Artwork created using Photoshop, ArtRage, or some other painting program.
She’s definitely a pirate queen… an UNDEAD pirate queen!
I don’t know who she is yet, but maybe she’s a pirate queen.
Unlike InkPad, Concepts doesn’t let me adjust the nodes on the shape, so there’s no precise way for me to refine what I draw with Concepts filled stroke tool. And that’s okay! Because I want a different feel of drawing in Concepts, and having things be a litle different accomplishes that.
So I’m pretty pleased right now with Concepts. I’ll keep working on this drawing and on the other one I’m doing in InkPad and see what happens!
I don’t know if this interests anyone or not, but I made another mushroom, and I’m making it available to anyone who wants to color it!
Color me! It’ll be fun… or weird… I don’t know…
I will do my own colors in Concepts for this one, but I’d love to see what other people make of my strange little doodle. I will probably draw more skulls, for folks like me who refuse to let the Halloween season end, and I will eventually make the mermaid I’m working on available as a coloring image as well.
Speaking of which, I got more work done on the mermaid today as well. The inking is almost done and I’ve started playing with the colors.
A creepy, colorful mermaid!
Adding colors in InkPad is a bit like making a paper-cut image. I trace the shapes of the main colors using the pen toll, then go back with the brush tool to trace less precise shapes for shading and highlights. All the colors are flat, so it looks like layers of cut paper laid over each other to make an image. At least that’s how it feels to me.
Again, let me know if you like the mushroom coloring image, and I will work on making more to share with folks. There are so many coloring books out there on so many topics, but I don’t think there are any books that focus on creepy or gothic or scary subjects, so I think maybe we could fix that, right?
I spent this morning working in two different vector drawing apps, seeing what results I could get. I went back to work on the mermaid image first, working in InkPad.
My mermaids tend to be more Ursula than Ariel…
Colors with shading andhighlights.
After working in InkPad for a while, I switched over to Concepts to play for a bit, to see if I can get some results that I like. Here are the results.
The Fungus among us!
(And yes, I love coloring, but I would prefer to color my own artwork as opposed to buying a coloring book. Nobody draws the kind of creepy stuff I love to work on. Perhpas I should make my own freaky coloring pages to share with everyone?)
So that’s the results from today. I’m very happily coloring and drawing away!
“The Mermaid” work-in-progress
I’ve been doing some more doodling lately, playing around with using random elements to create a character. Here’s a random crack I found in our road.
Random crack in the road
And here’s the sketch I made based off that.
Psycho Bird from a Crack in the Road
If you don’t see the resemblence to the crack above, that’s because I turned it sideways to do the drawing.
The idea for this little drawing experiment comes from the book Drawing and Painting Imaginary Animals: A Mixed-Media Workshop with Carla Sonheim. It’s a fun read, lots of creative ideas in it, and yes, you can find the book on Amazon.
I do a lot of artwork on my iPad, so I’m always on the lookout for new drawing and painting apps. I downloaded one last week that I thought looked promising – Tayasui Sketches. It had a lot of the same tools I see in other drawing apps, but there was something about the texture of the sample artwork that made me want to try it out. The basic app is free and allows you to sample the full version for an hour. The full version costs $4.99. Now $4.99 isn’t a lot, but I do prefer to try before I buy, so I did the one-hour trial and drew this quick image to test out all the tools:
Test drawing done in Tayasui Sketches
I really liked the paper grain texture on this. Tayasui Sketches is one of the few apps I’ve seen that includes the option of adjusting the background for paper grain as well as color. However, I did NOT like the way the text tool worked and I didn’t care at all for the way the app handles zooming and panning in the image. The tools had a nice texture (I especially loved the rough edge on the orange), but I knew some of the apps I already owned could produce similar results.
So I decided to draw the same image again in a couple of other apps I have. I tried Procreate first:
Same drawing recreated in Procreate
The biggest difference I noticed was the lack of paper texture. I don’t know if there’s a simple way to add a paper texture to artwork done in Procreate. I could always scan in a textured image and add it as an overlay layer, but I would prefer to have the option to add texture right there in the app. Also, Procreate doesn’t have a text tool, so I had to handwrite the text. On the plus side, I still get a lot of nice textured tools (again, I got that slightly rough edge around the orange) in Procreate and I found it much easier to adjust the brushes to get the effects I wanted. I can also create and save custom color palettes in Procreate, and it’s easier to pan and zoom artwork. Plus I can ROTATE the artwork on the fly, something Sketches doesn’t do.
For the last trial, I decided to do this drawing in SketchClub.
And finally, done in SketchClub
SketchClub is one of my favorite drawing and painting apps on the iPad. I have a lot of control over the brushes and other tools, and can download or create new brushes. Procreate will let me create new brushes, but doesn’t have the option to download brushes from a community of users. It also has a text tool, but since SketchClub didn’t seem to have access to the same fonts that Sketches does, I decided to handwrite the text again. And like Procreate, I can zoom, pan, and rotate the screen with ease.
One of the biggest differences I noticed between SketchClub and the other apps is the lack of an actual water color brush. In Sketches, there is a water color brush tool. In Procreate, there’s a setting for the brush tool that gives it a water color look. But I think if I played with some settings in SketchClub, I might be able to achieve a similar effect.
