never done a self portrait of myself in profile view as that is rather difficult and requires a bit of mirror placement/setup.)

As for "thoughts" I have really one major thought I've been going over and over again in my head. I dont think I'll ramble on about it right now, but I'll definitely do it sometime soon. It deals with Fanfiction, Copyright law, and Ethics. You might be surprised with my stance. 

ONE MORE THING!

Did I mention Adeline in An Adventure Season 2? YES I DID <-- CLICK TO READ!!!

So... NaNoWriMo

RIGHT. right. So I'm behind. Not by a great deal, fortunately. It'll take a couple of days of writing more than 2500 words to catch up, but I'm not worried.

The problem is: I got two pages into "A Poppyseed Affair" before it all fell apart. Then I spent the very same night after giving up on APA to write 4 pages of "Ash in the Shadows." I wrote that till about 3 in the morning, so I wasn't very lucid at the time of writing. The next morning I was sure that what I wrote was a piece of crap (turns out, after some fine tuning, is actually a fun read AND manages to be fairly poetic at times) so I tossed that one as well.

I ended up writing 2 more pages of a personal project called "Mad Love" and 9 pages of yet another NaNoWriMo possible called "The Murder of Agatha Christie." Which winds up a sum total of 18 pages written in the last 7 days, none of which count towards my NaNoWriMo writing goal. So I guess what I'm trying to say is: I'm so far behind because I've been writing other things. Including a 2 page paper for Visual Story on the movie Tomb Raider. 

Plus I've been drawing. Oh god did I need to draw. Its like an addiction. Go to long without it and I start freaking out.

Instead I wound up deciding, on Monday, to write "The City of Wonder." (One guess as to what its about). So over the past 5 days I've written 18 pages. Not bad if I do say so myself. Yes, I did once write 30 pages in one night but that was over 3 different stories and only one turned out to be any where near half decent. 

ALSO: Listening to Two Steps From Hell while writing might be the best idea EVER. 

Class Notes

and yeah, that also says "poop" because I really messed up that perspective

That I now kinda feel guilty for. I couldn't help myself. Sometimes, when I get too into writing - like, writing non-stop instead of drawing, I just get that "eff it" urge and pick up my pencils or wacom tablet. Unfortunately for me, I'm out of sketchpad paper. Which isn't too surprising, I did buy this sketchpad at the start of the semester. But it is kinda sad because now I have nothing but my wacom tablet to draw on.

Not that I'm complaining. But you dont tend to get the same range of expression in photoshop as you can with 6B or 9B pencils.

Yes, that reads "Super Derpy Eyes". Cause those are. 

VOR

The Voice of Reason really needs his own comic/ book / story. He has one. I initially didn't know what to put him in, but eventually figured he could only function as a super-villain. Specifically, a super villain in a Paranormal Romance book. (Though he generally tends to genre jump between PR and generic Paranormal stories). But what I mean is, I should be drawing his comic/ book / story, right now.

Obviously, however, I need to be writing (for various reasons: one - NaNoWriMo and two - Adeline in an Adventure) so I'll put this off (again, as always). One day, VOR, one day. 

Poppy

Poppy's original name was Avery. As all of her sketches are on my old laptop - this is the best image I got. The comic was this silly little sketch thing I was doing in my spare time (meaning I got 10 pages in before I wandered off and never returned) PLUS it had no cohesive plot - or really any plot to speak of. It was essentially "Pretty in Pink" if the main character was a little bit heavier and snarkier and totally winds up with the weirdo friend because the rich guy was a jerk. Anyway... Its no longer quite that! YAY!

The only major difference between Avery and Poppy is their hairstyles. I tend to shy away from short haired characters (and recently, red-heads) because I have short red hair (that I dye red because its a really fun color), and I dont want to be accused of self-insertion. (This is also why I try to avoid drawing stick thin characters (though, from time to time I do draw them, such as my avatar - Helena).) I was recently accused of drawing no characters with short hair, and then doing blondes (which is funny because I write less blondes than I do any other hair color)... which is why I'm kinda rambling about it now.

The problem I've been recently having is I've been drawing my characters TOO TALL. Like, it drives me crazy how tall I've been making them. (The images above aren't because after scanning them in I went in, lassoed the bodies and shrank them to the right size). Though I feel too tall might be an exaggeration; I'm trying to draw more petite characters and they keep coming out looking like total BOSSES. Like I dare you to make a comment about "healthy weight" kinda characters. Which Poppy and Avery never were.

