Gone Daddy Gone

Winter Ninja

I had to dig my front steps out from under a snowdrift today.

TAZ

I've been on a fanart kick lately. Here's Reagan from Templar, Arizona.

Rabid Grannies

I wanted to have the ones in the back beating up some criminal with their umbrellas, but couldn't make it work with their short little limbs.

Partly Done...

That Week Wasn't Going Well

Some days I get really, really tired of doing comics.

Contest

I've just discovered a web cartoonist whose work I used to follow before I got busy is having a contest. I usually have plenty of my own work to do without entering contests, but I've liked her work for years and I'm on a fanart kick this week.




I'd like to not tip my hand too early, so I'll link to the comic once the thing is submitted or the deadline is past.

Guitarist

I've been looking for a replacement for my blue mechanical pencil (which draws really nicely, without being too soft or smearing... but the leads are so thin that they snap if I even look at them wrong). I thought I'd try Col-Erase pencils. Alas, they smear like crazy. Completely worthless for my purposes. :(

I'm thinking of buying wads of cheap hairspray now and fixing every sketchbook page.



Still playing Rockband. My husband likes it so much that he went out and got an electric guitar today. So maybe in the future my guitarists will look like they are actually holding guitars.

The Room of Orange Hands

So I went to bed on January 20, but I had a terrible time getting to sleep. Eventually I woke up from a dream, all twisted up in bed and with half a dozen cramps in various limbs, and I couldn't get back to sleep. Rather than wake my husband up with all the rolling around, I collected my covers and went downstairs, where we have an extra bed.

Once down there, I realized rather muzzily that I hadn't done a sketch that day. Disaster! So I sketched out part of my dream:



In it, I was playing a videogame which consisted of a long chain of rooms, which were all ice rinks, and I had to skate my hockey guy away from other hockey guys who wanted to... I don't know. Talk to him sternly. With sticks. Eventually I got tired of the endless succession of rooms and I needed to pee, so I decided to save the game. This game, apparently, saved a file by dropping your little hockey guy through a trap door and into an enormous, bottomless room of giant orange hands.

The quality is not the best because I was half-asleep, but I kind-of like it.

Toy Division

Future fan art for Toy Division.

Window Watching

Did some people-watching out my work window.

The Classics

I was reading the Temple of the Seven Golden Camels blog today and the article on Sempe and Blake caught my eye. I like sketchy, delicate inky styles very much (about the only inking style I don't love is the heavy-lined woodcut style, and even there I can usually find a few pieces where I think it works well).

Not that these have too much to do with either artist, it's just that my original ink style is sketchy and I'm tired of the clean lines I've been doing lately.




These two are just poses of characters taken from my comic and de-bunnified.

Quick, easy fun sketches. There will probably be more of them here soon.

Dancer

School Bus

I saw a post titled "silly dinosaurs", and sketched out my own version before peeking inside.

January 14th

Rockband

My husband is the local Guitar Hero, since he actually plays the guitar and rhythm games. I... am not.

But at least I know all the words to most of the songs! Thhhbffft!

More Comeeks

Uggh. I feel completely unlike myself today, so you get more comic panel art.



I did a quick colouring job, curious to see how the characters would look in colour. Unfortunately, the monitor is still wonky, and I won't be able to see if the colours look really off until Monday, when I get back to work. Not that there's any guarantee that the monitor at work is also right...

Oh, the travails of digital art.

It occurs to me to add that the girl is supposed to be at least somewhat blue-green.

Tan

Just screwing around. I was going to colour this with pencil crayons (hence the suffusion of orange) but started erasing before the ink was completely dry. Then I had to scan and do some touch-up work at low opacity to prevent her from looking like she had black lasers shooting from her eyes.

Canada Goose

A speed painting I did today of a Canada goose.



I took the reference photo for this in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island this August. I'm pretty impressed with how well this turned out!

Just for comparison, here's the reference. I followed it pretty closely. One of these days I should branch out a bit more.



* * *

Looking at it on the work computer, I am reminded that I need to do something about my monitor at home (the power button on the LCD died, so I'm back to using el ginormo CRT). The goose head is much lighter and more blue on the work monitor. It's not a *terrible* look, but not quite what I intended.

Cone

A pine cone I had sitting around on my desk at work:



And this is just experimenting with looks for a possible future comic. I want to know how quickly I can make a colour comic-type drawing if I don't obsess over every small detail.

January 8th

Today was just a crappy day for drawing. I had a ton of work at work, a comic deadline at home, and we missed our bus to boot and didn't get home until 19:00. The first bus was too crowded to draw and the second had almost nobody on it, so this is all I have to show for the whole day:



It's kind-of embarrassing, so I'm posting a couple more bus people I did in December or thereabouts.

Sage

A speedpaint based on a sketch I did sometime last year. I work at a University, so there's no shortage of guys who are one robe away from being a fantasy book cover.



Just experimenting with colour. Plus it's been a busy day at work, I've got a mother of a headache, and I didn't want to post comic stuff again.

Rock Star

Screwing around in Photoshop while we had a couple friends over to play Rock Band. (There are only three instruments apart from the mic, and no one wanted to sing early in the evening. A couple glasses of scotch later and we had plenty of reluctant volunteers.)



Next time maybe I'll try for a more dynamic composition.

The Fuzz

I've spent most of today working out the kinks in this week's comic page, so that will have to be the daily sketch. A very unhappy policerabbit:



Okay, I also played Rock Band. Stupid, wonderful Rock Band.

Mask

We've got this guy haging by the front door, right by the coat closet. To make people feel welcome. And also because there was already a nail in the wall there.

On the Bus Again

Ah, winter bussing. What would I draw without you?



This guy had a really cool profile with unusually prominent lips, but turned away just as I started to get it down. He steadfastly refused to turn back, and then I had to get off the bus. Grrr.

Happy New Year!

It's another year, and I have a resolution: to try doing a sketch for every day in 2008! I won't be able to scan every day (or post every day, for that matter) but the plan is to post only those sketches that I do on a certain day on the blog for that day. At the end of the year, I hope to have 365 sketches up.

I don't guarantee that they'll be *good* sketches though. As the NaNoWriters say, quantity, not quality!

I got the idea for this resolution in the middle of the night, so all I have for January 1st is a couple of drawings of waves that I did for my comic:




Waves are not easy to simplify.