Archive for the ‘Daily Doodle’ Category

Weekly Doodle – Five minutes on kittens plus Sponge Bob!

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

We are continuing to do our five minutes of drawing in the evenings, though I will admit we can’t seem to get it done every day. Between homework, required reading, baths, etc., even five minutes can be a challenge to fit in. Still, I made sure to sit down with the girls this past weekend to do some drawing, and we decided to draw our new kittens. Well, two of us drew the kittens. Pixie drew this…

From left to right, this is a mommy, a baby, and a daddy. I can clearly see each figure, and I’m rather impressed by Pixie’s work! As for Princess…

She did opt to draw the kittens, but whipped through it very quickly as she was more interested in playing with her subjects than drawing them. Still, you can see Toothless and Hiccup, over which is Princess’ hand with one of the small fuzzy mice we bought for them. She did this in about 2 minutes.

As for me…

I drew a cat as opposed to our cats. I had thought I might be able to semi-accurately represent at least one of the kittens getting ready to tussle, but the moment I drew the eyes I knew it wasn’t happening, so I went with generic cat. Hey, you’ve got to be flexible when drawing straight in pen. I also think this drawing illustrates the fact that a mediocre cartoon can be saved by a decent punch line.

Finally, one last note. Princess had to go to church on Sunday with her dad. Here’s how the Hubster kept her from squirming in her seat during mass.

Yep, that first sketch is Mr. Squarepants, as drawn by Princess. The second is an angel, a bird, and the Communion wine and bread for the mass, so you know she was paying at least some attention to church today ;)

Weekly Doodle – Take a look at Five Minute Marvels!

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

We’ve started something new in la casa de Madden. The girls and I are drawing in the evenings for just five minutes! Yeah, I know, not a huge thing maybe. Or is it?

I got the idea from 5 Minute Marvels, where people are drawing comic book characters with their kids for five minutes a day. And I love the idea. Rather than draw comic book characters, we’re drawing anything the girls choose. I’m using it as an opportunity to cartoon and have a little fun with the girls. Princess is learning to draw. And Pixie is doing whatever Pixie does best, which is be her own hysterical self.

Here’s a sample of what we’ve done so far. The girls and I were completely enchanted with the movie “How to Train Your Dragon,” so we all decided to draw dragons one evening.

Here’s Pixie’s drawing (her dragon is wearing a dress):

Here’s Princess’ dragon, being taken out for a walk by Princess:

And here is my dragon:

I had not meant for my dragon to look like a cow, but once Princess declared it to be a ‘cow-dragon,’ I just went with it. I even drew in a little ‘cow-dragon’ pie ;)

Be sure to check out the 5 Minute Marvels website. There’s some really cool stuff there. And if you’re so inclined, why not try drawing for 5 minutes with your kids? You don’t have to be good at drawing. Trust me, your kids won’t care if you’re not Leonardo Da Vinci. But they’ll love you for drawing with them!

Weekly Doodle – Another Robot and Butterfly

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010

This is the sketch that inspired the Art Rage painting last week. I try to keep a sketch pad and drawing pens on hand, in case I get the urge to doodle. Sometimes I’ll go as long as a couple of months without doodling, which is stupid because I really ought to draw at least a few minutes a day. Other times, I’ll draw on a daily basis. I suppose this on again/off again cycle has a lot to do with my schedule. It’s hard to do anything on a daily basis when I’m already writing a different story every week. That’s going to change come this fall, because I need to give myself a bit of a break. And because I want to draw more.

Anyway, I’ve been drawing lots of little robots lately. Sometimes they have little word balloons over their heads like this one does, with jokes told entirely in Steam Punk, the native tongue of robots. This one was drawn on a 3.5″ x 5″ sketch pad with Faber Castell’s sanguine art pen set. I mainly used the brush pen with the small point pens for detail work. The initial sketch was done with a mechanical pencil. I love mechanical pencils for sketching. I always get a much crisper drawing when I use a mechanical pencil.

Daily Doodle – Robot final

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

There are two versions of this painting, so make sure you see them both. This first version was what I ended up with after painting in Art Rage 3.0. I did the entire image using only the watercolor tool, and was very pleased with the results. However, I thought it lacked something, so I exported this image with its various layers as a Photoshop document, and did some more work in that program. Here’s the results of that…

This definitely gave the image some punch. I used a couple of iStock images I had on a resources disk from Photoshop Creative magazine; one image of tree branches in autumn and the other a circuit board. The first obviously went in the upper left corner of the pic. I ran it through the water color filter, then faded in the edges using the maple leaf brush in Photoshop, then added more maple leaves to work it into the background a bit more. The circuit board image I had to work on a bit more; inverting it, colorizing it, and again fading in the edges using a layer mask and a few textured brushes (the maple leaf and one of the oil brushes).

