Drawing started life as one of my lunchtime sketches so the usual rules for one of those apply, no reference, etc. I scanned it and brought it into Photoshop for a bit of digital rendering, just some inking and a little shadow work.

Yes another one. What can I say, they are enjoyable to draw. This one was started at lunch one day last week, blue pencil in my sketchbook, no ref. I don’t tend to have an idea of what I’m going to draw when I do my lunchtime sketches, I just start doodling, usually just a head shape then sweep in a spine and shoulders and see what I see. A lot of adjusting can go on from there as I slash in where the hips will be be and make a rough rib cage. When I did this one she ended up having a very contorted pose, but I took it as a challenge. Contorted poses are hard to draw even when you have reference, to say nothing of when you have to yank it all out of your noggin’. I think I did a fair job. I did most of the basic roughing out the pose during my lunch break and then finished off the drawing before some friends came over for dinner that night.

Blue pencil in a moleskine sketchbook. Just my take on the Cimmerian. I was a bit distracted by the very tasty BLT + Avacado I was eating at the time so a few of the proportions are a bit off… it was worth it.

A little illustration I did for fun for Valentine’s Day that I titled Chocolate Dipped. I was doing some experimenting on this. If I were to spend more time on it I would make the chocolate shinier, I still might go back and do that, but for now, it’s done.

And I don’t mean that in a bad way.  I wrote a while back that I thought it would keep me from getting things done and I was completely right.  Every chance I find I have a chance to play it, I do!  It is an excellent old school CRPG in the vein of Baldur’s Gate or even the old D&D Gold Box games if you remember those.

The battles are challenging, especially on a console due to the way you pause it, and the third person view makes tactics problematic, if I had it to do over again, I would have purchased the PC version so I’d get the old school top down 3/4 view, but I hate to reboot my mac into Windows to play games so when I can, if it’s on a console, I buy the console version, just to keep my computer for work only.  Anyway, besides that one drawback, the game is excellent, I’m still in the early portions of the game but I’m enjoying it and I want to play more everyday, which is good and bad.  Good for the game since it means the developers did their job well, bad for me because it means I’m not getting any work done.

So just to prove I’ve actually been working on it, here’s a page’s roughs (basic blocking and rough drawing before going in to do the tight pencils) The lower right hand corner hasn’t been blue’d yet because I’m not content with the layout of that panel, once I am, I’ll blue it, then do final pencils/inks.

The story got a bit of a rewrite so that page I showed earlier that I said was page 1 is no longer page 1, THIS is page 1, that other page can be used later as a throw away one shot, it stands alone fairly well and can be used as filler sometime. The story changes are for the better and will really help move the plot along. The characters are less cookie cutter and have better defined histories and motivations, at least in my mind, and hopefully that will come out on the page. Anyway, the story changes have me jazzed to draw so I’ve been drawing almost every night this week even if only for an half hour.

Another female nude, this time from the front. Sketchbook sketch, graphite in moleskine. This one was an after work sketch originally done with a 2H, then darkened with a 4B, and then had it’s curves adjusted in photoshop a bit.

A lunchtime drawing I did a while back that I’ve been turning into an illustration. Pencil in a sketchbook, levels modified to sharpen the details.

Sorry for the lack of updates, been a hectic couple of months. Anyway, here is a lunchtime sketch to hold you over. I love this one so much I’m going to find a way to fit it into one of the fight scenes in the comic, shouldn’t be hard, there are several zombie fight scenes.

HB and B pencil in a moleskine sketchbook.

So I feel a little guilty doing two non-art-related posts, so here is what I was working on last night, the pencils for the last panel of the first page and yes, I both ink and pencil a page at the same time, it’s a benefit of being all digital.

This is the first time I’ve done a drawing of this character that I’m mostly happy with.  I’ve been trying to find a look for her face using various actresses and models as reference.  Funny enough, I get a look I’m happy with when I’m not using any ref, go figure.  This, by the way, is one of the three main characters, the other two are introduced in subsequent pages.

I learned a lot just doing this first page, first, that I can get away with just doing loose sketches for backgrounds before going to the “ink” step but for characters I definitely need to do tighter “pencils”.  This drawing resulted from an aborted attempt to do my inks over a very rough sketch of the character.  Maybe after I’ve drawn her a couple hundred times, and I’m better at getting ink strokes I’m happy with I’ll be able to do that, but not while I’m still figuring both her and that process out.  Second, don’t be afraid to scrap work and start a section over, thats the glory of layers, I can hide a layer of work I don’t like and try again, and choose which one I think is better.  Third, sometimes it’s just better to move on and call something good enough.

And for those going “Wait, you are still working on the first page!?”  Yes, I’ve had a bad bout of migraines lately (that’s where the Pained Brain moniker came from), and the last thing I want to do at the end of a day of toiling on a computer with a migraine is to get back on another computer to draw.  It’s also why I want to build up a good buffer, just for times like these when it’s just physically impossible for me to work on it.