MegaMan in Storyboard Pro

We're switching over from Photoshop to Storyboard Pro at work, so we spent a good deal of the day becoming used to the new drawing interface. Here's a doodle of MegaMan I made in doing so:

Album cover

A friend asked me to design an album cover that had the title "Like A Dinosaur." She liked what I did, but it didn't really match the song, so she ended up altering it before submitting it to iTunes. So here's the unedited version.

Drawbook 04

DOCTOR WOMAN

Drawbook 03

Lava monster!

Drawbook 02

Some sort of summer girl, I guess!

Drawbook 01

I think I'm going to start doodling in my drawbook daily, and then scanning/inking at least one of the doodles nightly (or morningly, in this case).

Business cards!

So I'm heading to Comic-Con and realized business cards would probably be pretty handy- I'm going as a "professional," I may as well look the part! Serendipitously, in the process of moving to a new apartment I uncovered unused printable business cards, so here's what I'll be printing tomorrow morning:

The caricature I'm using is actually cropped- here's what I originally drew:

And because I have no shame, here's the last time I drew a caricature of myself (circa 2004): 

The choice is clear

So, maybe I've been playing too much TF2...

"Jefferson Hour" t-shirt idea

I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, "The Thomas Jefferson Hour," and in this particular episode they brought up one of their longtime controversies over their claim that they record their show in a pastoral barn. Many listeners write and disparage the claim, as was discussed on the show, and the idea for this popped into my head:

I sent it to them and maybe they'll like it!

Drawing heads

A coworker asked how I drew heads. I never got the chance to demonstrate, so I thought I'd make a post about it!

1. Draw a shape. Doesn't have to be a circle, although I'll usually use those for female heads and rectangles for male heads. Not always though!

2. Draw your guidelines. This will be instrumental in determining where to draw the other parts of facial anatomy. If you start off drawing a "piece," like an eye or mouth, you'll end up with a really well-drawn eye, a really well-drawn mouth, and so on, but the whole face will look terrible; you have to build up.

3. I usually go for eyes first since they'll dictate more about the face than anything else.

4. Adding more facial features.

5. Sculpted the face a little more (the cheek especially), and added neck and shoulders so it's not just a floating head.

6. Hair. Rad has a good tutorial on the "hair shell gap" if you want to learn from a much better professional.

7. There's more steps between the previous and this one, but it was mostly minutiae. Here's the finished product with color and a little bit of shading.

Hope it wasn't too predictable!

Moon diagram

I made an astronomy diagram in Flash and put it on YouTube! Check it out:



It's still in progress. One thing I'll fix are the POV lines of the Earth and the Moon (as though someone's standing on either, looking at the other), which were washing out in the compression. Here's a pic of how it looks in a better quality:

CAD Silhouettes

So the two characters on the left are supposed to be analogues of the two main characters in CAD, in order to illustrate the importance of good silhouettes and varied character structures (which CAD lacks on all accounts). Then I thought for fun I'd draw a girl to add some balance and spontaneity to the otherwise dour composition. Only after coloring did I realize in a twisted way I had drawn an analogue of another character from the comic, who also has red hair that obscurs one eye. I swear that's not what I started off to do!

(it doesn't help my claim for originality when an earlier version of the skinny was character was essentially Jamie from Megas XLR:

D'oh. I feel like Elaine ripping off that Ziggy comic.

Another installation of CAD: Fixed

Nothing inspires me to art like shitty feminine poses.

This is what happens when you scoff at life drawing. I'm not kidding- the original artist, Tim Buckley, has made no secret that he never wanted to draw from life. I'm paraphrasing here, but his stance was essentially, "Why should I draw real people? I want to draw cartoons!"

And that's the result. If you don't know basic anatomy/proportions you have no idea what to exaggerate, and the result is a hideous cavewoman.

Fixing CAD

So there's this webcomic called Ctrl-Alt-Del and it's utter trite. So much so that there's a thread on SomethingAwful dedicated to following the comic, making fun of it, and critiquing its writing and art. After Lackadaisy, another webcomic, posted a tutorial for drawing facial expressions, I just had to redraw the latest CAD comic and bring attention to how shitty and bland his expressions are.

Here's the original:

And here's mine:

B^U