Massive Sketch Dump

Well its not that massive, but it seemed like I was scanning for 5 hours (it was actually about an hour). Anyway, more apologies for my inconsistent posting. As I mentioned before, I've started a new job, and had some other hectic things to take care of.
I had kind of burnt out on drawing a little bit until I picked up a copy of volume 1 of the original Akira comic, and my brother lent me Craig Thompson's Blankets to read. Both of them left me feeling inspired. Reading Blankets made me realize that I should be using a brush to ink. I feel like I can translate my pencil work much more accurately with a brush. So expect to see more brush work from yours truly.

The whole experience has made me realize that I need to spend more time enjoying inspiring stuff. The ironic thing is that I rarely read comics, which is stupid, and I'm going to change. I'm getting a library card and exploiting the Salt Lake Public Library's comics section to its fullest potential.

I've also got to find really good stuff to read. I had been referencing some kind of mediocre comics lately, and its made me complacent and boring in my approach to drawing. Seeing really good stuff like Otomo and Thompson's stuff just gave me so much more of a hunger to push myself, and they did it in two totally different, uniquely brilliant ways.

Anyway, enough talk.

Monsters

A couple of guys and ghouls I sketched out today. I was playing alot with my cleanup process here. All of these were drawn and cleaned up on regler old typing paper. I think the results are as good as I would have got with bristol board, although the wolf drawing did get a bit warped with the ink.

On the wolf, I sketched it out with a mechnical pencil. For cleanup I primarily used a brush marker. When I scanned it in, I adjusted the levels, so that you could still see some of the sketch lines from the mechanical pencil. I also had to fix the placement of the eyes a bit, and I played around with the black and white edges in photoshop. So, some of the strokes you see here are digital:


On the vampire chick, I used a .02 micron pen to sketch the whole thing, then I went back and added the thicker lines with faber castell fine point felt marker. I like the delicate lines, and shapes I could build with those lines. I referenced some of Clair Wendling's hair rendering for the hair. Not quite as smooth and pretty as she does, but I'm working at it.


This last dude was rendered in a similar fashion to the vampire girl, just using some different thicknesses on the felt pens. Its interesting, that as I was drawing these, I had the impulse to use different media for cleaning them up depending on the sketch. Much more explorative then carefully planned out.