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Hopefully, I can get back to daily drawings. Trying to work on that grand jette drawing some. These are mostly me using Mark Simon's Facial Expressions in order to work on, well, faces. I haven't drawn faces from ref much lately. That's something I'm going to work on.

"Somewhere That's Green" Walkthrough

Today's entry is a walkthrough of a piece of fanart I did for the fan community Club-Tutu's January contest. The theme, Broadway Musicals. Briefly, entrants had to take an existing musical (Broadway or off-Broadway, only requirement it be based on a live theater production), and show how it would look with the cast of Princess Tutu as the actors. After toying with a list of musicals that would be easily recognizable and fun (which I plan to return to in the future), I settled on Little Shop of Horrors, and quickly turned to using Rue and Autor for the starring roles.

I had to work out which scenes I wanted to do that included Audrey II in the scene, and while the play does have a lot of scenes with Seymour and Audrey interacting in front of Twoee, I wanted one with punch. The reprise of "Somewhere that's Green" seemed best. Below are the initial rough pen sketches I did to design the pair and set up the scene. A rare case of first sketch coming out best.

After that, I moved to the rough pencils. Followed by the inks (not shown). I fine tuned the look of Audrey II thanks to some photos I found online, and figured out the vines. I think Audrey II pretty much makes the image. Autor, as usual, drove me nuts. Rue wasn't much trouble.

And below is the final piece, colored in PS CS3. The coloring of raven!Audrey II is based on the raven flowers evil!Mytho created to tempt Freya in episode 16, "The Maiden's Prayer," which were a kind of purple-pink.

Watercolor boat

Doing okay so far. I delved into a medium I've long been interested in, but not used enough of over the years; watercolor. There's a little boat sitting on a shelf and over the last few days, I liked the idea of using it to practice drawing and painting from life. It turned out okay. Need to work on brush control and water mixing, and to let things dry.

IF: Renewal

It's been a while since I've done an Illustration Friday prompt, and this week's prompt was very appropriate: Renewal. Hopefully, I'll do many more over the course of the new year. I admit I was thinking of the Sprite from Disney's Fantasia 2000 "Firebird Suite."

Happy New Year, everyone! May it be a blessed and productive one.

A Little Reference Helps

Reference seems to be one of those buggy issues that crops up in art. For a lot of people, the ultimate goal seems to be being able to draw an image without using reference. It's a holy grail, an unattainable goal that artists and outsiders seems to think is the epitome of being able to create art. But if you hang out around enough art boards like ConceptArt.org, you find that a lot of artists, professional artists, telling you to study and use reference.

The important element is using it as reference and outright copying the image. The latter can be useful for studying purposes, but not when it comes to actual creative art, and can be stifling if you adhere too much to the information in the source material. Fanart is often a victim of this, especially when it's a recognizable piece of artwork that's being copied. Using it as reference, on the other hand, is taking the model (if you're lucky enough to have one) or the photo(s) to fill in the information you need to draw a believable image. Artists have been doing this to some degree for ages. Even Norman Rockwell used photographic reference for his paintings, but he wasn't slavishly tied to them. He often knew when to exaggerate features or what to eliminate. For one of many articles available on this topic, check out this post by James Gurney (and check out the rest of Gurney's blog and the related book for more information about this), and this recent NPR Slideshow about Rockwell's work.

Getting to the point, I've been a little random lately about using reference. I need to do it more. I recently did an exercise with a mentor over at CA.org about just this. I drew the below image of a grande jete from imagination and vague memory. There are issues with the rear leg, tangents of the near hand and body, line of action, etc.

I was then to follow-up with a drawing based on the original but with some reference applied. I opted to use a mix of images from books I had (surprisingly very little grande jetes), online videos, and images found online. Below are the quick sketches I did based on them.

And lastly, I used a mix of reference and the sketches to work out the final image. Made some changes to the pose, such as how the leading leg is usually away from the audience and fiddling with the arms. Much better, but couldn't quite avoid tangents (they kinda meet at shoulder-neck-shoulder). Still, the line of action is a little better, and the legs are stronger.

Box Adventures

Just a bit of fun, a mental exercise based on childhood playtime. How many things can you come up with to do with a large cardboard box? I was finished getting my hair done, so I'm sure I could have come up with some more things.

Another PT fanart progress

Another walkthrough of my process. This was a pinch hit image for a community gift exchange, so I didn't fret too much over the process. It's a kinda quickie image. It's again the characters Lilie and Femio, and this image kinda gets the two across well.

The original planning sketch (was drawn with an H pencil, and adjusted to make the sketch easier to see).

The "cleaned up pencils;" really nothing more than using a softer lead pencil and putting in the more finished lines.

The inks.

The final image, colored in Photoshop CS3.