What’s New This Week…

I’m working on a new children’s book—another one about trains. I can only show a little snippet of it so far. Here is the preliminary cover.



I’m using a much more simple illustration style—simple in that I am not using brush strokes or a painterly effect. It still takes me about 8-10 hours to draw and color each page. Plus I keep seeing things I want to change.

I also keep in mind that I don’t want any of my trains to ever look like Thomas or The Little Blue Engine. I also need to make my wheels appear to be moving faster … maybe a little blur is needed.

I won at Monday Artday!

How surprised am I? That was my first ever post to Monday Artday and in my opinion one of the first drawings of a cat that I feel mildly successful at! It really is a great blog and inspiring to be challenged by a new theme every week.

Thanks!

Monday Artday…

This is my contribution for “Cliff Hanger.”

Sketches and Doodles…

I’ve been trying to work out some new characters of a cat and realized that I am terrible at drawing cats. So, I took some time today to work out these little guys.

Fun with PhotoShop…

I ran across a video of tilt shift photography a few days ago and I am enamored with this look. So, I have tried replicating the look on a few of my photographs using this tutorial. «Fake model photography»

The photographs always remind me of train sets and Godzilla models. I don’t think the effect works as well on animals, but maybe it’s just the photos I’ve been playing with.

Life Drawing Mondays…

There is one fail-safe technique to drawing that will always make your drawings better. Draw more. So, I will keep going to The Drawing Studio to do just that. The model for the morning had a very punk-rock look to her—she even had a slight Mohawk going on. I had a very off day today though—forgetting things, dropping my supplies, kicking my bag off my chair—I almost gave up for the morning. But I didn’t and here are my samples from this week.

One-minute gestures to loosen both the artists and the model up.

10-Minute pose

10-minute pose. I focused on portrait only with conté on sand paper.

20-minute pose. This is black conté on gray sandpaper.

20-minute pose. Used white conté on black paper. I don’t think I enjoy this technique—which probably means I should do it more in the future, because I’m not very good at it.

10-minute pose.

25-minute pose. Again, I focused on portrait only. This is the first time I’ve ever used pastels in a life drawing session. And, it’s probably only the 3rd or 4th time I’ve ever used pastels in my life. I liked them a lot, but now that I see this drawing out of the studio, I realize, she’s kind of lopsided.

Doodles and Sketches…

I’ve been trying out a few new doodling techniques. One—you look only at your subject and never your paper—fun! Difficult too. The second, is watercolor. I know these are terrible, but I have determined that I would like to pursue watercolor as thoroughly as I have charcoal. The two ink doodles are of my cat Ashley.

Ashley looking to her right at a plant

Looking over Ashley’s shoulder

A trio of old scooters.

My first mistake with the watercolors were working on Bristol Board. It immediately bubbled. More experiments to follow…

Life Drawing Mondays…

Monday morning I attended the Life Drawing session at The Drawing Studio in downtown Tucson. It's been a little over a year since I've been and they have a wonderful new facility. It's always inspiring being downtown especially during business hours. I will definitely make this a weekly event if I can find the time.

I tried a few different techniques this session, starting with quick 1 minute charcoal gestures. These are meant to loosen you up and to quickly get the idea of the image in a quick manner. I generally do as many as possible on one sheet and don't worry about the direction. This session, I tried to focus mostly on portraits and used charcoal, conté, water soluble graphite, ink pen (forcing myself to not be able to erase) and white charcoal on black paper.







In all my years drawing and even in college I have never tried drawing with white charcoal on dark paper. I had to force myself to think backwards and only paint highlights.