New Year, New Goals (sorta)

It's a new year, and symbolically at least a chance to start over. I want 2012 to be the year I get out of the artistic plateau I find myself in. I want to make my anatomy stronger, my figures more dynamic, and to increase the variety of my subjects. I've given myself the challenge of drawing at least one picture a day, based on the theme for the month. My goal is to use this to draw everyday. The theme drawings are meant to be a minimum; I wish to also get more studies done and improve my technique. But I've learned that just learning for the sake of learning isn't really all that fun. But learning to be able to apply what I've learned to a picture I want to do, that is fun and will hopefully lead to more progress.

To finish up the wordy part of this post, I have done all right so far on my challenge. I've been meeting the daily theme drawings (men this month) so far, at least. These helped to drive home to me how much I need to spend more time learning and prepping; I want to spend the last half of the month with drawings that have a little more thought put into them for things like composition. So let's use the last two weeks' worth of images as a benchmark for 2012. And here's to me being more active here again.

At the start

It's been a long time. A bit of bad artist's block, well, fear, really. And sometimes, you have to go back to basics. The very basics.

Air Kiss Walkthrouh

For May's contest over at Club-Tutu, the theme was underwater, and was open to a variety of depictions, so long as the characters were actually in the water. After trying a number of ideas, including a pairing with Mytho and Rue, Ahiru and Rue together, I eventually settled on doing either Fakir and Ahiru fluff or a cute Ahiru solo. Below are the pen sketches I did one evening, and put up to get feedback. The Fakiru piece was the one chosen.

Fuschia, April Drawing day 30

Just sharing the steps for a marker piece I finished today, but started on the 30th.

Initial colored pencil sketch.

Used a lightbox to trace clean lines with a mechanical pencil.

Inked with G-pen and Deleter Black 5.

Copic markers.

April Drawing Days 26-29

April Drawing Days 24-25

A walkthrough of a piece I did based on my friend Becky's steampunk characters, Conn and Odette Lohengrin.

I started with a pencil drawing using a .7mm mechanical lead.

Followed by inking with a Maru pen-nib, so the lines are little more uniform than if I'd used a G-pen. Deleter Black 5 ink.

Final cleaned up inks.

April Drawing, 17-23

April Drawing, So Far...

More than halfway through the month, so high time I updated.

Win with Science

One thing I'm glad I was able to do was to finish the February challenge with a piece I'd been wanting to do for more than a month. I had seen a couple of images in a photo post on a friend's Tumblr which connected Blue Beetle (Jaime Reyes) with Sailor Mercury, who both shared a very scientific attitude (and were blue, but that's a bonus). I really like the pair, and wanted to do a picture based on it. Eventually, I managed to work myself up to doing it, and opted to finish on a high point.

I enjoyed making this piece. I first did some research on how to draw the Blue Beetle armor, which really intimidated me, at first. This eased a little after I gathered some pictures and did some studies. I figured out how to approach the segmented aspect of the armor, the trickiest to me, and how his mask/helmet worked. Here's the rough.

You can see I marked the places where I would fill the blacks. Note, I did draw Mercury's visor, but did not ink it because I'd honestly forgot what that line was for. (I think I had thought it was my mark for the eye line. Simple mistake.)

Initial inks without the graphite sketch.

I think the inking came out very well. I only realized I'd forgotten the visor after I'd inked it and had uploaded the "final" inks. Easily fixed with a couple strokes of the pen. I then took the corrected image into Photoshop and applied a deliberately flat coloring. I eventually opted to have some yellow because it helped act as a contrast to all the blue, and allowed some more color from Beetle to show up.

I plan to do more of this with the other Inner Senshi/Scouts. I've got one I'm pretty sure about, but the other two throw me a little bit. Hopefully, I'll figure something out.

February Drawings

I could have sworn I'd posted more pieces as I went along than I did. At any rate, here are the remaining drawings from February. I managed 25 out 28 days, which is pretty good compared to previous ones I've attempted.