The truthful way to draw...

I was going to title this "the right way to draw", but it's not really. I was thinking about how sometimes I come across pictures where the anatomy is just off, but it looks like the artist really does know what they're doing. I'm always puzzled by these - at Wondercon I saw this huge poster of a guy riding a horse, and one of the joints on the horse's front leg (only ONE leg, the other was perfectly fine) was backwards. Its wrist/knee had turned into another elbow, or a hock or something.
It was just so weird and jarring - the rest of the horse looked like the artist knew how to draw it. The other front LEG looked right. What had happened? Did he have reference for the rest of the pose, but not that leg? Did he just have a brainfart? Did someone else dislike how his pose looked and fix/maul it themselves?

And that got me thinking. I noticed it immediately because I've been drawing horses forever, and have always tried to learn more about how they're built, how they move, etc. So I guess when a horse is drawn weird, it really jumps out at me - because I know the shapes so intimately. I may not be able to always get it right in my own drawings, but I can tell when it's weird.
But I wonder, can people who don't pay attention to horses tell if it's drawn weird? Something like putting knees instead of hocks on the back legs, that's probably immediately noticeable by anyone. Or is it? I read misspelled words all the time, just skimming over them and not realizing until maybe the third time I read it that it's spelled "thrid" instead of "third" - I understand what it's supposed to be, given the context, and I don't pay any attention to the mistake.
Do non-artists (and artists, too, I guess) scan images like that? Identify the elements that say "horse" to them, and not notice the rest?

Just thoughts. AND NO PICTURE... oh noes.

Couple of doodles

Finished my portfolio, mailed it off. I'm wondering if I should make it accessible through my website, because that might be handy at some point.

I wrapped it up on Monday morning and called it a done deal. It took maybe three hours for me to notice the gaping hole where my portfolio had been - when I'm working on it, it's so consuming, takes up every drop of energy I have... but I really love doing it, working on something so hard and figuring out how to make myself better and show it. Bu the end, I'm glad to finish it and throw it into the mail, but it doesn't take long to want to do it again. I imagine that's something like directing a film, or giving birth.

I'll stick to portfolios for now, though, thxmuch.

A couple of drawings today to relax... I'm thinking about going out to a cafe tomorrow before it gets too disgustingly hot outside, do some drawing there.

Squirrel for the win!

Yeah, this bird got pwnzored. I really wish "pwned" was pronounceable, because it's an awesome word, but whenever I try it always comes out "boned" which really Isn't What I Mean, or "powned" which doesn't sound even remotely cool.

Part of a story sequence for practice...

Page two!

I can't imagine it makes much sense except that it's obviously about some people getting killed by other people riding horses. Maybe that's not clear - but there are plainly some people with weapons, and some horses.

These are my favorite subjects to draw - besides my two stinky cats, and they don't do anything worthy of immortalizing in graphic novel form.

The second panel, the top right, is the one I was complaining about in the last post. After stepping away for a couple of hours and coming back to it, I felt a lot better about it... it's still a little confusing. I so wanted it to be an accurate pose, but I also wanted it framed a certain way, which I couldn't DO if it was an accurate pose.

Oh well.

Comics!

I've got four days to pull together 32 pages of storyboards, comics, and sketches. I've been really getting into the comics bit... it's a lot of fun, figuring out the layout and doing the little storyboard sketches for it.

I ran into one panel, though, that I just couldn't for the life of me figure out. Either the composition was messy, or the action and characters read. If I straightened out the composition, it turned into random shapes and you couldn't tell what was going on; if I redid it so you could tell what was going on, you couldn't tell what was going on because it was too confusing and all over the place.

Ergh. Learning curves: they're all over the place.

Shifting out of neutral

So much of everything is just doing it. You can't get good at playing an instrument without actually playing it, and it sounds absolutely awful until you get good enough to make it sound less awful. That's like the saying, "there are a million bad drawings sitting there inside of you, so you better start drawing now to get them out." It's true... but it's not like a queue, bad drawings to the front of the line, good drawings stay in the back. Every fifty, or twenty, or so, a good drawing sneaks in.

That's what I think. It's not so much drawing the five billion bad drawings you have lurking in your fingertips, it's practicing enough so that one in five, or possibly one in two, is a good one.

Out of five pages of faces, this dude is IMO the good one in thirty.

Punker

Playing around with a different photoshop setting, which makes the brush fluctuate between background color and foreground color depending on how hard you press. Pink hair, also, is fun to do.

I'm thinking about concepts for comics right now, which is not a particularly useful thing to be doing, since my main priority is to get an art-related job... and I don't see myself in comics just yet.
Still, they're boinging around in my head, so I'm thinking about trying out a page or two. Comics is also a different way to work on story than straight-up storyboards, which is nice.

Attack of the Hyena Men!

Hyena man, really.

Just a hyena guy and some people. Sketchcrawl last-last weekend was a blast, but no drawings really to post because I managed to forget my watercolors at home and wasn't terribly impressed by anything I'd done. We were down in the Palace of Fine Arts, which is just kind of mind-blowing in how huge it is. I can't imagine going to visit a cathedral in Europe or anything, because the detail on the stuff at the Palace of Fine Arts just shuts me down, there's too much intricate detail.

Yesterday we were down in SF again to be part of the human chain across the Golden Gate Bridge, at the rally to raise awareness of the situation in Darfur. Great music and speakers, and sunburns all around.







The next post will be LESS than a week coming. One would hope.