Andy and Andy again

Andy, Cloudy and Damion
I'm really happy with how this came out. l was going for an Adams Family look crossed with an old-time family photo with maybe a hint of The Nightmare Before Christmas thrown in for good measure. I started shading in the whole drawing with just a black art stick and then added a few colors to subtly add a moody tone to the drawing. I spent a while moving lines and shapes around until I was able to create an interesting composition (I hope) with a balance of positive and negative space and realism crossed with abstraction.


Here's an earlier version I did of Andy a few weeks ago. It was the first studio-style caricature I had ever done with markettes and art stix (done before the Andy, Aida and Dejon drawings), so I was happy with it when I did it, but I like that I've already started to get comfortable with the materials and have been trying new stuff out already.

Dejon

Trying to work on rhythm, perspective, shapes and exaggeration on this one. My line quality still needs a lot of work, but I'm pretty happy with this drawing for now. I like how the ovals of the nose, eye, ear and cheek are all tangent to each other. I've gotta say that I'm really liking being able to start and finish a color drawing anywhere I want without having to drag along a huge table, a tacklebox and a portable air compressor like I had to do with airbrushing. Plus it's (nearly) silent and doesn't require electricity.

Grab Bag o' Sketches

I've been keeping busy seeing what I can do with pens, pencils and markers and having fun drawing animals in ways that I haven't tried out before. I did most of these over the past couple of weeks, so I should hopefully have many more to come over the summer.

Flamingo marker and highlighter sketch
After already having bought some highlighters for the aye-aye's eyes, I knew I had to use them a bit more. By using warm and cool grey markers in addition to the highlighters, I was able to capture the brightness of flamingos without the full-out tackiness of fluorescent flamingo lawn ornaments (I hope).


Baby aye-aye marker sketch
After finishing all the grey in this drawing, I realized that it wouldn't do the animal justice for me to leave the eyes white, as aye-ayes really have highlighter-yellow eyes in real life.


Giant leaf-tailed gecko marker sketch
One of the coolest-looking animals I'd seen in a while.


La Jolla Cove marker sketch
I had a pretty limited time to work on this since the tide came in really quick and backed me up against the rock wall.


Prismacolor cool and warm grey marker fish sketch
For some reason it had never occurred to me before to use warm and cool gray markers together to develop more form. I had always figured you were supposed to use one or the other (or french grey).


Pen penguin sketches


6B pencil walrus sketches
After spending a long time on the other walrus drawing, I wanted to do something quicker and more cartoony.


6B pencil walrus sketch


6B pencil seahorse sketch


6B pencil shark sketches
These were drawn on 2 separate sheets of paper, but they fit together really well accidentally.


Pen sketch of a basking shark


Sketch of a Sketchers poster girl done during down time at the mall

Some Last Mall Sketches

Here's some ol' sketches I had lying around that I've been meaning to throw up on the ol' blogosphere.

Reckless Runner


Hairy Hunter


Pointy-Jawed Boxer


Preggo with Skinny Leggos


Goblin Gal


Teenaged Thor

Aida

I didn't use a foamy on this one. So, I used the white blending stick on this drawing on parts of the table, the background, her gums and a couple other places on her face that I wanted to take emphasis away from. I figured that by making certain parts of the drawing smoother, it brings more emphasis and texture to the skin and sweatshirt where I want it. I like how the colors came out in this one.

A Drawing for a Drawing

Here's one of my first attempts to use markettes and art stix to create a non-park drawing. I think this ended up being pretty derivative of other better drawings of this guy, but learning a lot these days. This is the eggs-celent Aaron Philby:


Here's Aaron's second take of me: