Some 2 minute and 5 minute life drawing studies

Here's a little digital sauce.

Playing around with markers here, learning how they behave. Markers are fun.

Cyclops sketch I'll color for real at some point.

Back to doing some training. Here is a Rockwell study. This is about 3 inches in height.

I was working on a page, saw a blank piece of Bristol and three minutes later there is a Hellboy sketch. And there you have it!

To make up for the scribbles I posted, here are some finished pages.

I never post this kinda BS. I love this little drill though. I learned it from LeSean when we were working at the same web animation place a long time ago. He's got stacks of this shit all over the place. It's a great exercise. You take a scene from something you like (Sean does mostly anime, but I do films a lot), and you freeze the pertinent frames and sketch 'em out. You can learn a ton of things this way. Composition, storytelling, and little things like what you see when you draw. You see what you're good at picking up right away, and what technique issues are apparent in their most basic form. These days, I don't draw it to the point where it's really legible, because I'm always addressing basic compositional shapes, not the drawing of (in this case) the animation.

This is a quick little scene from Steamboy. I only spent a few minutes here. Usually the drill should be an hour or two, so you can fatigue, and then really start to pair down what you "care" about. You stop thinking about illustrating and start hitting the shapes you really think are pertinent to storytelling. This was and is a great tool for me, both for learning and warming up.

I stopped short here because I ran out of 3B lead, and I HATE sketching with hard lead, lol. I also picked a rotten scene, because the storytelling is mostly backgrounds, CG and special effects, but gotta roll with it. All the same, this drill is as fun as it always has been.

-N

I've been working on a massive, 100 page graphic novel for the past few months, and will continue to do so for the next couple. It's been fun and challenging, because I'm drawing, inking, and putting the computer tones on it. Bryan Hill is the writer, and it's coming out this fall.

I've been in St. Louis without real internet access for a bit, but that's all solved now thanks to my favorite thing in the world, my macbook. I love it like the Knicks love overspending. Enough yackity yack, here's some art.




This is Nina Carmichael.

Science Deals a Blow to Religion After efforts to smooth over the tensions between dogmatic and skeptical thought, a conference was held in which esteemed scientists from varying fields waged war on the whole of religion. While a thread thin line was drawn between the Christian/Islamic bloodletting and bug sweeping Janeism, no worshipper was spared in the scathing indictments of organized make-believe. This was not a tired resuscitation of the Creationism vs. Evolution argument, but a plea to the world to recognize religion as the greatest threat to post Enlightenment reason. According to facts cited at the conference, 93% of scientists are atheist, and the other 7% were asked in the meeting, "what is wrong with the rest of you?". Science has spoken loud and clear on this one: there is no God, and we are tired of letting you believe it. There were long term and short term versions of the plan. Some suggested marketing, others suggested education and Joan Roughgarden even suggested parables. The overall goal saw little dispute, however. Science wants to knock religion out, and sooner rather than later. Resources: The entire video can be found here http://beyondbelief2006.org/Watch/ The Wired Magazine Article: http://www.wired.com/news/wiredmag/0,71985-1.html?tw=wn_story_page_next1 The NYTimes article:http://www.nytimes.com/glogin?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/science/21belief.html&OQ=_rQ3D2Q268dpcQ26orefQ3Dslogin&OP=5dcbe3ccQ2FQ51)0uQ517svNqssQ2BpQ51pWWtQ51Q25Q25Q51pQ25Q51Nvy0cv0Q51pQ25u0ly0Q3AxaQ2BQ23l

Bynum Fellows?... That's Crazy!! One of NBA.com's sports writers wrote that Andrew Bynum, promising young center for the L.A. Lakers, looks like Tracy Morgan. He went so far as to write "every interview, I expect him to look into the camera and yell, 'I'm Brian Fellows'. My first reaction was skepticism, but then I came across this picture while finishing my daily NBA reading. I darkened Andrew's skin and mustache a bit to match Tracy's and I was a bit surprised at the results. Is he Brian Fellows? You be the judge.

Panda!!! to be colored soon...

A couple of panels from "Shirley, Don't Look Back!"

Car notes(pun intended, and I'm not sorry)

Important: I have to preface this post to make myself clear. This is not a tutorial. I'm not an industrial designer, and if you want to learn how to draw cars, you should pick up "How to draw cars like a Pro" and use reference for accuracy if you're working from a particular make or model of car.

That having been said, that book was of no use to me. I think it has some great, great stuff in it, but my problem was not the inability to draw cars, but the inability to draw cars easily. Then one day, like a bolt of lightning, cars were easy to draw! That's what this post is about. Some people have picked up on my new found love of drawing vehicles, and inquired about the method.

This first image is the real breakthrough. I'll explain.

I was playing around with shapes, and found this nifty shape right here. This was the proverbial lightning bolt. The shape is an exaggerated assempbly of the two parts of a car that I personally need to draw it easily. The body/wheels, and the hood/windows. At this point, we're pretty much done, but that's only if you live in my head, so lets move on to the next visual step.

I have to share a drawing philosophy here. For me, the single most important tool in drawing is visualization. That first shape is the key that unlocks car visualization in my head. In order to break down that barrier between all of the distractions of reality, and that imaginary car that doesn't exist yet, I need to get SOMEthing on the page. Not only does the first shape serve as something for visualization, but it is ample construction information, if you know the parts of a car.

I learned the parts of a car from playing too many racing/free roaming games. Now I can tell myself that it wasn't a complete waste of time!

Step by step, the process in drawings two and three are perspective(lights, face and windsheld) and then information. The information is where you either need mental or physical reference to be accurate. The key things here are inventory, proportion and most importantly, silhouette.

Just to show how that shape translates to all angles, I'll turn it a few times. Here are some basic yet effective examples.

Using this method, a quick car sketch takes at maximum, thirty seconds, and at minimum, about 7. Once I found this, a drew probably about fifty cars in the next couple of days to make sure I wasn't wrong about this new method, and it checked out with every conceivable shape, style, angle and amount of reference used.

Speaking of reference, I have to cap this off by saying that for pages, I'd always use reference whether a model sheet I created, or photos of actual cars before submitting a page. Also, while this method allows for a loose and free approximation of a finished image, proper perspective and templates are still necessary for art that I'd consider finished and professional.

For all that were curious, I hope this helps.

Nelson