Anyway, that’s the same drawing done in three different apps. I still haven’t decided if I want to buy Sketches or not. The biggest drawback is the way it handles zooming and panning, and the inability to rotate the artwork. That makes a huge difference to me.
So what do you think?
Background Orc #6
Feast your eyes on this beauty! Isn’t he adorable?! He’s an orc, but not one of those big, bulky hero orcs that look all intimidating and muscle-bound. Sadly, this cutie is one of those guys that gets stuffed into the background in fantasy movies because he’d totally steal the scene from those insecure alpha-male type orcs. That’s why I decided to draw him. He deserves to get a spotlight all to himself!
And all of this is my way of saying that I’m still working on drawing every day, though this past month I dropped the ball for a while. Drawing is something I need to work into my schedule every day, and that can be tough. I work on the webcomics first thing in the morning (unless I’m overwhelmed by some other project, like I was last week). I spend my afternoons handling email and office admin stuff (and there are plenty of both right now, thanks to Girl Scout cookie season). And I spend my evenings just trying to keep up with the house and the kids.
But I think there may be a time when I can do a little drawing. The trick is to figure out how to remind myself every day.
I came across an article on Lifehacker this week entitled “Encourage New Habits by Stacking Them On Top of Preexisting Habits.” The basic idea here is that you create a new habit by building it on top of something you already do, and then you reward yourself for doing it. This is something that I have been playing with for a while. For example, I like to grab a cup of coffee in the afternoon before I sit down at my desk to work. Between grabbing that cup of coffee and heading to my desk, I walk right past my purse/giant-man-eating-bag-of-DOOOOOOOM, where I stuff all my receipts. As I walk past it, I have begun prompting myself to grab the bag and take it upstairs with me, so that I have all my receipts right by my desk. And doing that now triggers me to scan in the receipts as soon as I sit down to work, so that I now have all my expenses recorded and I no longer wonder what the hell I spent all my money on.
It’s a simple idea – set up one habit to trigger another I want to encourage. And since it’s worked so well for receipts, I’ve decided to use the same technique to get me to draw more as well.
First, I need to figure out what habit could trigger me to do the drawing. Since I do so much of my drawing on the iPad, I’m thinking that the trigger should be something I do every day on the iPad. I’ve gotten into the habit of scheduling the next day every night before I go to bed. So I’m thinking that once I’ve finished doing that, I can simply switch over to one of my drawing apps and do a short bit of sketching.
It’ll take a little while to set up the new drawing habit, but I’m hopeful. And to reinforce building this – and other – new habits, I make sure to reward myself using Habit RPG . Habit RPG lets me set up a check list of habits and daily tasks and assign a certain amount of virtual gold coins as a reward for completing them. When I collect enough coins, I then spend my REAL money on a REAL reward for myself, like a new book, yarn, lunch out, a day off to do nothing but watch TV and crochet, etc. I keep the rewards small/inexpensive to keep from breaking the bank, but still, I make sure I reward myself.
But the real reward is in setting up these new habits. Because more drawing means more finished artwork, and more artwork means more fun/weird products on Zazzle and that could mean more money! Yay!
But for now, I’ll settle just for getting more drawing done. Especially if I get to draw cuties like the Background Orc #6.
Original sketch done in Sketchclub on the iPad
Sketch imported into Adobe Illustrator Draw for the iPad.
What pretty eyes he has!.
So I decided to do this weekly art challenge at the beginning of last month, with the idea that it would force me to do more drawing that I had been doing. Well, I was right about that! In the last month, I think I’ve done some drawing or digital painting every night.
But I haven’t done what I initially thought I would do – turn out a new drawing every week.
The first week, I completed 3 digital paintings. Just in the first week! But then I tried working with an app that didn’t give me the results I wanted, so I ended up with an unfinished doodle and since I didn’t like how the app in question handled, I decided to abandon that picture and move on.
Abandoned sketch. He started out cute, but the app wasn’t cooperating.
Then I started work on the current painting, the “Zombie Portrait.” I’ve spent a lot of time on this one. The pencil sketch alone took at least a week. Now I’m slowly getting the painting part of this done, and since I’m doing this as a painting instead of a sketch or cartoon, I know there’s no way it will be finished this week.
But does that matter? Is it against the “rules” if I don’t turn out a new image every week for the “weekly art challenge?” I don’t know. I started out with no more specific a goal than to draw or paint something every day. So I think if I do that, I think I’m doing pretty well.
Anyway, here are the latest images of the work in progress. I’ll keep working on this one until it’s done, and then move onto the next piece!
https://www.flickr.com/photos/cynicalwoman/15307397193/
The almost finished pencil sketch for the “Zombie Portrait…”
And the current painting in progress! Ta-daa!
I was hard at work on last week's webcomic when I had to set everything aside to go off to a karate camp for 4 days. When four of the highest ranking instructors fly all the way from Okinawa to teach someplace you could actually manage to get to, you drop everything and go.
But I am home now and back at work on the webcomic. It's still not ready yet, though, so here's some other artwork I've been working on. Let me know what you think!
(It's BMO, but not exactly BMO. I'll explain it when I finish if, if it needs explaining then.)
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