April's Birthday Card thing.

I'm going to skip a ton of steps here but I can at least share a few - not that anyone needs to see my process... most of the time my processes are very sloppy and defy logic... but still I always enjoy seeing how other people work so maybe someone will enjoy this?

Ok so I started with my trusty Pentel Quicker Clicker 0.5 Mechanical Pencil that I've been using for as long as I can remember... threw down a few sketches and tweaked the facial features forever until I thought I had a reasonably ok likeness and a sort of ok pose going.

Then I butchered it by trying to ink it with a well-worn Faber-Castell Pitt Brush Pen... which did ok for some bits but for the details of the face... not so much. Nothing against these pens but once they are a bit "used" they aren't really the best for fine details as the tips tend to fray a bit. Oh well. So I then scanned it in black and white and here's that then:

So next... I brought this image into Flash for cleanup... and what I usually do there is make the image into a symbol so I can scale back the opacity on it and put the image on a guide layer for reference while I go over it with other crap.

The way I usually work is just to draw boxes over areas I want to trace... hack the crap out of the boxes with the polygonal lasso and then bend the shapes until I get what I want out of them. I do have an older Wacom (Intuos 2 I think) at home that a generous friend sent my way after he upgraded and I do have some experience with these from a former employer but I still seem to get faster/better results the hard way. So after doing this here's what I came up with:

The first of these two images is with the reference layer showing and the latter is with just the vector trace. Coloring is then a snap cos I can just fill in whatever I want... so I did that - but everything looked really flat and lifeless and I thought it might need more texture... enter Google Image Search - one of the best sources of comedy in the history of mankind.

I took the fills I did for three areas (the pomeranian, the fleshtone, and the clothing) and I separated them to their own layers... then I headed to Google Image Search to find some textures!

Here's the one I used for the clothing:

A few more textures later and some added scanned in garbage in photoshop and BANG! The finished piece!

Ok, I have to do work now or I will get fired!!!

Wowoweewa...

Unfinished sketch dedicated to the mesmerizing Marlo Meekins who told a creepy/amusing story about her move out to California. I'm hopefully going to complete this by adding the subject of her story to the palm of her hand but I've been drawing this at work so I haven't had too much time to get into it. I colored her hair with 3 different dry-erase markers from the whiteboard in my cube...so that's why it's done so beautifully. Vector version later.

Snaggletooth!

I was supposed to be sketching ideas for some illustration for work and I drew this snaggletoothed lady over my lunch break... still could do a bit of detail/color work on it but i think it's coming along ok... I still don't know how I'm going to render the hair. I like the way the pencil rough of it feels but that might not translate well to digital. Any suggestions?

Don't expect this place to be jumpin' now that I've actually made a real "post" but I'll see what I can do about being more regular.

Taste Test

Oh, hi there.

Hopefully this page will look more interesting over the next few weeks or so. I'm going to try to update on a regular basis but I doubt that it will work that way. This is going to be used as a design/sketch blog mostly for my own personal use but feel free to barf all over it. I will post links here to rad things and hopefully post my own things here that can sometimes be rad.