Challenges – Page 10 – The Cynical Woman Website

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

By Cynical Woman November 13, 2015 November 13, 2015 Art, Challenges, Creative Challenges, Digital Painting, Drawing, Vector

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…

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!

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November Drawing – Day 12, Sooooooo Many Details…

By Cynical Woman November 12, 2015 November 12, 2015 Art, Challenges, Creative Challenges, Digital Painting, Drawing, Vector

Is it done yet? I can’t tell!

I think there’s one or two last details I still want to add, but I don’t know how much more my iPad can take. Concepts is still performing pretty well, but this drawing is definitely slowing it down.

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November Drawing – Day 11, Details, Details

By Cynical Woman November 11, 2015 November 11, 2015 Art, Challenges, Creative Challenges, Digital Painting, Drawing, Uncategorized, Vector

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…

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!

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.

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

By Cynical Woman November 10, 2015 November 10, 2015 Art, Challenges, Creative Challenges, Digital Painting, Drawing, Vector

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.

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!

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November Drawing – Day 09, Pirate Queen and Mushroom in Color!

By Cynical Woman November 9, 2015 November 9, 2015 Art, Challenges, Creative Challenges, Digital Painting, Drawing, Vector

Here’s today’s work!

At this point, I’m slowly adding details like lip stick and scaly spots

I’ll get to the background (or are they foreground?) elements soon. Not sure yet how I’ll handle those.

Meanwhile, someone took me up on my offer to color the mushroom I posted a couple days back!

Hello! I’m psychadelic!

Yeah baby! Isn’t he gorgeous?! This guy was colored by one of my very best friends, Patricia, and it makes me very happy to see her colors on my line art! And it inspires me to do another coloring picture. I have an idea of what to do, so come back tomorrow to see what it is!

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November Drawing – Day 08, Definitely a Pirate Queen!

By Cynical Woman November 8, 2015 November 8, 2015 Art, Challenges, Creative Challenges, Digital Painting, Drawing, Uncategorized, Vector

She’s definitely a pirate queen… an UNDEAD pirate queen!

I’ve been having way too much fun playing with the colors on this one. The color palette is limited to Copic colors, with no way of mixing your own colors, but that’s still a pretty big palette, and since I can EXPORT THIS IMAGE IN SVG, I can touch up the colors in CorelDraw. Yay!

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November Drawing – Day 07, Pirate Queen of Hearts?

By Cynical Woman November 7, 2015 November 7, 2015 Art, Challenges, Creative Challenges, Digital Painting, Drawing, Uncategorized, Vector

I don’t know who she is yet, but maybe she’s a pirate queen.

I’m playing around in Concepts again today. They did a big update yesterday and added a new tool – the filled stroke tool. This tool does the same thing I’ve been doing with the brush tool in InkPad – tracing a shape and leaving a filled area with no outline around it. It’s great for setting up larger filled shapes too, like the ones in this drawing…

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!

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November Drawing – Day 06, the Mermaid and her Sailor

By Cynical Woman November 6, 2015 November 6, 2015 Art, Challenges, Creative Challenges, Uncategorized, Vector

So I finished up the “inking” on the mermaid drawing, and here’s a view of what I got done today!

Look! The mermaid has a friend!

I like my mermaids to be creepy and sort of predatory, and this one definitely fits the bill! I started doing more work on the colors as well, playing around with a color scheme. I’m not entirely happy with the colors of the dress yet, but I’ll get there.

No mushroom today, but I may do more drawing tonight in Concepts and post that tomorrow 🙂

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November Drawing – Day 05, How would you color this mushroom?

By Cynical Woman November 5, 2015 November 5, 2015 Art, Challenges, Coloring page, Creative Challenges, Digital Painting, Drawing, Vector

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?

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November Drawing – Day 04, Mushrooms and Mermaids

By Cynical Woman November 4, 2015 November 4, 2015 Art, Challenges, Creative Challenges, Digital Painting, Doodles, Vector

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…

In addition to working on the ink lines (which are actually made by using the brush tool to trace shapes instead of lines over the pencil drawing), I did a bit more work on the colors.

Colors with shading andhighlights.

I’ve added some highlights and started work on the hair. I like how I can control the shapes of both the colors and the lines. I also like that I have a dropper to pick up the colors I’ve used so I don’t have to keep hunting for them in a color palette as I work.

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!

To get a line with variable width in Concepts, I have to set the pen tools to the smallest line width setting. Unfortunately, this doesn’t look very good on large images (at least to my eyes), so I drew a small box on the canvas and zoomed in to do this drawing. Now this is a style I like – shaky, creepy lines that aren’t too big and aren’t too small, that have a nice amount of line width variation. And best of all, I get to color this image the way I like, because Concepts doesn’t let me draw a shape for the fill or let me use a fill bucket. I get to color my drawing like it’s a digital coloring book page!

(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!