NEW WACOM AAAAAAAH! After so many years with my trusty Intuous 2 Wacom, I was gifted a glorious Wacom Pro for my 11 year anniversary with Joel. He knows the way to my heart... hah! Well this was the first sketch on the new Wacom. The sensitive takes some getting used to, I keep turning it up and down and messing with the hardness and opacity levels etc. But I'll figure it out. I was surprised I didn't goof up the proportions more in this, honestly. I was having the darnedest time zooming in and out all the time. But I found myself sticking around 100% zoom for the most part.
Joel was cute though - he says 'Nice!... No color?' and this was after me having like 2 hours with the new Wacom and I was like 'DUDE do you know how long it can take to color stuff!? It took me over an hour just to do the rough sketch lol'. I think he was misled cuz he's seen me do copic or watercolor drawings that take like 30 minutes to an hour (simple portraits) and assumed it was the same. Maybe for the pros who know all the tricks and have their hot keys and such setup in just the right way. But me? I gotta relearn how to use layers even hah. But I'm excited to do so.
Old school! And by old school I mean high school senior portrait class project circa 2004/05. I still remember how much of a challenge this project was for me. It was a great process.
I had to sit and pose in this little photo studio the teacher had setup in the basement of the school and let someone take portrait shots of me. Then I took the film (not digital) and processed it myself, darkroom and all. Then made a print of several of the photos, all myself. And finally, pick one and start painting a monochromatic piece in acrylics. The teacher recommended black and grey tones to make it easier (since the photos were black and white) but said we could do any color... so I had to do purple. Then I had to map the light values and make a sample palette strip that had an example of a gradient from lightest to darkest so I didn't get confused while painting.
Wow, it was really a lot for a single project. I'm still really proud of it, regardless of the oddness of some things in it. I think it was a great example of all that I had learned in that class and with that teacher (the lovely Mrs. Lacy XOXO). Maybe this would be a good project to do a redo of in digital form with my wacom, see how much I've changed. Maybe take a new self portrait photo... hmmmm.
Second quicky sketch with the Krita paint program. Tis glorious. The paint program, not the sketch haha. The sketch is fine. I was trying to do something.... else with that chin angle, didn't quite work out so I just went with it. Sometimes I find myself having conversations with my drawings. 'Oh, I'm sorry, you wanted to be facing forward, not tilted to the left? My bad. I didn't realize you felt so strongly about it.' Hence his shady side eye. So much shade.
This was sketched while listening/watching to a Fred's Voice ASMR video on the youtubes. Specifically the 'rude English gentleman' bits. Cracks me up. But of course, it also relaxes me. If you've never tried ASMR, I highly recommend it. For me, it's a cross been meditation and a brain massage. I have a strong response to it, though. I get all tingly. Not everyone does. And not everyone responds well to intimate personal attention either, I recently found out. And that's ok. There's always cute cat videos. Bless the internet and all it's glory.
Fred, if you're seeing this, thanks for the great videos. Keep up the great work for as long as it is fulfilling for you.
Throwback to Christmas 2011. I made a sketch of each of the ALT's in Nanao, at the time, gave them the original colored drawings, and made this collage of all of them. It was a great exercise for me, thinking about each personality and what I imagined them doing. I really tried to keep it light and not be demeaning or anything, tried to let the sketch go where it wanted. At the time, I remember everyone really liking the drawings of themselves. But maybe I'm just remembering it better now that time has passed haha. Ah well, it's better that way.
My favorite is still Nicole's drawing. If you zoom in, you can see the snowmen she's making are actually evil snowmen. I think at the time we joked about building tiny evil looking snowmen on the cars in her apartment complex so it looked like a tiny invasion of evil cannibal snowmen. It was really funny at the time, I swear. There may have been alcohol involved. Almost definitely.
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.