I also overlaid some texture photos, again from my Photoshop Creative resources disk. And you can see the final result.

I always say I plan to take more time to do art. It’s hard to find that time given my current workload. But playing in Art Rage made things rather simple; just a few minutes here, a few minutes there, and then about an hour this evening finishing up the effects and postwork. We’ll see if I can pull this off again in the near future.

Daily Doodle – More Robot

Monday, March 29th, 2010

I’ve gotten a little farther with this since yesterday, and am pleased with how it’s going. I didn’t bother with a sketch before painting on this one. Just jumped right in with Art Rage’s water color brush tool. Keeping the different colors on separate layers helps keep things from getting muddy, I’ve noticed.

Will post more as this progresses.

Daily Doodle – Robot?

Sunday, March 28th, 2010

No idea where this one is going yet. I just decided to steal a few minutes this evening to open up Art Rage and play around a bit. I’ve been drawing various robots in my littlest sketch book the past few days, using a sanguine set of Faber Castell art pens, and decided to see what a robot done in water colors might look like. I have to say, I really like Art Rage’s water color tool. It does a very nice job of simulating the real thing.

Any way, I’ll post more of this as I get it done.

Just Doodling – Manga portrait

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

Someone on Twitter asked me about ArtRage 2.5. ArtRage is a terrific natural media graphics program from Ambient Design that only costs $25. It’s not as powerful as Photoshop, doesn’t handle photo editing or stuff like that, but if you want to draw and paint on the computer, ArtRage is the program to go for. Here’s a recent sample of work I’ve done.

This is nothing fancy, just a quick portrait done to give me a feel for how ArtRage might handle manga style artwork. My only real complaint is that the marker tool is not all that great for inking. I’d rather sketch an image in ArtRage, take it to Manga Studio for inking, and then bring it back into ArtRage for coloring and painting effects. Thought if I want something seriously polished, I might handle the last part in Photoshop.

But even so, this image was all done in ArtRage, and I think it turned out pretty well. So there ya go. ArtRage. (And version 3 comes out soon, with a new inking tool. Sounds promising to me!)

Testing blogging software

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

No biggie here. I just want to see which blogging software will work better for me – Blog Jet or Zoundry Raven.  This post was done with Blog Jet.

Here’s a test image to see if this works:

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Just Doodling

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

I’m schlepping Princess to camp at a local museum all week. The place is just far enough away, and her time at camp just short enough, that there’s no point in me coming back home to do anything. So Pixie and I are spending the day hitting ALL the local museums and parks in that area. There are quite a few.

Yesterday, while Pixie ran amok in the Virginia Living Museum (where Princess’ camp is being held), I squeezed in a little doodle time, experimenting with a new tool in my art kit – a mechanical pencil with red lead. I just can’t drag myself to the computer anymore in the evenings to cartoon, so I am once again switching to doing things the old fashioned way, by hand. A friend suggested I use a mechanical pencil with red leads to do my sketching, then after inking and scanning in the artwork, I can just drop the red channel from the image, and voila! No erasing to do to clean up my artwork. This page has both red and blue pencil in it, and I can’t get rid of both (it doesn’t work that way), but I was able to experiment in Photoshop long enough to confirm that I can do what I want with the red pencil. So without further ado, here’s my random doodles with the fancy new mechanical red pencil!

When you click on the image above, you’ll get it in full size, which will be HUGE, but then you can see all the nifty detail. Yeah, I know, whatever. And yes, that is a talking toilet in the lower left corner. That was Princess’ suggestion to draw.

Deep Fried – A Holiday Self-Portrait

Friday, December 5th, 2008

CWtoon_xmas_portrait02

Yep, this is me. All frazzled and fried, just in time for the holidays.  And from what I hear, I ain’t the only one feeling like this.

It’s December 5th, and I have managed to buy a grand total of one, yes one, Christmas present.  That’s it!  Even though I put a little reminder in my calendar to start shopping waaaay back in October.  See, that’s how organized I am!

So the plan now is to drug— er, occupy the Pixie with some TV and then spend the morning knocking out a few blog posts.  After that, I’ll hit the online shops and do the Santa Mommy thing.  The Cynical Woman cartoon gets the rest of the day.  Tomorrow and Sunday are dedicated to my erotica podcast — I’ve got a story to finish for next month, plus recording to do for the next week’s episode.  Oh, and I did I mention I’ve invited the Princess’ little playmates over for an evening of pizza and mini-chick flicks?

No wonder I look like this!