November Drawing – Day 19, I Love Tentacles!

One of the reasons I’ve spent so much time working with Concepts this month is because I’ve been looking for a replacement app for Adobe Ideas. Adobe replaced Adobe Ideas with Adobe Illustrator Draw, which is very nice for drawing with, but…

I cannot export my work in any useable format.

Adobe Ideas allowed users to export their drawings as a vector PDF, which could then be opened in Illustrator or almost any other desktop vector program. Adobe Illustrator Draw will only allow users to export drawings as low resolution PNGs. Unless you own a copy of Adobe Illustrator CC on your desktop. Then you can send Adobe Illustrator Draw images to CC and work on them there. Of course, that’s assuming you have a copy of Adobe CC. Which I don’t.

The end result is that I have some drawings that were half-finished when Adobe made the switch from Ideas to Illustrator Draw. I wasn’t worried initially about it, because Adobe said they would be adding the SVG or PDF export eventually. Well, it’s been about a year since Adobe switched things over, and still no SVG/PDF export. So I am now exporting LOW RESOLUTION PNGS of my half-finished drawings in Adobe Illustrator Draw so I can re-start them (and FINISH them) in Concepts.

And I have to say, the results are pretty good.

 

Victorian Mermaiden!

A lovely Victorian mermaiden!

 
For this image, I was able to go back to the original sketch, done in Sketchbook Pro by Autodesk, and start from the beginning again with the inking and colors. And how does it compare with Adobe Illustrator Draw? Well, here’s the unfinished drawing from that app.

 

Old Victorian Mermaiden

Old Victorian Mermaiden

 
I actually think the inking looks better in the Concepts app. There’s more line variation, and I have more control over each individual line. Plus Concepts has a text tool, which is a nice thing to have!

I got back some images of the busted robot coloring page I did earlier this month. I should be posting those tomorrow. For now, I’m going to watch Doctor Who and relax for the rest of the evening.

November Drawing – Day 18, Lovecraft Wine

 

Lovecraft Wine

Ta-daa! Lovecraft Wine! Soothing but creepy 🙂

 
Welp, there it is! Lovecraft Wine is done. I still need to export it in SVG format and do some final cleaning up, but this drawing is basically done.

One interesting note about the Concepts drawing app – the eraser tool actually acts more like a masking tool. It doesn’t make a difference until you export the drawing in SVG format, then open it in another program. The strokes of the eraser tool then show up as white marks on the image. It takes a bit of work to remove these marks because each mark in the image is a separate object in the SVG file, and that totals up to hundreds, even thousands, of objects.

But it’s not an impossible problem to fix. Concepts uses layers, and those layers remain in the exported SVG. By going through the separate layers, I can remove the white marks of the eraser more easily and then fix the vector objects that the white marks were covering in the first place. I’d say it’s about another week of work, but I think it’ll be work it!

November Drawing – Day 17, Pretty Colors

 

Lovecraft wine!

Have a drink and you’ll see pretty colors too.

 
I love desaturated greens and pinks, and these seem like the perfect colors for this drawing. Now that I’ve laid down the flat colors, I’m going to add some details – cross hatching, highlights, shading, more hints of those pretty pinks, greys and greens. Time to have fun!

November Drawing – Day 15, Inking the Bottle

 

Creepy wine!

This is one creepy bottle of wine.

 
Tired again today. We had our monthly Girl Scout troop meeting today. That’s five hours of working with girls on writing scripts, recording audio, adding sound effects, then planning the menu for next month’s cooking badge. Oh, and we made these…

 

Book charms!

What charming little charms!

 
We’ve spent the past couple months learning about media for the “It’s You Story – Tell It!” journey in Girl Scouts. The charms were our way of celebrating finishing that project.

But now I’m dead so I’m going to bed. More drawing tomorrow, I promise!

November Drawing – Day 13, A-Maze-ing Hair and a Bottle

 

Mermaid hair!

Can you find your way through all this hair?

 
I had not intended to add this much detail to her hair, but things kind of got away from me. I expect it will take me the rest of this month to finish the hair and maybe add some details to the dress. I have no idea what I’m doing with the dress yet, but I’ll figure it out!

Meanwhile, I’ve exported the Pirate Queen as an SVG file so I can open it up and tweak it in Corel Draw. And while I do that in the background, I’ve started sketching out something new…

 

Creepy bottle!

No, it’s not a dead plant!

 
This is something inspired by a tweet that came up in a conversation about Lovecraft. I’ve been reading an anthology of Lovecraft at bedtime, and I made a comment about how I find Lovecraft to be the perfect bedtime read because his stories are both creepy and soothing at the same time, and a friend of mine mentioned that would be the perfect description of a very evil bottle of wine. So that’s what I’m drawing, an evil Lovecraftian bottle of wine. Enjoy!

November Drawing – Day 11, Details, Details

I’ve gotten all the line art and base colors done on both the Pirate Queen and the Mermaid drawings, so now I’m working on the details. Lots and lots of details.

First, the Pirate Queen…

 

Pirate Queen!

Her tentacles need spots!!

 
Again, this one is drawn in Concepts on my iPad. I’ve mainly used the pen tool and the filled stroke tool. I’ve been trying to stick to a limited color palette, and I think this one works pretty well.

Now for the Mermaid!

 

Mermaid haid!

I love drawing flowing hair in water.

 
The Mermaid is being drawn in InkPad for the iPad. Again, InkPad is a free app, and one of the best vector apps around. I’m using the brush tool to draw the ink lines and the shapes of the shading, similar to the way I use the filled stroke tool in Concepts. The difference here is that I can adjust each point on the curves of the shapes to get exactly what I want.

So there are two different vector drawings in two different vector apps that are still rather similar but different. Differently similar. You know what I mean. Whatever.

November Drawing – Day 10, the Pirate Queen, plus a robot for coloring!

 

Color me!

If you like robots, here’s one you can color!

 
So the above robot is based on a doodle I did a few years ago. I love drawing robots, especially rusty, broken ones. With this guy, I included some of the highlights and shading, but you can add your ownif you like.

Anyway, once I got this guy done, I did more work on the pirate queen.

 

Pirate Queen!

Tentacles!!

 
I love how this is turning out, especially since Concepts has done yet another update, and now I finally know how to set up custom colors. I still have a lot more work to do on this one, but when it’s done, I think I’ll upload it to Society 6 as a print and maybe as a throw pillow or mug or something else.

Anyway, I hope you like both pictures, and let me know if you color the robot!