Annual Self-Portrait Day

I just realised I worked on this all day when I could have been watching football!

See all the gorgeous work over at http://conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=171682

Dr. Sketchys -- October 5

Honey B. Hind was the model for the night -- she was a pleasure to draw and reminded me of an another actress. Didn't realise until the drive home that she looked more than a little like Julianne Moore.


As usual, we started off with gestures. . . .

I wanted to experiment with media a bit, so I started using pencil, gel pen, pentel white-out pen, ink and a makeup sponge for the five-minute poses. . . .

Obviously I was too slow to get very far for the first one. . .


I narrowed my focus a bit for the next few poses, but Honey liked to move her head quite a bit (especially when Brynne was taking photos), so drawing head shots was a little difficult.

Challenge!

The goal was too include Smurfette -- I was too slow and didn't get to enter. . . sigh. . . .

Last drawing of the night! Honey kept running her tongue up the neck of the guitar. Love the way Dr. Sketchy's provides so many new drawing experiences!

~R

The Keyhole Sessions, Toronto

So I attended my first Keyhole Session tonight.

Three one-minute gestures -- kinda bad for me as I usually need about 10 to get a feel for the paper I'm working on and getting the proportions to flow right.


I missed the model's name, but she was stunning and a fabulous model.


She was joined for a few poses by an additional model, which was certainly fun to draw.


The models posed in front of a mirror -- I ignored it, but regret doing so now. Hopefully next time I'll incorporate some reflections.


The proportion issues stuck with me all night -- I cropped off the legs on this piece as they were embarrasingly small.

This was my favourite drawing and pose from the night - -wish I could have had another 5-10 minutes on it.

I really enjoyed the session and will repeat -- though I'll likely try to alternate this with Dr. Sketchy's; Keyhole is weekly while the good Doctor is bi-weekly. I had enough of commuting into Toronto when I was teaching, so two trips into the city in a week would start to wear after a while.

Dr Sketchies: Tank Girl!

Monday night was Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School and the subject, in honour of the just ended Fanexpo here in Toronto, was Tank Girl.

Photographer Brynne Kennedy, dropped her camera and most of her clothes, wore a helmet and hefted toy guns to portray the titular (tee-hee) grrrrl.

Gestures:

I'm sure every Dr. Sketchy regular has looked at Brynne's butt quite a bit -- usually while she's standing between you and the model, but this time we were supposed to stare at it.

Which was, you know, fine by me. . .

5-minutes -- or less as I goofed off some with Sharleena and the others at her table

Liked playing with the Pentel brush for the two little doodles at the bottom there.

There were the usual challenges. The first was to incorporate one of Tank Girl's kangaroo lovers. I didn't have any idea what to draw until the last minute. I won, but I think it was a victory of punch-line over drawing.

The second challenge was to give Tank Girl a Rob Liefeld-style gun. Brynne had actually written "Up yours" on her cheeks, in the actual pose she teased down her "shorts" to reveal that. I didn't really want her holding a giant Liefeld gun in her ass, so I changed it up a bit.

The last drawing was more inspired by the costume than her pose -- Brynne took a Flashdance-style pose stretched across a chair, but I really wanted her to take this sort of pose.


Brynne was such a great sport she actually took one extra pose like that after we were supposed to be done -- the drawing next to the ink sketches above was all I managed to do before time ran out. I was pacing myself for 10 minutes even though I knew it was a 5-minute pose.

As always, Sketchy's was a blast and a half. It was packed last night and I think Brett had to turn people away -- thus earning his nickname as "The Despot"! It's two of my fave models in two weeks, so I'm gonna show early.

~R

Conan, What is Best in Life?

Here's the other one -- much less animated than the previous.

~R

Hey, Conan!

A little while ago I accepted a commision to do a couple of Conan sketch cards. I'm not really a fan of the little 2x3" things outside of a convention, so I drew them around 6x8". Sketch post-cards, I guess. . . .

Here's the first one:

When drawing two of anything I try to have some variety -- so this one is the "battle-crazy" look. I'll share the other version tomorrow.

New Painting Project -- progress 1

Last couple of weeks ended up being turned upside down as far as my schedule, so this evening was the first real time I've even had to touch this.

I just started playing with values -- I'm thinking about what colours I'll be dropping in later -- Karu-Sil has a dark magenta-toned skin and her "dogs" are energy beings of yellow light, so I'll be dealing with a fairly limited initial palette of yellow/yellow-orange light with some purples and touches of other colour in the shadows.

I'm certain saved iterative steps and ctrl-Z will allow me to be more experimental than I would be were I using traditional media.