I’ve been doing daily drawings over on Twitter again, and while I’m trying not to post them here for fear of being redundant, this one I feel merits a bit o’ blogging.

It’s been a long, long time since I did anything with realism.. Got so caught up in my silly noodle-arm people I forgot how much I used to love portraiture! So after watching the new Sherlock show (SO excellent, by the way) and becoming enamored with the dynamics of Benedict Cumberbatch’s face (SERIOUSLY THAT IS THE ACTOR’S NAME. WHAT) I decided I’d see where my portraiture skills are at!

And here they are. I’m pretty happy with this, but I see I still do that boring thing with skin tones and purple. So I guess I’ll have to try again and push myself further. And I need to work on how I render hair.

Funny how the littlest exercises can turn into your favorite works, eh?

This was just meant to be a simple rebound off a “your favorite video game” piece on dribbble. I wanted to get it done fast and I tried out something I haven’t really done before – leaving my sketch in and painting over it. I absolutely LOVE how it turned out! It let me be looser and quicker and I think the final just looks so bold and energetic compared to my usual work. Definitely going to mess around with this more!

The piece is of Raz from Psychonauts, my favorite game of all time. (Though recently Alice: Madness Returns is seriously impressing me..) Not only is it hilarious and really fun to play (over and over…), the art direction is just fantastic. That game made me reconsider how I approach color and character design.. and I guess I’m still getting inspiration from it. :)

This is the finished illustration from my line width tutorial! I’m not going to lie – it is one of my favorite things I have done in ages.

Also just going to throw this out there-
I did a bit of fanart for my favorite show, Misfits. I do not love how it turned out (I guess I find it generic?) but I was excited to play with the line width tool some more.

Long time no blog! Been so busy with my new job. (I get to draw AT WORK! but it makes me not want to draw at home!)

But at work the other day I stumbled across a new tool that has COMPLETELY changed the way I view Adobe Illustrator and making lineart. I now bequeath this knowledge to you!

TUTORIAL AHOY!

Alright guys, I hate inking. In photoshop, my lines look wobbly no matter what I do, no matter how many times I go over it, if I use a fancy tablet, if I tape paper on it, blah blah. It’s never right.

I thought the pressure-sensitive brush tool in illustrator would make this better. It doesn’t. Sure, it smooths my lines out, but it also takes out all the character in my drawings. They look mushy, imprecise. I can’t control the line width very well, either – I have to really exaggerate my strokes to get at all the look I want, and it’s still not quite right.

Enter: the line width tool. HOLY CRAP YOU GUYS. This tool lets you draw out your lines with the pen or pencil tool (I prefer the pen tool, personally – more control once you know how to use it) and then go back and adjust the width all along the line so it’s how you want it. I should not be allowed this much control over my artwork!

If that doesn’t make sense, it’s ok. I made pictures!

First I made a beautiful drawing in photoshop! (Totally inspired by OOH, GIRL, which fills me with delight.)

Then I turned down the opacity and started tracing the lines with the pen tool. If you do not know how to use the pen tool, you should learn. It really takes less time than the pencil tool once you’ve got it down. But if you don’t have wobble-hand like me and the pencil gives you nice results, then use that if you like!

Ok it’s inked enough for now. Yes, I know it looks ridiculous. Let me introduce you to our new friend, though:

You never would have guessed that such a silly icon would be so useful, huh? Yet IT IS THE BEST LET ME TELL YOU.

Ok, here I’ve selected that tool, and then grabbed a spot on my line. (It doesn’t have the be a point already, you can pick anywhere.) Then I dragged a little to the side… (this can be finicky, it helps to zoom in a lot.)

And voila! The line has variation!

Here I’ve done a bit more, but I don’t like how fat the end of that line is. So I grab the end with my width tool..

And I make it thinner! Yay! But I don’t like the way it’s making so MUCH of the line thinner..

So I use my width tool on a point close to the tip to widen the line again!

And I do that a bunch more until I’m done inking! You can click the image to see more close up the quality of lines you can get this way. And this was just a quicky tutorial drawing!

