the last couple of nights when drawing with wendy mac before bed, little guy has been cutting up his drawings and pasting them in his sketchbook and mine, collage style.
based on the pile of leftover paper triangles, i think he enjoys the physicality of cutting the paper more than the act of drawing.
the orange puppy i drew is my childhood stuffed toy, Orange Puppy. Drawing your stuffed toy was the latest assignment in Wendy Mac’s Draw Together.
For the last week or so, Little Guy and I have been drawing with Wendy Mac before bedtime.
This was my peacock drawing from yesterday, made with crayon and ink.
not sure why.
try it.
see for yourself
organizing the studio last week and dug up these marker drawings i drew about a year and a half ago of little guy while he was drawing:)
i’m writing this while sitting in the waiting room of a tire shop.
the valve stem on the front driver side tire broke.
i walked over to the grocery store while waiting for the tow. a lot of holes on the shelves. crowded. a nervous energy. i bought some canned goods.
a little down-screen 2 frame walk cycle art
crazy how much every pixel counts
little digital warm up
that is all
and the shop is back up!
(thank you wordpress for fixing the bug)
to celebrate, how about a new ‘steps’ strip?
this rough is pretty rough
but its the building blocks of a new steps strip
i need some whiteout to fix the bubble butt i gave spidey in the one where his spidey sense is going crazy
both very different from each other
here’s the sketch for yesterday’s journal strip ‘backwards’
and here’ s the timelapse
you’re getting about an hour of creation time in a scooch over a minute
making comics is hard work any way, and right now making comics seems very hard for me
just have to find ways to keep the pencil moving
a little metal gear solid 3 action with volgin giving snake a jolt
you even get the sketch
where else can you get deals like this
new steps strip is up
i’m not in love with the inks
they feel too harsh
maybe i just need to work larger
maybe i just need to use pencil instead of ink
maybe i need to get better with the paints so i can avoid the line work entirely
and i know the horizontal layout doesn’t work great on mobile
i mean, seriously, the best thing
sheesh
and doodling in marker
so if you’ve been reading along in our casablanca/tmnt mashup, the story continues here
or you could start here. which was kind of where we started, but its not the beginning of the movie.
mostly we skipped around to the parts where we could make pizza jokes.
the photo here is one of the sketches for this strip
and if you haven’t seen casablanca you should stop reading this right now, go watch it, and then come back and read these. you’ll get twice as many jokes. maybe more
gorilla in the grass
haven’t made many comics lately but I’m still drawing
here’s a sketch of the neighbors house
maybe the most important part of doing the strip is figuring out the timing
when trying to do that my sketches can look more like the diagrams you see in the top half of the page
then comes figuring out the props like the chair you see in the bottom half of the page
I also need to figure out the main poses
here you can see I really had trouble with that left leg
No time or energy for a finished strip
So you get this sketchbook sketch which isn’t a strip yet
Which is definitely the opposite of how it usually works but I’m tired
I hope doing it this way doesn’t take away the punch from the eventual strip when I get to it
saw the king and I last night.
It was incredible.
Forgot my pencil bag with all my pencils and pens including my Wacom tablet stylus so had to do this one by hand.
turns out watson was irene adler the whole time. day 31 ‘masks’ alternate drawing
Inktober is over. Time to look back through the month and see what I can do better.
The Bad
Brush pen skills didn’t really improve over the course of the the month, but my confidence in using them did.
The first day may have had some of the best linework. I like the delicate line that my timidity with the brush pen gave me, but as my confidence grew over the course of the month I was soon just slapping down the ink.
Day 2 was one of my lowest points in inktober. Watson’s gesture is so stiff and awkward and his arms are too long.
Day 14 was a missed opportunity. The original idea was to recreate the cabinet photograph of Irene Adler that Sherlock took as payment for working on the case, but the result is boring. My idea was that Irene Adler (I found inspiration in photos of Helena Bonham Carter, which you can see more of in the above sketch), was fierce, and I did nothing to capture that fierceness.
The Good
A shift occurred for me on day 4. I spent more time designing the page, using the shape of the paper to help tell the story. Black areas became vital. Day 20 took those ideas to an extreme and was a lot of fun from a design standpoint.
Day 5 and 7 were strong, but 6 is one of my favorites. The design just works. It is one of the few Inktober 2017 drawings I am proud of. It also freed me up imagination-wise. If Sherlock Holmes could find the Sword in the Stone, why couldn’t he also deal with Martians or giant robots?
Day 11 and 12 aren’t great drawings, but I felt like they do capture the poses.
Attempting a Robert Downey Jr/Guy Ritchie inspired Basil of Baker St on day 26 had me paying closer attention to costume design and attempting to capture some of those textures helped give the drawing some richness, and it was the last drawing of the month that I felt great about.
Though I’ve done inktobers in the past, this was the first inktober that I managed to do a drawing every day, and it made all the difference. Having a daily deadline forced me to do the drawing rather than worrying about doing the drawing. Maybe that’s the most important thing.
My Sherlock Holmes Inktober (inspired by jake parker’s official inktober 2017 prompt list) continues with day 24. Today’s prompt is ‘blind.’
previously on sherlock holmes inktober 2017
Check out my past inktobers here:
