Beardus Maximus fan art, day 34

This drawing is made to support the sale of the collected trade comic book of PC Weenies, a webcomic by Krishna Sadasivam for Geeks and people who can tolerate them.

That is all.

Drawing cars, version 0.0.5

If you want to draw something well, I found that you have to be emotionally invested into your subject, either because you love the subject, or you love drawing the subject.

If you don’t love the subject, you need to find a way to love drawing the subject, and the most obvious way to do that is to challenge yourself. One of such challenges I try to set myself is to draw each version of a subject a little better than the last version.

But what defines better, you might say? Well, I think better is when I notice details I didn’t see before, or when I’m able to draw a certain curve (or straight line) with confidence. So, it is not so much the result, but the process which I use to see if I have improved.

In short, if you want better drawings, immerse yourself in the process of drawing. Find new techniques or ways of looking at your subject (or what shortcuts to use for a similar result).

At version 0.0.5 of this Dodge Stratus I’m pleased I kind of got the proportions right and I drew most of the details much better than previously (version 0.0.4).

I used a 0.5 mm Pentel blue lead in a mechanical pencil to do the pre-sketching and traced the blue line with regular HB black lead pencil (the wheel wells were filled in with 4B lead pencil).

That is all.

Beardus Maximus fan art, day 33

While everyone is expecting a tablet PC from Apple called “Slate”, in reality Apple has been working in total secrecy on a sleigh, called “Sleigh”. Here is an artist’s impression of a leaked pre-release version of Apple Sleigh.

The dogs aren’t real dogs, but robot-powered iDogs.

This drawing is made to support the sale of the collected trade comic book of PC Weenies, a webcomic by Krishna Sadasivam for Geeks and people who can tolerate them.

Krishna grows a beard in response to a challenge from his fellow comics creators, while he doesn’t like a beard. Read more about it, and how you can support the artist in this post on his blog. For each copy of the trade comic book “Rebootus Maximus” sold through the website Krishna won’t shave for a day. Let him look like a hobo and freak out his wife, who is on family visit for a few months in India.

That is all.

Hoppy comic beta version

I started this comic, and… was stumped when I wanted to tell a story. What story? And what’s up with the crappy dino drawing?

This is going nowhere. Sigh.

I guess I have to come up with a story first. Double sigh.

That is all.

While listening to Digital Flotsam

While listening to the great P.W. Fenton tell his story about the places he grew up in, I drew this portion of a car from imagination. His story was much better than my drawing.

That is all.

Hoppy the Kangaroo

Hoppy is one sick kangaroo. No, I mean he is sick sick.

He sprouted from my imagination after many hours of spending on drawing kangaroos and things that should help me to draw kangaroos. I also had a sick clown, by which I mean an evil looking clown. I’ll leave that one for my eyes only. He was just too sick to show to the public.

That is all.

Beardus Maximus fan art, day 32

The whole day I have been slaving, seemingly in vain, on drawing this kangaroo. It was prompted by a slip of the tongue of Steve Gibson in Security Now 221 (The Elephant in Your Browser), who said Rooboot instead of Reboot. I thought it was funny enough to use in fan art for Beardus Maximus.

I made this drawing in an effort to support the sale of the trade paper back comic book of the web comic PC Weenies. The comic book is called Rebootus Maximus (or should I write Roobootus Maximus?). The comic is about the former systems administrator, then Windows Guru at Bogus Buy (pun on Best Buy) and now employee at Footle (pun on Google) Bob Weiner and his family.

The hard part about drawing the kangaroo from instruction was understanding the text in the book The Art of Animal Drawing by Ken Hultgren, that described what to pay attention to when drawing kangaroos.

Kangaroos

The rib cage is small, and the forelegs hang, rodent-like. Head and ears are similar to that of the deer. The tail is long and pointed and quite full at the base where it is attached to the body. The tail is very important to kangaroos, since they use it as rudder and to help support their weight. Because of its prominence, it will give you a strong line of action, and add sweep to your drawing.

The term “line of action” made no sense to me. What in blazes is that? I tried Googling it, reading in the same book about it. Nothing made ring a bell in me. I’ve spend hours, doodling, sketching, pondering, and still nothing.

Frustrated, and knowing that I had at least try to draw a kangaroo, I tried, and … bam, there it was. Apparently I had understood the concept of action lines. But… I still can’t explain it to you.

Maybe that is the whole point. It is some mysterious term, which is meant to keep you thinking about how to draw your subject, without grasping the meaning of the term you’re supposed to use while drawing. It is the effort of trying to understand which is important, not that you actually understand it, or think you do.

Because you can’t, it’s magic.

In my opinion it does not exist, but it still has an effect on you. If that isn’t a good definition of magic, I don’t know what is. There are more things that don’t exist, but have an effect on us. How about the number zero? If zero things of something exist, it does not exist. Magic!

That is all.

Two modes of looking

While trying to find a productive way to draw a circle freehand, I found these two modes of looking at an object, which may be handy to know about if you are a visual artist.

The human eye has many properties, but two of those are particularly important to artists who tries to do a sketch from memory or use imagination to change an existing image into something else (so when you’re not drawing from life and are mainly looking at your artwork). Those are focus and peripheral vision. Focus is mainly concerned with detail and has no real concept of an overall look. Peripheral vision is all about overall look and has a blurry concept of detail, at best.

Now, an experienced artist will quickly switch between these modes while sketching, and will probably not be aware of them. However, if you don’t yet have years of experience under your belt, knowing that these two modes exist and that you can train them separately, might be a tremendous shortcut in improving the quality of your artwork, or at least, make your sketch have better proportions and look more like what you had in mind (during the previsualization).

Mind you, I’m not an expert on perception and the human visual system by any means. I’m just sharing what I have found to be useful.

Try this experiment:
Draw a spiral in one go, keeping your pencil or marker on the paper, and…
1) only concentrate on the gap between the concentric lines (the whitespace)
2) only concentrate on the outer borders of the shape your drawing

For (2) you probably will need to relax your focus (as if you were looking at a distance object), so your peripheral vision takes over. The idea is to let go of detail in favor of overall shape.

Note: I’ve tried to do this in the image above, and used a drawing program and Wacom tablet. The lag between my hand movement and when it appeared as pixels on the screen was too long to feel comfortable. It was perhaps only a few tenths of a second, but long enough to spoil my concentration. This is one of the reasons I don’t feel comfortable using a computer in the sketching phase, when I’m still exploring a shape.

Mind you, if you doing life drawing, your eyes should be mainly on the subject and only be on the drawing to make sure your pencil, marker or piece of charcoal is still where you imagined it was on the drawing surface. In that drawing mode, your drawing utensil is just registering what your eyes receive.

For some people, this is the only drawing mode they know of and will ever find enjoyable. However, there is also a drawing mode in which the object of your attention is solely in your imagination, and where you only use photos, drawings and even life individuals as a remote image to spark your imagination, and not as an icon you should copy literally (or resembling as closely as your drawing skills are allowing you).

It is this latter group of draftspersons my advice could be useful for.

That is all.

Beardus Maximus fan art, day 31

There is a difference between ecstasy and extacy. The first is real, the second is chemical.

The drawing is made to support the sale of the collected trade comic book of PC Weenies, a webcomic by Krishna Sadasivam for Geeks and people who can tolerate them.

Krishna grows a beard in response to a challenge from his fellow comics creators, while he doesn’t like a beard. Read more about it, and how you can support the artist in this post on his blog. For each copy of the trade comic book “Rebootus Maximus” sold through the website Krishna won’t shave for a day. Let him look like a hobo and freak out his wife, who is on family visit for a few months in India.

That is all.

Comics is not the same as simply drawing from a script

Breaking into comics is hard, even if you can write a draw pretty well. There is more to comics than mere drawing and mere writing. There is also panel  and page design. In fact, that is what makes comics unique from other forms of art.

That is all.

Beardus Maximus fan art, day 30

The weirdest thing I can think of I heard on the Art & Story podcast from Jerzy Drozd. He talked about someone taking great pride in showing off his illustrations of clowns with crucifixes, two things that should never be mixed. It’s just too bizarre to think of.

This fan art is made to help sell an excellent comic book, published as a collected trade of the web comic PC Weenies by Krishna Sadasivam. The comic book is called Rebootus Maximus.

After I sketched the drawing with pencil, I inked with a big brush pen, scanned it, and filled it with flat colors in GIMP. I then exported the flat colors of the hat, jacket and pants each as separate images, which I colored in Art Rage 2, and imported those back into the GIMP image. After some retouch I finally exported it as a TIFF file, which I uploaded to Flickr.

That is all.

I’m here to make you look cool! – part 3

This one was a tough. I had to use a Pentel blue lead in my mechanical pencil to pencil this one out and I guess there are plenty of mistakes I forgot to correct in a quick editing pass before inking.

The idea was prompted by the fact that some people think too long about their comic, and it becomes all stiff and formal. Presumably mainstream American comics is to blame for this, because in that art form, story has become the underdog and it’s all about stunning art. No roughs are allowed by editors, only top-notch artwork.

But sometimes just blurting out a comic is the best you can do, because it’s fresh and rough. That won’t do for a multi-million dollar company with shareholders, of course, but a lone cartoonist can still get away with it.

Oh, in case you were wondering why the comic is on its side, that is a limitation I have with WordPress.com. It forces a 450 pixel wide image size on you. If you want to change that, you have to pay a monthly fee to unlock the style sheet editing feature. You can either turn your head, turn the monitor (or laptop screen), or print it out (go to the largest size on Flickr, download the image, and print it) and read it in the correct position.