Now, it does take a while to use this method – but it’s not nearly so fiddly as you think. And, in my opinion, it is completely worth it. The level of control you have over your final art is just ridiculous. And remember, they’re all pen lines, so you can tweak and move the lines themselves even as your adjusting their thickness.

This has opened an entire new world of working, for me. I’ve avoided lines and things with lineart, or disliked my lineart, for YEARS. Now I can’t wait to do comics and silly drawings and experiment with line and get even better with this tool!

I meant to post this sooner, but I was hoping to have a cute drawing to go with it.. ain’t happening!

The blog is on a temporary hiatus while I move ACROSS THE COUNTRY!

I got a new full-time job in Roanoke, VA, which I’m sure I will talk about more later. Hopefully semi-regular posting can begin again in mid-october, november at the latest.

See you all on the other side!

I love fall. So much! I used to love the feeling of new beginnings from going back to school… but now I am not going back to school. Which is a weird thing.

So anyway, I have actually been busy working on art for various projects that I can’t post yet. (How exciting is THAT?) But I felt bad for not having anything to put on the blog, and I really liked miss Chelsey Holeman’s doodle from the other day, so I thought I’d do a little “back to school” drawing.

I recently purchased and read Anya’s Ghost, so I’ve been totally inspired by Vera Brosgol’s art. So, more of those pencily lines I was messing with.

So.. I don’t really like drawing very much. I mean, sketching is kinda fun when there’s no pressure, but I don’t find much joy in doing exquisitely detailed drawings anymore. I like painting them! Or getting the color in there in whatever form. I like finishing stuff, is what it is. So sometimes (only on personal work, I swear!) I kinda .. jump ahead of myself and work from really, horrendously loose sketches. I DO IT LIVE!

Another one done! This here be the cook for the sky pirates. I see her as gran’s gran – in this case a bit more typical of an old lady. (But only a bit!)

This one was a bit of a struggle, but of course I neglected to take any progress shots because I AM TERRIBLE. I will do better next time, I promise! Basically, I tried for a simple, head on, symmetrical composition. I disliked it. So I tilted the granny and the background, and now I’m pretty happy with it!

And I want a cookie.

Finally got the sequential art page up!

Along with that I posted 2 comics that I did during school and never got up on the blog or anything. Well, better late than never, eh?

Today I’m going to talk about Perfect, a short comic I did about body image issues. I honestly don’t remember much about the assignment itself – I think it was a “do whatever you want as long as you talk about yourself” sort of deal.. and I wanted to talk about how I’ve come to accept and love my body, even though I have a lot of features that society would consider “flaws.”

It ended up morphing into something a little different after I had what I thought was an unrelated conversation with my mom. She was injured in a car accident when she was a little younger than I am now, and it left a lasting impact on her body. (Details in the comic.) I was asking her about how she feels about all that now, and she told me she’s really come to accept it as part of who she is. That lead to more conversations, and then eventually a shift in the whole focus of the comic.

I also got to hear a lot about my mom that I’d never known before. I saw pictures of her from around the time of the accident, and I got to see notes that she wrote in the ICU right after the accident itself. It was pretty cool to get to learn all that about her.

Art-wise, this was my second try in inking a comic in illustrator. There are parts I think are very successful, and other parts that are .. less so. Illustrator can do lovely things to lineart, but it can also make it clunky and imprecise. I’m still learning how to deal with it. (And trying to figure out if it really works better for me than Photoshop.) I am, however, very very happy with the way I did the colors. :)

So anyway, if you want to read the full thing, click on over here and check it out.

Eli Perez on Dribbble posed the question, “what do you think about while you’re working?” Well you know what I think about? I think about FOOOOOOD. I think about what I get to eat when I’m done working. I think about what I just ate. I think about what I’m going to make for dinner tomorrow. I think about that great thing I ate last week. I. Like. Food.

So I made an illustration of me thinkin’ about some of my favorite things to eat! Included are: sweet tea, samosas, butter chicken, donuts, chinese takeout, cheesecake, mac and cheese, braunschweiger, frozen custard, pretzel buns, pho, tuna subs, lumpia, cheese curds, aaand chocolate.

The irony is, I got so into this illustration that I actually haven’t eaten anything all day!