Many many moons ago, I was into the whole scratch-art thing. I never got very good at it but it was fun to do something that wasn't pencil to paper. Also, working in reverse lighting is hard to get use to - like seeing the darkest areas as the blank areas and the light areas as what needs to be scratched out. Highly recommend to help you learn lighting values as a young artist.
This piece is from highschool so ... 2004 maybe? Anyway, it's old. But I still like it. I used a page I clipped out of a Vogue magazine as a reference. Wish I still had it so I could show a side by side comparison. If any body finds it, like it to me, yeah?
Thank you, Joel, for encouraging me to go to the Josei panel at Zenkaikon 2016 instead of whatever the other option was at the time. I remember being like 'Idk if I'll be into the Josei panel... they'll probably just talk about dreamy unrealistic men and unrealistic expectations in relationships etc.'. So glad I was wrong. Was a pretty good panel (gotta a little sleepy towards the end but it was early in the day) and learned about a bunch of really interesting sounding manga and anime. Like the one where the main character is a secretary type woman by day and a call girl by night but the lovers she brings home are then fed by her to her pet alligator... YES PLEASE. Of course not all josei style stories are like that and that's the point. Some are milder, more slice of life style and others are more fantastical. The point is simply that Josei offers something for the mature female oriented audience.
Explain - you've got shojo for young girls, shonen for young boys, seinen for young men (think 15-24), and of course josei for adult women. Evidently there's also kodomomuke for kiddies that's supposedly fairly gender neutral. Check out this kotaku article for some more info.
If you're looking for something to check out, one of my current favorite josei type things at the moment is Princess Jellyfish.
So to anyone not familiar, I think I pulled this from Escaflowne styled drawing. I say 'I think' because I was actually thinking about Escaflowne at the time... it just sort of came out that way, like auto-writing. Then later I looked at the sketch again and was like heeeeeey wait a secooooond... HAH. It's funny how things you loved as a young person peek through your subconscious well into adulthood.
with love - M
Edit: was NOT actually thinking about Escaflowne. See people, this is why proofers are so important (love you Kyle, light of my design life).
I never sketch Baku, my Akita ball of fluff. I don't know why. He's the perfect practice model. He sleeps maybe half the day away so it's easy to get him at a moment where he won't be moving much for at least 30 minutes. But I have a hard time with anatomy, animal especially because it's more foreign. This sketch was a product of my new habit of leaving sketchbooks around the house so I don't have any excuse not to draw.
Thought the odd proportions are becoming more glaring as time rolls on, I still really like this. I had (have?) no clue what I was doing with my watercolors. No training, no practice - this WAS the practice hah. This piece taught me a lot. Still feels soft and warm to me and I feel happy when I look at it. Isn't that the point?
Hah. This neck. Love it. Love to hate it. Still like the over all sketch though. That little tuft of bangs in the front, the HUGE eyes. Whatever. At least I sketched hah.
So last year I bought a cute little hard back sketch book and took it with me to Zenkaikon 2015, an anime/game/all the things convention in Lancaster, PA. Scrawled this little ditty while waiting for one of the panels. That's me up top, Joel on the right, and Kyle hanging down below. The three of us did the Con again this year, 2016, and it was fabulous. Really, they did a great job. I've got grandiose plans of doing my own panel next year and having a table at the artist alley... we'll see. I've always wanted to do these things, give something back to a community that has given me support, camaraderie, and inspiration over the years. Either way, I'll be back again next year for sure. Lancaster is such a cute town to have it in, too. Reasonably priced, close to home, win win.
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.
You know how sometimes you start sketching and eye, ya know, just for the sake of an eye. And before you know it, there's a whole oddly proportioned face is starting back at you?! Madness.
I started 'hiding' little mini sketch books around the house... because my house is too big... and I'm terribly lazy. SHHHHHHH my methods are working. I feel less pressure whilst doodling when I can just grab the nearest paper product and scratch at it for a bit. The alternative is to keep carrying a single sketchbook around the house with me.
