Sketch Diary: Lips iterative practice

This was a good challenge and I ended up needing to look at references for ideas on some of them. That first one, top left, is definitely my go to look. But I'm a big fan of the middle one, second row, and of the bottom left one, last row.

with love - M

Sketch Diary: Inktober Day 22 - Whispy hair and purple lips

So I've been watching a lot of Artwork by Christopher Cayco videos lately so I've been all about the freehand brush pen drawings. Be sure to check out his live drawings at least. It's like watching a wizard do magic on paper, to me anyway hah.

How it works is you need some kind of ink and brush - brush pens are definitely easier than using raw ink and brushes. Or at least cleaner and takes up less space. Cuz for raw ink you need the ink well, some kind of palette, some kind of towel, glass of water, brushes, and heavy duty paper. Anyway, you have your brush and ink and then you just draw! No pre-sketching in pencil. Just brush to paper and go. I haven't drawn in straight ink like that in ages and it was so freeing and fun and I felt like my wrist was opening up more. Super nice. Highly recommended.

with love - M

Sketch Diary: Big hair, big lips, and first go with Krita

OH YEAH. Now we're talking. Finally found a painting program that actually works with my super old Wacom tablet, Intuous 2. I had just about given up and was looking to buy a new drawing tablet this year because I miss painting digitally. Thankfully, another artsy friend (Nathalie) introduced me to Krita, a wonderful FREE paint program.

Krita appears to be open source and already, for me, has far surpassed Gimp. I never got the hang of Gimp, too many things were different from Photoshop and I had grown up on photoshop, I even use it in my career so it's a daily thing for me. But I don't really like Photoshop for painting. I like things like Open Canvas and Sai much more. So when I upgraded to Windows 7 and the sensitivity stopped working for my Wacom pen, I thought all was lost.

For some crazy reason, Krita works and works really well. To do the sketch above, all I did was install the program, open a new document, didn't change any settings or preferences, and sat down for 15 minutes. This is just the basic brushes setting so I CAN NOT WAIT to try the specialty brushes. After my 15 minute doodle, I immediately went back to the download page for Krita and made a donation because hot damn, this program is nice.

After I spend some more time with it, I'll do a more in depth review of Krita. I have high hopes. Have you tried it yet? What were your thoughts on it? What's your fav paint program?

Nathalie and I are hoping to figure out how to do co-op painting via Krita but if that's not a thing, I hope the developers can figure that out because this will be the perfect program for that. Also, live stream painting? I think it already has a record feature but not sure how good it is yet.

with love - M

Sketch Diary: Lips, Deadpools, and a Finn

All the doodles. I don't usually do cartoony styled characters. They're hard... you can do 'anything' with the proportions and joints don't exists but... they have their own rules and I don't have a lot of practice with them. But still fun.

with love - M

Sketch Diary: Lips and floating heads

As an art student, I got really drilled about making sure I stayed away from just drawing floating heads. I had a pretty cool illustration professor (looking at you Mr. Rea) who had us keep a real sketch book for class. We had to draw A LOT. More than I was used to, for sure, at the time. I think we had to draw a sketch a day and each week we'd have to hand over our sketch books to be checked as part of our overall grade for the class. He rarely critiqued the sketch books heavily, that wasn't the point of them, but he did have a particular grudge against floating heads. It's a common issue with many artists - incomplete drawings.

Thanks to his light pushing to stop doing that, I started to finish the sketches as much as I could. Heads always had at least shoulders attached to it, backgrounds started to happen, though very primitive and simple. One of my dreams has always been to illustrate for books. But I know that's not going to happen without at least a basic understanding of backgrounds and landscapes. So whenever you see a sketch of mine that has a background of some kind, get excited with me because it's a big deal!

Note: it is ABSOLUTELY ok to have sketches like the one above. That's why it's a sketch. If you want to just draw eyes or lips or hands or whatever from here till the end of time, have at it! Just remember your teachers want you to grow and try different things so they're going to pressure you to constantly step outside of your comfort zone in your creations. Don't be upset at them, that's their job. Your job is to learn from them and decide for yourself what practices you want to keep or discard. There are bad teachers out there so don't take it all as gospel. Use your head.

With love - M

Sketch Diary: Almost kiss, nose nuzzle

D'awww. Aren't they just the cutest? AREN'T THEY?! No, they're not. The figure on the right has weird facial dimensions that I couldn't reconcile... or was to lazy to reconcile. Bagh.

with love - M

Sketch Diary: Pouty lips... but why?

Been a while! And this sketch has some obvious rust on it. But I only want to leave out the absolute worst ones. I feel like if I try to pretend the mediocre sketches don't exist, it makes the really good ones less special. And every not-so-awesome idea tends to be stepping stone on the way to something bigger and better, right?

Things have been busy lately with plenty of work, lots of fun after hours stuff, and a dash of drama. Here's to hoping for the work to continue but maybe a bit more time for sketching.

With love - M

Sketch Diary: TBT - weird proportions face

A little throwback sketch from November of 2009.

Not a clue what I was going for with this sketch. Most likely it's one of those 'I don't know what to draw....' and then the pencil just sort of goes 'blargesndofpaos' all over the page until I feel I've gotten whatever it is out of my system. Sometimes those kinds of sketches turn out something super cool. This was not one of those times. Still, I wanted to share it with you because errors are just as important as successes. Enjoy!

with love - M