Anyway, I realized that the comic/ book's title "A PoppySeed Affair" sounds like I'm euphemistically talking about opium. ... Which I swear I'm not. It's actually one of my favorite favorite "how to slay a vampire" lores. (Essentially, as this tale goes: you use a bag full of poppy seeds on the believed vampire's grave, so that when he rises at night to prey on the living, he doesn't get very far. Apparently Vampires are obsessive-compulsive, because they will not be able to leave until they've counted every single seed - and if you used a full bag, the sun will rise before the vampire is done and HE'LL BURST INTO FLAME!!! MWAHAMWAHAHA!!!) (I swear I'm not making this up. I couldn't if I tried. Even if it sounds like The Count from Sesame Street).

In fact, I chose Poppy as the MC name long after the book title. ... But I dont think I'm changing the title. Yet.

Tess Sketches

For "Like Ash in the Shadows" the main character, Tess, I doodled lots of character sketches. I was just trying to pin down how she'd look. 

What I shouldn't be doing

My schedule doesn't actually have much room for stuff outside of: project work, Adeline Season 2 (yes! Season 2! Link to come as soon as it launches!), and then chorish stuff like sanitizing my bathroom and emptying out my stinky fridge. And yet, I decided (after Cory Doctorow visited our program to give an interesting talk about the problems with copyright law) that I would forgo sleep if I needed to do this years NaNoWriMo.

Why??? (you might ask; I'm certainly asking). I dont really know. I just feel like it would be a good exercise in time management and functioning on less sleep than normal. I think I've just read one too many cheap (and by cheap I mean less than 2.99) amazon kindle books. (Hint: for the most part they're TERRIBLE - ESP "YA" aka: Craptastic Paranormal Romance). So in rage-not-stroke I decided I would resurrect an old idea, spice it up with some new direction, and actually pound it out with the help of NaNoWriMo. Obviously I wouldn't use a good idea (that I have strong attachements to) as NaNoWriMo is fun but normally produces terrifyingly bad writing. (Which even NaNoWriMo admits, is kind of the point).

Originally I was going to do a totally-not-sherlock-fanfiction-I-swear! I read a kindle book (again, less than 1.99) called The Devil's Grin and it was totally-not-self-insertion-sherlock-fanfic-I-swear! It wasn't bad (when we weren't in the presence of Sherlock) and as a stand alone non-fanfic (aka, if they took out Sherlock) it would have been a decent book. Not good, mind you, for I found the writing too sparse. I know its a plague of modern books to overwrite (I'm looking at you Twilight and all other Paranormal Romances!!!) but this did a complete 180 and ended up on the other end of the spectrum. Too little is shown. What little is written tends to err on the side of telling. Like the introduction of Sherlock. Because he's a well known literary figure, the author didn't need to show too much, but she missed out on adding a new dimension to him. 

Or, rather, a believable new dimension to him. I dont care how she explained it in the book, I'm a big fan of Benny Cumberbatch's Sherlock and absolutely love his "I'm a high-functioning sociopath! Do your research!" Because in my mind, Sherlock is a sociopath. He's the actual manifestation of  a misanthrope. Instead of being a "misanthrope" as many Romance Books (and I mean Romance as in from the early 19th century) characters were (which was an affected state of mind instead of an actual one). And there's a great quote from Sir Arthur Cannon Doyle how Sherlock was about as likely to fall in love as Babbage's computing machine was. 

My point is: as much as I love Sherlock, Self-Inserted-Romantic-Sherlock-Fanfiction doesn't work for this very reason. You cant change his character to make it work, or else he stops being Sherlock and starts being a guy who just happens to share some major quirks and the same name as Sherlock.

I have to admit, quite a few of my story ideas stem from some other story I read. Usually where I toss the book into the wall and go: NUH-UH. And then repetitively tell everyone I know that I could write a better story. Probably in my sleep. So, for NaNoWriMo I decided I'd do a Not-Sherlock-Fanfic where I'd do it "better". And I use "better" loosely because it didn't come to pass at all. I was going to set it in the 1920s. The Heroine was going to be an opium addicted show girl, whose sister winds up on a slab in the morgue. And how she goes all vigilante detective and solves the case herself. Except she meets the Sherlockian character, who really solves the case. Anyway, it didn't happen because I couldn't pin down the Sherlockian character. And I couldn't pin down their relationship (not romantic at all) and I couldn't get his reactions right. 