Yeah! Keeping up with the sketch a day thing kinda! This was back in December when I first started loosening up my hand to prepare for a sketch a day mentality. I'm still not there yet but it's definitely more frequently which means I'm a much happier camper. Look how loose those lines are! SO LOOSE. What I was going for in this sketch... I couldn't begin to tell you. Let's just love it for what it is and move on.
As some may know, I have always loved portraits. It's my 'go to' thing to draw. So when I was browsing a National Geographic and saw this beauty, I couldn't resist. It was an article about women and families in a Mormon community. And though the article itself was a bit dark (talked about very young -read illegal- brides, unhealthy relationships, children not receiving much education opportunities, etc) this photo really shined for me. Like this girl/woman was finding her own star, her own fire with which to guide herself and her family even if her situation was less than ideal. Her eyes just glowed with life and a will to persevere. I truly hope that she was able to find fulfillment in life.
Man... this sketch is super old. Still one of my absolute favorites. When was the last time I did an IRL sketch of a person? Or even just a portrait of someone from a photo like this was? Gotta get on that.
Taking me back! I still get good feels from looking at this piece and remembering how cool I felt while painting it. They sketch alone, I thought, was pretty awesome for my skills at the time and then the actual execution of the colors was quite exhilarating. I think this was 2010 or there abouts. Maybe a good one to hold onto for an OC. I'm so bad at creating original characters... correction, I make them all the time but I very quickly move on to the next one. I should commit to one, at least.
So this was one of my 'just starting out' watercolor pieces. I had (and still have...) no clue what I was doing. I was just putting brush to paper and seeing what happened. Man... it's really making me miss doing watercolors. Just one more reason to get my craft/art/sewing/book/misc room cleaned up so I can get pack into these things again. I certainly don't have to have my art table to paint but it sure makes things easier and more enticing. It's almost there! Just a couple more big projects to finish and it'll be ready for war.
What does it mean to be an artist? I feel like I got the sensation of it when sketching this girl. I was doing all the things: using my imagination, drawing out in the open (where could watch if they wanted), feeling at peace, and allowing the flow of the sketch to happen instead of forcing it. This all works together in me to create this feeling of accomplishment. Not because of the final outcome (the sketch itself) but because of how I got there. The experience of drawing the sketch was fulfilling. I think that's what in artist is: someone who is fulfilled by the act of the craft they are practicing.
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.
Being in a more corporate setting at work, I don't usually have time to sketch. I usually have, you know, work to do. But sometimes we have meetings or the work is slow in getting to my department (production and design) so we get moments of pause. These figures were done during one such meeting. Don't worry, the meeting didn't really hold useful information for me. The other folks there were very irritated that we were forced to be there at all and when it ran late, folks started leaving lol. I mean, I don't blame them, time is precious.
Anyway, this. I need to do more of this. Quick, rough ideas. Then when I find something I like, I can sit down and rebuild it, develop it further. Instead of getting hung up on an ok sketch and working it through for an hour and then getting frustrated because it's not going where I thought it was going because really, it wasn't a great sketch to begin with. And that's ok. When sketching more frequently, it's easier to hold onto only the ones that move me and just thank the others for the service they provided... and let them go.
Whoa 2008? Taking me back. I remember seeing one or two episodes of Skins and immediately falling in love with Cassie's face. Those teeth are just the CUTEST. I don't know how much justice I'm doing her here... but I still love this sketch. It's quite large, maybe 18 by 24 inches or something crazy. I was really into drawing on big sheets of paper at the time. I was also still in love with my pastels. Ah soft pastels. So messy but so pretty. I should do a re-do and see if I still got the skillz.
If you aren't a big fan of TED talks, that's totally fine, but if you're a fan of drawing, learning, or gaining new perspectives then give this video a shot. It's interactive so have paper and pen ready.
When I came across this video, I was looking for other artists to watch for speed painting and drawing tips and tricks, etc. I was in a bit of a rut (this happens with some regularity) and in order to recharge my creative juices, I have a long list of things I can do.