That is all.

Beardus Maximus fan art, day 29

A seven-headed monster with heads of Bob Weiner. This only can be a nightmare, or a wish-come-true, whatever you think applies.

This fan art is made to support the sale of the trade paper back comic book of the web comic PC Weenies. The comic book is called Rebootus Maximus.

That is all.

It’s a Molly-Rant

Okay, I’ll admit it. It was Molly Wood, of the Buzz Out Loud podcast.

The strange thing is, though, that I didn’t use the reference photo to create this drawing. It seems that sometimes a reference photo is more of a hinderance than a useful tool.

That is all.

Anonymous female podcaster

After having listened to a popular podcast, I decided to try a caricature of the ranting female host of that podcast. However, it didn’t turn out that well, so I won’t reveal who it is.

I tried to draw a caricature of her anyway, but even that didn’t succeed.

No, I’m not dissing someone by publicizing a bad portraiture.

And if you happen to know who this is supposed to look like, I’m not as bad a draftsman as I thought.

That is all.

Loud Mouth

Thinking of a suitable avatar for twitter, I came up with a loud mouth.

When this Loud Mouth isn’t being loud mouthed, he likes to listen to music.

The basic ideas was to draw a funny character, but also redraw him in another pose, to train myself in drawing characters, and perhaps make the original pose even stronger, because I know him better.

I could write this all down in stories, but that isn’t how my mind works, it seems. I can’t work with abstract ideas. I need some inspirational piece to work off.

That is all.

Messing with Mr. D

Mr. D says: “You! Hey! Don’t mess with me!” That is one messed up drawing.

That is all.

Beardus Maximus fan art, day 28

What one could do with an ellipse other than to use in geometry.

This fan art is made to support the sale of the trade paper back comic book of the web comic PC Weenies. The comic book is called Rebootus Maximus.

The creator of Rebootus Maximus, Krishna Sadasivam, has a small experiment going on, where he will grow a beard for as many days as there are copies of the comic book sold through his website. He called this dare Beardus Maximus, and it is the challenge I’m supporting whole-heartedly by drawing a piece of fan art, either with Bob Weiner in it, or something that has to do with beards (or both).

BTW I used the ellipse construction technique I wrote about earlier today to construct Bob Weiner’s head shape.

That is all.

How to construct an ellipse

I wondered what a good and easy way was to construct an ellipse. I fooled around with formulas and decided (slightly frustrated by the lack of progress) to look it up on Wikipedia, the “source of all knowledge” (wink-wink). As often is the case, those subjects are written in a kind of language normal people don’t speak or write, so I decided to make it simpler to understand for anyone.

Step 1. Draw a rectangle and divide it into four equal parts by drawing two lines, each line parallel to one of the pairs of parallel sides of the rectangle, and equal distance away from each side. The lines should intersect at the center of the rectangle.

You want to give your ellipse some dimension, and a bounding box is the most usual way to do that. Be sure the line parallel to the short sides extends well outside the rectangle.

Step 2. Measure the length of half the short and half the long side of the rectangle.

Mark the length of half the short side as point B on your ruler.

Mark the length of half the long side as point A on your ruler.

Step 3. While changing the angle of the ruler, keep point A on the line parallel to the short sides, and point B on the line parallel to the long sides of the rectangle. Mark on the paper where the zero mark Z is on the ruler.

Mark several points to have enough to connect them into an ellipse.

Step 4. Connect the points into an ellipse.

A steady hand helps. I wish I had one of those.

I have made this tutorial in Art Rage, but if you use a real ruler and real paper, I suggest you use masking tape (or similar) to mark points A and B.

Remember, the long distance on the ruler should be on the short axis of the ellipse, and the shorter distance on the ruler should be on the long axis of the ellipse. The short and long axes of the ellipse are the same as the lines parallel to the short and long sides of the rectangle, respectively.

That is all.

Mark Rudogmatix

As promised some weeks ago, here is Mark Rudolph drawn as Dogmatix.

The process involved massive sketching (until almost all the paper was filled with pencil lead), erasing with kneaded rubber, inking with a brush pen, scanning, threshold filter, and some creative retouch.

The sketching was the hardest to do, because I had to draw in the style of Dogmatix, while putting features of Mark in it. I used Mark’s drawing on the “Don’t Draw Like My Buddy” mug and an image I –ahem– got from the Interwebs of Dogmatix as templates and kept sketching until the result did both justice (in my opinion).

It is hard to explain, because it all happened in the “back of the brain”. Obviously, I have had enough drawing practice in the last few weeks so, that I was able to pull this off.

And it felt “right”.

It’s still crude, though, and would need several months of refinement to approach something what I would call “professional looking”.

That is all.