Friends Forever

I've been getting back into colored pencil a little bit. I forgot how much I love those things.

Anyway this is what I imagine it would be like if the Loch Ness Monster and a dodo met and could be best friends and talk about being genetically inept and cumbersome.

Dogleslugs

"Wow, Katie, I wish I knew what it looked like inside your imagination," Says nobody ever. But if they did, this would more or less be the image I'd direct them to in response.

In addition to being the most brainless thing I've painted in recent memory, this is also kind of a color study inspired by a piece by Sam Nielson, who is amazingly talented and you should check out his work.

Here's a little test animation of this blob eating an apple. It's kind of cute. I think the stupid built in Flash codec I used on export made everything kind of short and fat (like, shorter and fatter than I already draw things) so I'll fix that later probably.

Casting MaGiC!!11

I've got this bust of Socrates on my desk that I draw sometimes when I can't think of anything else art-related to do. The drawings were all pretty grim at first but I found something that really helped:

 I got this book called "Classical Drawing Atelier" for my birthday which, in the few pages in the very back of the book that have any sort of actionable instructions for improving your artwork, outlines this method of cast drawing (but I think it can kind of be applied to any kind of observational drawing) in which the main forms are blocked in with a bunch of intersecting lines. Like, the line that defines the back of this sculpture's neck, if followed through, can define his browline as well. It's a lot easier to keep features positioned correctly in relation to each other this way than my own homemade method, which involves drawing a bunch of circles and stuff ontop of each other until they sort of resemble a face and then hatching out details from there.

 Y'all should give it a try!

Tommy Lee Jones-- Progress!

I feel like I never post anything finished on this blog, but here you go. I've got about a zillion personal projects going on at once and it helps me to stay motivated if I get to post something on here every once in a while even if it's not in any real state of completion.

So I was SUPER PROUD of myself working on this and then I flipped it to a mirror image in Photoshop and realized that it's pretty lopsided and wonky and doesn't look as much like him as I thought it did.

It's funny how your brain plays tricks on you-- the longer you stare at a piece of art the more your thoughts and preconceptions start constructing a pair of proverbial artistic beer goggles that sort of blind you to what's actually going on. Sometimes it takes looking at a piece in a mirror to shake it off and see things for what they are.

Which, actually, sounds like some convoluted metaphor for life. I didn't mean it that way, but if you got a sudden philosophical urge back there I think you should just run with it.

Ron Swanson

5 min sketch from tonight.

Life Drawing

Norman Rockwell master study progress. 1 hr total so far.

Caricatures!

So I've been playing around a lot more with caricature. It's proven to be really, really challenging. It's all about hierarchy-- finding the primary, secondary, and tertiary features and keeping the exaggerations within that same structure. But sometimes the hierarchy isn't just in the person's face, but the person's face as compared to other people's faces. I've found that it's really helpful to work from a photo reference that includes multiple people, so you can see that a jawline that doesn't really seem like anything special in isolation is actually comically huge compared to other people's. I started out pretty tragically horrible (And I'll post progress lineups so you can see JUST HOW BAD they were) but now they're sort of getting to the point where you can just about tell who the person is. Not groundbreaking by any means, but I'm kind of proud of how much better they've gotten. (These are Steve Buscemi and Tommy Lee Jones, by the way.)

Cheeks!

So sometimes when I get artist's block I go back to drawing these characters I created when I was twelve. I know their personalities and they're just kind of cute and easy so things flow pretty easily. I wanted to experiment with some color and light with these guys. Pretty pleased about how it turned out considering it started as just a bunch of goofy sketches.

Jackrabbits

Bertram

A mood piece for the short film I've been working on sporadically for a couple months!

DRAGONS!

One day I might post something of actual artistic relevance, but for now y'all get this guy: In my mind his name is Larry Sunshine and he's a glass half full kind of guy. Like, the kind who slips encouraging post-its into the lunchboxes of coworkers and holds eye contact a little too long and wears socks that match his sweater on days he's feeling kicky.

Progress!

Workin more on skintones, here's a progress dump of someone diabolical that I've been working on today.