If I'm restless physically, I might dance or sing or go for a walk at a park. If I'm tired and downtrodden, I might watch a good movie with lots of color and vibrancy (literally or figuratively). If I'm sitting there staring at my sketchpad and the inspiration just won't come, I turn to videos like the one above as if it were a giant bowl of fiber that I needed to consume in order to unblock my creative tubes (haha imagery). My point is, I don't have a single cure-all for my creativity droughts.
You may have noticed that I've been trying to be a bit more regular with my sketching. I tend to post in week long chunks on this blog but in person, I've been actually getting closer and closer to my goal of 'a sketch a day'. This isn't a 'creativity binge' or anything like that. My goal is not to sketch every day for a month or a year and then stop or slow down. This is simply a life goal. I enjoy drawing. It brings me peace. Why then shouldn't I at least attempt to experience it every single day?
The real reason I want to share this video, however, is because I want the world to know that everyone is creative. Everyone can draw, everyone can dance, everyone can sing. These are not special talents given by the grace of God or whomever to a select few people. Yes, not everyone can be a master painter but just like there's only one Michelangelo, there's only one you. You are the same as everyone else in the sense that you also possess that creative fire but you are also unique in that your fire is yours alone. A master artist is simply someone who's taken the time and energy to hone their craft.
It just makes my heart hurt to have people look at my art and say something like "Wow that's so cool!" followed immediately by "I could never do that..." as if they think they're complementing me further with that second comment when in fact they're merely debasing themselves for no one's benefit. You can love an artists work while still loving yourself and your own accomplishments.
Story time: I was babysitting a 5 year old once that understood this concept wholly and completely. We were drawing together with crayons (dragons if I remember correctly) and when we were done, we showed each other our drawings. She loved my dragon, especially the pretty scales, she said. She showed me hers and of course I said it was very nice, that I enjoyed the vibrant colors and so on, and because I took her seriously, she beamed and seemed to love the drawing even more. To be clear, she loved that drawing before I said anything. She didn't need my approval to love that dragon she had just created. It was her creation and perhaps for that reason alone, it was worth cherishing.
But as an art teacher (in that moment, that's absolutely the role I or any other parent takes on when spending time with their kids, you're their teacher) I had to make a decision to critique her drawing or to praise it (or both). I decided to praise it alone that time because I had not real criticism to offer that I thought would benefit her that time. Other times, I offered advice with my praise and sometimes she took my advice and sometimes she didn't. She liked it just the way it was and that, for me, was the most wonderful part. We should all strive to grow as individuals but it's ok to stand by yourself, your creations, your achievements and say I'm proud of it as it stands. Of course, you can still value the criticism being offered, that person obviously cares about you in some way otherwise they wouldn't waste their time saying anything at all.
Whoa long post today. Anyway, you do you. And be open to trying new things or new ways of doing old things. You never know how much it could help you grow until you try it.
See below for my results from the video. The real results are still echoing every time I put pen to paper.
Welp... I told myself I was going to post every sketch... Guh. Here's a great example of a sketch that I used to just hide away in a cabinet or maybe even thrown away because it just didn't turn out well. I don't usually have big plans when I start sketching, I like to just let it take me wherever. But I think I was fighting with myself in this one. I wanted to do something particular and my subconscious just didn't agree.
I sketched this right after watching a special video about how everyone can draw. I just kept the pen in my hand after the practice doodles and did another quick sketch while the feeling of it was still in my mind. I'm not particularly in love with this sketch but I do admire the fact that it's in pen only, no pencil so no erasing. All the 'happy little accidents', as Bob Ross says, are there for all to see.
Over that last couple years I've definitely gotten in to the habit of erasing less but when it's in pen there's a whole other level of permanence happening that can be very freeing. What's there is there and all I can do is keep moving forward with the drawing or stop. There's no going back. Much like life, eh?
