Category: Art

Cartoons, webcomics, sketches, 3D art and other artwork.

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Weekly Doodle – Take a look at Five Minute Marvels!

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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!

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Weekly Doodle – Another Robot and Butterfly

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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.

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Daily Doodle – Robot final

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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.

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Daily Doodle – More Robot

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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.

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Daily Doodle – Robot?

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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.

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Random Cartoon! Hair we are on Babylon 5

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The Adventures of Cynical Woman is far from being my first cartoon. I think I’ve been cartooning as long as I can remember. I drew comics for the Collegiate Times at Virginia Tech for four years! I drew several comics on my own, to sell and give away to friends. I’ve always cartooned, I tell you. Then yesterday, while flipping through some old sketch books, I found this cartoon, which for some reason I never showed off anywhere – not online, not in a college newspaper, etc. I still think it’s hysterically funny, but then I was a dyed in the wool Babylon 5 geek 😉

Again, hysterically funny if you’re a B5 geek. If not, I have no idea what you’ll think of it.

Maybe I’ll dig out more old cartoons and start posting them here…

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Just Doodling – Manga portrait

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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!)

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Art Gallery is up!

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I’ve spent a couple of days fussing over how best to put together an art gallery for the new site. The current set-up isn’t exactly perfect, but it does seem to work pretty good right now. I’ve got two categories up so far, including cover art I’ve created for e-book publishers and male pin-ups (if you don’t like looking at naked men, don’t visit that part of the gallery; if you do visit that part of the gallery anyway, don’t come whining to me over what you see there!).

Take a look and let me know what you think – The Cynical Woman Art Gallery!