Color, this and that.

Hello!

Let's get back to business. Every Saturday, I meet up with some friends at a coffee shop and we sketch, critique, and discuss the works of the masters. I did a drawing of Hellboy (surprise). It was done in blue pencil, in a Moleskine sketchbook, and inked with a Kuretake no. 40 pen, along with a Copic Multiliner .02 pen. I scanned it into photoshop, and with the help of a great tutorial, http://designinstruct.com/drawing-illustration/how-to-color-inked-line-art-in-photoshop/, I decided to give it a go. I think it turned out pretty good. I hope to continue to explore and learn color, and maybe acquire a good critique or two along the way. I was hoping to really get some form and texture in the line drawing, but my goal was to let the color do most of the lifting as far as rendering.

The original

Also, you'll see I'm playing around with cartoon head shapes, as well as studying wrinkles. I'm ALWAYS making little studies of that stuff. I recently read Andrew Loomis say that wrinkles and textures should reinforce the form and support it's interpretation. He said that any lines and details that don't do this should be omitted. I was struck by that idea, and will continue to perfect it. I did the small studies on the bottom right with a Hunt no. 108, a very nice flexible copper pen. Great for when a brush won't provide enough control.

Here is a gesture sketch I did with a brush. This exercise is part of my goal of drawing with the brush, not inking with it. I'm trying to treat the brush like a flexible pencil. This is because I watched Moebius work on a video, and he held the tool very casually. I love the qualities the lines take with this approach, and it also makes me enjoy working a lot more, because it's a bit more carefree. Also, you'll see some little cast shadow studies on here. I've found that working things out on the side, just like long division, yields a better result. Sometimes I will redraw something 10 times on the comics page, repeatedly erasing and ruining the paper. I would get very angry during this process. Then it hit me: I was approaching the panel in question without a fully formed intention. I needed to work it out a little better somewhere else. It also REALLY helps me to scale things down to work out composition, lighting, and spatial relationships.

Lastly, here are some little cartoon sketches I did. I'm really getting into cartooning. I've just recently began to appreciate how sophisticated it is, and how deceptively difficult it can be. I want to do one Bill Watterson study a week, and also some studies of George Herriman. 

Thanks for reading.