Calendar Girls

Happy New Year! I hope everyone had some good holidays. It always goes quick for me, especially that time from Halloween to New Years Day, and it is tough to get any artwork in with all the busy work with cleaning for company and shopping for relatives and friends.

I have some aggressive art goals for 2013. I'm looking to publish a couple comic books, one including the ISHI storyline, which I gave a sample of last month. That is really just a sampler zine that is part of a larger story along with some other Northern California historical themes I hope to get to. 

But between all of that sequential work, I wanted to get back to doing more sketching. I have a sketchbook that I set aside for months that I finally did some damage in. The goal of this sketchbook is to study more artists in the industry that I like and copy their works to learn from. I feel I really haven't done enough of that over the years.

 

So I printed out a bunch of drawings I liked from some of my favorite artists in Terry Dodson, Steve Rude, Mark Schultz, and Adam Hughes and started sketching. Other that the opening image at the very top, all of these were sketched at a small BASA gathering at the end of December.

I didn't want to limit it to copying other artwork either so I had some photographs to study from. All of those drawings are below.

While there are a few male figures in the bunch here, I noticed most of them being women. Being the end of the calendar year and the start of a new one, I'm calling these my calendar girls.

The first three months of a new year tend to be the most productive for me so I was anxious to get back to my art once the holidays were in the rear window. But, as luck would have it, I rang in the new year getting sick with a cold and have been nursing it for a week and a half. But the image at the very top is the start of yet another sketchbook and the first drawing of the year as I try out this new RENDR sketchbook.

And so, 2013 begins! A year of Arting it up!!

More Saturday Night Sketching

More pencil clean ups from the St. Paddy's Day Par-tay! But these were just misc.-themed ones. Above is a space scene since I'm dying to do some inking of some space with some asteroid rubble after recently looking at a Jim Starlin WARLOCK comic book splash page that has, as someone called it, some very "baroque" inking. I'm also ramping up to do some background drawings with rocks and stuff for my animation later this week. For my drawing above, that left arm will need some fixing. Probably the right as well.

Head sketches above and the whole page below.

Sketching in Class Part I

Last semester, I just filled up an entire sketchbook with drawings, something I've never done before in 4 months. Without the class to give me a kick in the rear, to give you a point of reference, the sketchbook that I started in 2007 is only half full.

So one of my goals for this semester was to fill up another sketchbook. I wasn't sure if it would happen since I figured most of my animation drawing would take place on sheets of paper outside of the sketchbook. But I wanted to keep active and sketching so I kept the goal.

Fortunately, I think I'm going to hit that goal with one blank sheet left in the sketchbook. During the down time of our last ACME broadcast of the semester, a had some time to sketch and doodle and will post some of the drawings here in the next few days like the one above.

It doesn't seem like it but I might have exceeded my goal from last semester since I've done some damage in the old 2007 sketchbook as well plus filled up half a Moleskine with drawings. So Yay for me!!!

Moleskine Sketching

It's a new semester of animation, I started a new sketchbook. But I already had this new Moleskine sketchbook that I bought last spring. It turns out I have one with some good drawing paper when I need a watercolor paper one for class. So I'll have at least three sketchbooks going (the standard one will be a spiral bound one).

After doing very little drawing during the summer other than for my teaching class, I was a little rusty so I wanted to get things moving. The opening piece below covers two pages and shows some stiff figure work.

While waiting for a doctor's appointment on Friday morning, I took the book with me and did some loose sketching. Below is one of the nicer head drawings along with the opening drawing above.

The stiff opening page drawings were not to my liking so I stayed up one night and just sketched to loosen up. Just me, a pencil, the Moleskine, and Turner Classic Movies on in the background. Many of the upcoming pencil sketches are loose and unfinished so I plan to come came later and clean them up and maybe ink some as well.