Life Drawing

So I moved to New York City a few months ago. This is not immediately related to the image posted above, but I think it's going to meander back to relevance in a little while:

I moved here for a new job and to live with my sweet, handsome nerdy boyfriend Michael who is a cinematographer which means he can basically either live here in NYC or Los Angeles. Having just spent four years in Savannah, Georgia, the most magically, confusingly beautiful city in the whole world, it came as a bit of a shock to see piles of garbage ten feet high on all the street corners, brave and savage rat colonies and people urinating in subway stations.

I was elaborately unhappy. And it took about two months of probably unhealthily vivid daydreams of living in a squat little cottage all alone in a flowery, lush, rat-free meadow with not a single Starbucks in sight and multiple instances in the subway where I nearly witnessed small toddlers being lifted away by the King of Rats, I began to figure the whole city thing out:

Sure, New York City is a vile, festering cesspool of neverending filth and constant unwelcome full-body contact with unwashed strangers on any given street corner or bus or subway train or burrito restaurant, but you never ever have to be bored. There's always something to do, and millions of really cool people to do things with! This alone has more or less won me over and I think I'm about a third of the way to earning myself a metaphorical I <3 NY tshirt.

There's stuff to do all the time. Instead of having to drive for 25 minutes to Pankake Palace to eat greasy ham biscuits after everything in downtown Savannah closed at 5 PM, I can walk out my front door, blindfolded and hobbled, turn 45 degrees in any direction and literally run face first into a dining establishment of some kind. And in this city there's a fair chance that they'd be totally into the blindfold and hobbles.

But other than food, one of my favorite things in the whole world is my life drawing sessions every Thursday. Life drawing was a total punishment for me through most of college (breathing charcoal dust in a hot, cramped room drawing a dimply model who makes occasional, uncomfortably long eye contact) but this one is swank, man. It's at a fine establishment called the Society of Illustrators which is bedecked with Leyendeckers and Rockwells and a well-equipped wet bar.

Aside from the crippling inferiority complex which rears its head every time I look at the gorgeous paintings hung on the walls, it's a really nice way to relax. There's always some kind of live band and the models wear cool costumes and they don't even carry toy swords or get half-boners while gazing smolderingly at the misplaced fashion student in the front row!

So anyway, I feel like I've made progress in my sketches, but my favorite ones always come from when I get bored with the real models and start drawing random people in the crowd. This is one of those, onto which I attempted to paint some skin. I will probably get around to scanning some of the real sketches one day, but have not yet due to laziness.

Stanley Does Dinner

Tryin' to animate all subtle-like.

The Wombat King, Again!

And here's the wombat king which I'm calling done for right now because I'm sick of working on it after a year of horrendous missteps and redos. In all of its tangenty, strangely composed, questionably-perspectived glory! I really do like this piece, and it taught me a bunch about photoshop and layer types and different surface treatments and whatnot.

Also I think all my superhuman struggles with this piece paid off because I got that dumb platypus painting below this done in like a day. And that feels pretty good, even if it is just a goofy sketch I painted over. Hurrah and good day :)

Rupert, the Reluctant Platypus

So at my new job my mighty ignorance of even the most basic Photoshop tasks became glaringly apparent. But my awesome patient coworkers have taught me about masks! And keyboard shortcuts! And basic organizational skills! It's been a wild ride and I think it deserves its own blog post pretty soon someday when it's not midnight but for now here's this platypus I painted yesterday:

Blog on the Range

I spent seven years in a place called Dripping Springs, Texas. We had goats that lived in a barn at our high school, there was a barbecue smoker directly outside the biology hall, and the Ag. teacher had students shoot and bring in dead squirrels for the annual taxidermy fiesta. It was a colorful time in my life, and although it goes against everything I believed when I was actually living there, I sort of miss it from time to time and a faint, mesquite-scented poof of longing emits from the nostalgia lobe of my brain. This sometimes manifests itself in an insatiable desire to draw armadillos. So that's pretty much what I did.

Ancestry!

This guy is the predecessor of the little gargoyle Bertram from a couple of posts back. Although it was fun to paint this on a piece of wood, I realized that it would be an almost complete nightmare to animate all this... stuff! He needed a good dressing down, but I still keep this little piece of board on my bookshelf for company.