There's no shame in Googling

In case you need to cut & paste, those names again are:

Stephen Harper
Morgan Tsvangirai
Abousfian Abdelrazik
Jacob Zuma
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Barack Obama

Well, I'm pretty sure you know who Obama is.

Listen!!

Do you smell something?

So starting to get somewhere fun with this stuff, after the past few months of hammering away at the basics. I've learned a few interesting things. One, I love hatching. I mean I really love it. I'm not that good at it yet, but I seem to be getting better. Two, I find angular stuff way more appealing to draw than simple curves. Maybe that's a phase, but it's really enjoyable. And three, although you don't see it on this stuff, I seem to enjoy exaggerating shoulders. Not sure what that means, but I would guess when I get to doing a lot more figure work again you'll probably see a lot of it.

We'll see if those observations hold up. For now, it's just nice to finally start getting some insight into what my hands find fun to draw.

Pressure

So after three months of staying at home and trying to improve, the new term is rushing forwards at a frightening pace. I get my schedule for the fall term on Friday, and in only six weeks I'll be sitting in my first class. Whatever that is.

I know I'll be working a lot harder this coming year than I did last. Not so much that I was slacking or anything, but because the courseload is way heavier. So much for 3 and 4 hour breaks between classes and days off in the middle of the week. This is gonna be real work.

It'll do me good, though. Hopefully I'll improve a lot.

Eh, it's a start

One thing Rich recommended back in April was to spend the summer doing caricatures. I can kinda see why now, so you can expect to see a lot more of this sort of thing.

Speaking of PZ Myers, his blog had a bit of network maintenance or something and as a result it spit up a bunch of old posts. Since I've only been following his blog since pretty recently, I hadn't seen this gem before. It's wonderfully evocative and poetic, well worth a read. That's one reason I always feel sorry for Creationists, by choosing to see the world through such a limited filter, they totally miss wonders like these.

Dailies

So as the title says, this is what I do pretty much every day. I've got several directories of stock and other photos, with faces, figures, anatomy, what have you, all fed into a random slideshow with a 60-second advance. From that I do three pages like these each and every day. Works pretty well, as you can see I'm getting a much better grasp at capturing form and motion.

That's in addition to any other sketches, studies and whatnot I do in the run of a day, although the past few days I've been way more lax than I should be. Trying to get that turned around, but as always it ain't easy.

A little hilarious stupid for you all

Via PZ Myers (who's well worth reading any day), a fun Creationist test on evolution, every bit as hilariously wrong as it sounds. Being honest, I ended up answering every question with "Are you really that stupid?" For extra laughs, go check out the poll. It's been Pharyngulated.

So today's piccies!



Sketch Night tonight at the school, and we needed to draw chihuahuas for Rich's daughter. Problem was, I didn't know how to draw a chi-dog. So a quick run to the internets and a couple of hours practice, I think I've started to get the idea. Not great, but certainly a start.

I ended up submitting the squinty one, way up there at the top.

More and more

More heads, as before. Starting to have some fun with them down at the bottom, getting away from just recording the heads I see and making something a bit more individual and appealing. Think I might keep tweaking the punk chick, she's got potential.

Maybe I'll have her fight robots.

Aaaand that's two weeks

So as promised, two weeks of daily head studies. not that I plan to stop or anything, but let's take stock. Certainly a lot of improvement from my first page in just about all respects. I'm starting to get the idea of expressiveness, and at least a little better concept of hair. On the other hand, my profiles suck. Really suck. Need to work on that a lot.

Started studying the work of Pierre Alary a lot more, he's developing into a big influence on where I want to go with my work. I mean seriously, if I can get characters this expressive with such subtlety and economy, I'd be in heaven. Mind you, there's years worth of work in getting anywhere near that stage, but at least I'm starting to figure out what it is I want.

Organized the links on the right there, too. Could use a few more, but it's a start.

Happy Canada Day!

Day 10-12 of head sketches. Some things are improving, some things are getting quite comfy, some things are MAKING ME WANT TO GNAW MY OWN FACE OFF.

But hey, that's art for you.

And for fun, what could be more Canadian than Stompin' Tom. And obligatory "Bryan Adams' nationality" jokes, of course.

Guess I got some new readers

Or maybe watchers, since it's all about the images here. But either way, a big thanks to CC for the surprise shout-out.

Just to let you know, I'm left-leaning politically, and like Slartibardfast I'm a great fan of science. So evolution is A-OK with me, no worries. Not particularly religious, but what's there is sort of non-practicing pagan with a smattering of Buddhism tossed in for flavour.

More importantly, since my head is mostly filled with fluff and art, I'm very much influenced these days by the French bande-dessinees. I used to be a big fan of Japanese manga, but the French have sort of taken over, starting with Spirou and going from there. You'll probably see more and more of their influence on me as time goes by, so you're getting in on the ground floor.

So that's it for the moment, I figure I'll have another head tilt post later since it's been three days since the last one, and maybe a page of hands for Frank Frink, since he suggested it. Gonna run over to I Draw Girls.com and see what Xia's got for tutorials, and see what I can come up with.

So that's that. Below are a couple of pages of what I've been doing the past couple of days. First is a page of relatively quick figure studies from stock photos, the second is a girl of my own devising using no reference, and some stuff drawn from Pierre Alary's wonderful Belladone BD. So much movement in his characters, I'd really like to learn how he puts them together.

More posts later.