Which leads me to the second (and final) idea I'm running with: "a Poppyseed affair". Just like "Ash in the Shadows," Affair stemmed out of a .99 cent kindle purchase. But it had more than 40 reviews! And they were all pretty positive! 4+ stars! ... Which means I should just stick to my gut and learn from my mistakes (except I'm a sucker for punishment). I ended up reading ... oh, maybe up to Chapter 6 before metaphorically throwing it across the room and dramatically "ugh"ing. (For those curious its called Blood and Snow - but you've been warned). I think the major thing it has going against it is: WHO THE HELL PUBLISHES AN E-BOOK ENTIRELY IN PAPYRUS FONT??? WHO??? WHY??? AURGH!!!!

Its eye-gougingly bad, but thats because the typeface is a bitch to read. Whoever published it in that format should be taken out back and forced to (clockwork orange style) watch Helvetica. At least a hundred times.

Typeface aside, the story fluctuates between decent, almost tongue-and-cheek (but not quite), and craptastically angsty. The character spends an entire chapter moping and monologuing complete in passive voice and TONS of TELLING. (insert Eye-Roll here). UGH. Whats interesting is how blatantly sexually charged this book is, in comparison to say, Twilight. Unfortunately, it also leads the heroine to "flush" "blush" "burn crimson" and "bloom red" in almost every page. Can I not read a single Teen Book without the heroine bursting into flames??? (Or rather, could she just burst into flames, like, literally? Cause that would be an interesting twist on the rather tripe trope). 

...

Where was I going with this? Oh, right. So after getting to chapter 6 and nearly vomiting I decided to write (not for the first time, I'll mention) a little satirical one page about Craptastic Paranormal Romance Tropes. Which managed to flesh out to an entire story. I'm as shocked as you are. And it even has a decent skeleton to build off of, because I took an old idea (A Poppyseed Affair used to be a sketch comic, high-school drama story about a girl named Avery) and then mixed it with the Paranormal genre. And now it actually has a place to go!

doodles in technicolor

notes I took in class and then colored. I love note taking.

TSU Teaser 3 - WIP

I always did mean to get back around to drawing teaser posters for TSU. The next in order was Thomas, but he proved to be difficult both to visualize and conceptualize. >.<.

First itération. Possibly Second or third, but definitely the furthest I got. As you can see, I didn't like it. And Audrey made a very valid point: its very hard to read what exactly is going on. If you cant tell, its Thomas' back. At this point in time I'm so used to working on it/ looking at it, I can tell, but I dont count. But there just wasn't enough drama/ tension. 

WIP of the second (or third of forth) itération of the poster. I'm still not too sure how exactly I'm going to color it, but after all the time I put into the line work, its probably not going to be the cutout style I used above (and for the 2 prior teaser posters). I might try out (and am currently trying out) a painting technique that synthétises the cutout style with my watercolor-esque style. 

Oh the image here is far more cluttered than what I'm painting. This is actually an accumulation of my sketches, initial rough (the cyan blue) under the shadows and second rough (the purple), and finally the outline top layer (the dark blue). It'll need some more tightening up, but with any luck, I wont have to worry too much about line.

a sitting boy

Trying out a new shading technique / playing around with colours. A commission, so I hope it turns out okay.

Procrastin~Nation!

obv a work in progress. I decided to apply the face shading technique to full bodies (instead of, oh, writing a 2-3 page paper on Digital Ethics due tomorrow). I took a really old drawing (I think something from high school, honestly) and painted it. It needs some more work and then some fine tuning, but, honestly, I'm really beginning to LOVE painting in photoshop. Well, so long as it remains black and white. Color still kicks my butt.

(original)

And Classroom Doodles

Having run out of No. 5 pencil lead (the only size pencil lead I use (that and No. 3 for really super fine lines)) I've taken to bringing my tablet to classes so that I can continue to doodle while I take notes. Sometimes I do more than doodle.

Sherlock Doodle.

I was doing homework (project work actually, 10 images down, 50 more or so to go) when I got that "eff it" urge and decided to open a new photoshop document and play around with faces. I've been doing this in class more and more (in fact, I'll put them up as well) and its been a fun experience. I want to learn how to draw a larger variety of face shapes (not that I'm currently doing that either) and I've been experimenting with drawing from shadows rather than from lines (I know! I'm the line girl!). I ended up doodling Sherlock. Yes, I did tweak Benny Cumberbatch's weak chin, I just don't know how to get about drawing it, and I personally like defined chins.

I think its more correct to say this is my interpretation of Benny Cumberbatch's Sherlock. And yes. I do call him Benny. What kind of horrible name is Benedict?