Monkey Kombat!

Did anyone ever play Monkey Island? Those have got to be, hands-down, my favorite computer/video games ever. They're so quirky and weird and silly and you can only die at one point in the entire series. I was playing The Secret of Monkey Island not too long after I learned to read, and I think the final showdown between LeChuck and Guybrush was just about the scariest thing I'd ever experienced in my young life (although the Wicked Witch appearing in a cloud of red smoke in The Wizard of Oz came pretty close).

Yeah, anyway - my point being that the ape I drew ended up looking kind of like one of the monkeys from number 4, where you have to learn the complicated monkey martial arts version of rock-paper-scissors. Oop eek CHEE, everyone.


(also there is a shoe there which, while it may look like a Chuck Taylor, is actually a MotherJones NoSweat sneaker, crafted lovingly by people who are not impoverished children living in third world countries. This is the object of power which the ape uses to vanquish his foes - I was going to draw missiles and laserbeams from it but that's so juvenile)


And a woman-at-arms. This is my idea of a hot warrior chick - no chainmail bikini, just a ton of armor and an attitude. Crowquill again...


Aaaand a skater chick for The Drawing Board's 'Redheads' thread. Cause skaters are fun to draw. Also now that I'm sitting here and looking at it, I want to futz with the pose some more because it looks weeeeird.


Hokay, and here's a portrait I was paid to do, from a photo... usually I would use watercolor, but Noah Klocek did a drawing where he drew on one side of a sheet of vellum and then used pastels on the other side, thereby preserving the linework but also getting neat-o pastel coloring. I've wanted to try it since I read how he did it, and the guy who wanted the portrait wanted pastels anyway, so I thought I'd give it a try. Turned out nicely, though not as nicely as the scan makes it seem; I fiddled with the levels because it's kind of washed out in real life (here). I'm kind of cheating, but levels is a tool like a pencil or crayon, too, right?

Peter Pan

We've got a washing machine! Unfortunately it's inaccessible - thinking to foil any would-be quarter thieves, they locked the door to the laundry room without giving any of us tenants a key. They're going to unlock their office tomorrow morning to find a furiously beeping answering machine stuffed to full capacity with angry messages.

But they'll have to step over the heap of dirty laundry stuffed through their mail slot first.

Thinking a lot about storytelling. It's something I've never really thought about before, never consciously practiced. I'm finding myself looking at my comics collection with whole new eyes - realizing why the art in some comics draws you in and keeps you turning the page while in other books you have to slog through it. Interesting pictures seems to be the key... not pretty pictures, exactly, but pictures where there's more going on, where you want to know more, where you're asking 'what happens next?'
It's a weird mental shift, drawing for an audience.

It also seems to be one of those things where advice helps, but like drawing occasionally you get the lightbulb of enlightenment that blinks on over your head as you realize that if you color the whole picture black nobody will be able to tell what's going on...







Playing with crowquills today (not the actual kind yanked out of a crow, but the plastic kind with the replacable metal nib)... I had a bunch of ideas for doing monochromatic pictures but the red ink started leaking through the page and so I only did the one.

Invisible Ink

Just discovered this blog, and it's so awesome I have to plug it. Without a gratuitous picture. If you've got any interest in story or storytelling, go read Invisible Ink. Really interesting stuff, and fresh because Brian McDonald writes about the whys of story instead of reducing it to a gajillion formulas like Robert McKee (though McDonald does end up with some formulas too, they're more like guidelines -really).

If you missed that the first time through... Invisible Ink.

Sketching day

When I woke up this morning, the sun was shining and the birds were singing and the clouds were rolling lazily across the sky. I packed up my sketchbook and paints and went sketching. I saw a tree...


And I met a goat with his entire head all wrapped up in a grubby bandage...


And then I drove out to the zoo, because it started raining here...



Unfortunately the rain caught up with me about a half hour later, so I went home.

The end.

Mermaids...

So it's not my regular thing, but the other night sleep just wouldn't come and so I lay awake staring at the ceiling and thinking up variations on mermaids and dogs and I can't even remember what all else. These are a couple of quick watercolor sketches; I'm planning on doing a character lineup - let's see how that works out.

Been thinking about ideas, and how they're often so closely guarded. Information is pretty free nowadays, if you ask someone what kind of pencil they use they'll tell you. The pencil isn't the trick; it's what's inside their head that's the trick. You could concievably come up with a mathematical formula for drawing like Mignola or Wendling, but that's still only the style, not the content.
What a lot of people miss is that ideas, like your technique and like your tools, are just extensions of your head. Ideas can come and go, but if you jealously hang on to one of your ideas specifically, nurse it and shelter it and keep it away from prying eyes - from my experience, it doesn't thrive and grow. It becomes bloated, stagnates, complicates itself unneccessarily because it hasn't got other ideas bouncing off of it and snapping off the unneccessary bits.

Here's the thing I'm trying to say: someone stealing an idea is just like someone stealing your pencil. There, now they have it; but just as they can't draw your drawings with the pencil they've got now, their thought that used to be your idea (and now I'm a little lost here because it sounds like I'm encouraging plagarism) - their thought is theirs, and if they toss it out and make it grow, that's great. If they sit there and try to follow where your idea was going - that'll turn out crappy because you're the only one who knew, and maybe not even consciously.

My point being: there are always more pencils, sketchbooks, and ideas than there are people to use them.

(oh yeah, and a picture)

Big dump

The last few days have been crazy. Today is my first day off work in 11 days, which is a cause for great joy. I start out the work week with much enthusiasm, updating compulsively, but as the hours drag by I realize that my creativity has run off to the happy lands of the weekend and is waiting for me to catch up.

I'm finding myself frequently drawing from life just because I can't think of anything better to draw - no, not that I can't think of anything, just because I'm thinking about other things. Sure, it's good practice, but... I'm trying to make an effort now to imagine, and sit and think, and draw the things I'm imagining and thinking about. Keeping in shape isn't enough; you've got to challenge yourself.

That's what I think.

Here are some things from the last week or so:










And that's it for tonight, people. Check out the Sketchcrawl Blog (in which I am a presently noncontributing contributor) and Zen and the Art of Photography... or else I'll know.