A long time coming...

So, yeah. Posting on a regular basis is hard when life dumps everything on you at once. Remember that busy week from a about a month ago? It turned into a busy month. On top of that, my spare time has been spent studying up on my French, which is a language, not a style of drawing.

As you can see, my head is filled with Eiffel towers, French book, some French words, and Swiss cheese; because Swiss cheese is easily distinguishable from other cheese and easy to draw.

Before my busy month I promised an explanation regarding the title of the blog. It boils down to this:

An Elf(?)

A dragon (thing) fighting a knight

Wizard. Duh.

What do all these things have in common? Traditional high fantasy stuff  (not pictured: Dwarves, Trolls, Orcs, Gnomes, Good Drawings, Magic, Rings, Amulets, etc). You know what else they have in common? No unicorns. Fantasy is all about being creative. The only things that are not fantasy are things that are real. Simple. Somehow, fantasy became all about Elves, Dwarves, wizards, and dragons shooting fireballs at each other and waging epic wars. While fun concepts, (who doesn't like dragons or fireballs?) this can get boring.

All of this was the subject of a recurring discussion I had with Fiancee, at which point she asked me what happened to all the unicorns? (If you haven't seen The Last Unicorn, you should). Long story short, this blog was going to be about drawing unicorns, and not just fanciful happy-go-lucky unicorns, but also unicorn war-machines, and unicorn airships, and unicorn armies...and now I've fallen prey to the fantasy genre trap. No matter, unicorns are ridiculously hard to draw. Largely because they are horses with horns, and horses are ridiculously hard to draw. Case in point:

This is the same one I drew last time.

Instead of drawing unicorns (I'll work up to it?), I'll be drawing some of my favorite, or at least moderately interesting, scenes from various novels. My next post should include a couple of large birds fighting...maybe.

Pictured: A bird of unknown size.

Faces are Hard

As promised. Another post with more drawings! As you may have guessed, this post is mostly about faces :D

Also, my dog...who is yawning. Which is a perfect segue into faces! (Turns out it wasn't a good segue, but I'm too lazy right now to think of a better transition, so deal with this awkward jump in topic.) A coworker turned me on to a comic called Lackadaisy Cats, which is a brilliantly drawn and fairly well written comic about cat-people. The real gems for me were a small collection of pages describing the artist's methods for drawing expressions and building characters. In short, a face boiled down to a sphere with a couple of lines at the horizontal and vertical center and some features based on those lines. Easy, right?

Sometimes circles are hard, let alone a sphere. Regardless, the cat-people served as inspiration and got me practicing face drawing. My first exercise was to trace a face and get a feel for how they worked... Where should lines go to define features? How big is a mouth? A nose? Eyes? How the fuck do you draw an ear?

 

After I traced I drew the "same face" freehand. I bet you can't even tell which one is which. My freehand drawing started off with the eyes and the smile not matching up, resulting in a very creepy looking face. It still kind of is. Regardless, I just need to practice more.

Bald people are easy. I haven't figured out the whole hair thing. Or ears. Mine always end up looking like they are bent out from the head on the top and bottom. I'll have to work on that. There is more in the pipe, and my next post should help explain the title of my blog! There's a sneak peak down below a:)

~Chris

Busy Week

Turned out to be a pretty crazy week, and I didn't get as much time to draw as I had hoped I would... Oh well. Iggy hurt his paw pretty badly while Fiancee was on lunch, tearing his nail and landing himself a trip to the vet. Seems like he is there every month for something different. It's always something with that dog. Regardless, I came home to find a very drugged out and miserable puppy.

Yeah, yeah. I cheated and used my other sketch of Iggy with a cone around his head and a bandage where his paw was, but you get the idea. He's been moping around all week and running into everything when he has his cone on, which is actually pretty funny. Of course, he has a ton of energy now that it's been a week without any exercise but he still can't go anywhere. Instead, he sits on the couch watching me draw.

This one is a work in progress...actually, all my stuff is a work in progress. I seem to be able to do the loose sketches, but when I tray and draw a contiguous line it ends up looking worse than my stick figure bear. Not sure what to do about that, but I'll figure something out eventually.

While having the dog mope around this week has been lots of fun, the real adventure was last night, when Fiancee, Iggy, and I were headed to my parents house for my older brother's birthday. We were getting close to their house when...

Ed (my Sentra) is currently on life support in a towing lot. The insurance is likely going to have us pull the plug. I guess the old man behind us decided he was too good for stopping... or for sticking around. He drove off right after he hit us, but the guy behind Old Man grabbed the plate number and passed it on. The police were helpful, and the insurance lady was great too. Unfortunately, dealing with both at the same made me want to scream. Deciding whether the police or the insurance should call a tow truck is not something on my to-do list immediately after being hit. Never again. Next time I'll just call the insurance when I'm safely home and comfortable.

Just before the tow truck showed up, Old Man made his triumphant return. And the first thing he asked?

"How long have you been here?"

"About 50 minutes..."
"Oh, that sounds about right. I think I probably hit you."

/facepalm

The police got his statement and followed him to his house to get insurance information. Thankfully I won't have to deal with a hit and run and Old Man's insurance should cover everything. Now we just have to play the waiting game.

Here's hoping next week is less stressful.

~Chris

P.S.
There will be another post with more drawings later this weekend.

What the f*&^%$ is this thing?

Fiancee convinced me to start a blog. Why, you ask? Because I started to draw again. For those of you who have known me for a while, you are probably confused. I never used to draw, so how can I start to draw again? Let me show you some of my early work:

Obviously, I was a pro.

I always wanted to draw, but I had trouble getting into the pen(cil) and paper thing. Naturally, a couple of years back I bought a really crappy drawing tablet with a pen and sat down to get to work. My results were roughly as good as the bear. I couldn't get the tablet running properly on my computer and Paint isn't exactly the best place to be drawing... After a few weeks I put my tablet away and went along with my life.

Recently, in an effort to fill my free time while Fiancee is busy on her computer, I decided to start drawing again. I bought myself a little sketchbook and borrowed some of Fiancee's pencils (she is far better at this whole "creative arts" thing than I am) and drew a glass. No, I don't have a copy to show you. Since I was enjoying myself I brought out my old tablet and managed to get it working along with a version of Photoshop that came with it (I think?).

That is my dog, Iggy... Or it is supposed to be. I found my tablet and Photoshop (mainly the tablet) to be fairly limiting. My lines ranged from super light/non-existent to dark. That was it. Not ideal for trying to mimic graphite in a digital medium. So I got some new stuff...

and drew this one! A huge improvement, right? I upgraded my tablet to a Wacom Bamboo Pen and Touch, and am using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro to do my work now. They are both great products individually, and combined they allow my computer to act like a sketchbook, which I absolutely love.

Obviously, I need to work on my shading and about 3874382764823764823746 other things, but I'm excited to continue working and posting my work for people to see. The idea is to use this as an excuse to improve my drawing (and my writing) over the next z years. And yes, I start sentences with "and" sometimes.

More to come soon.

~Chris