Daily Drawings 1/23/12

Throwing up a sample of my Daily Drawings from 1/23/12. I have finally segued out of the "ugh, this sucks, sucks, sucks" stage of my daily drawings and the last couple batches have loosened up and I am liking the images I am producing and enjoying the process again. I was doing some concept sketches for some new Rollr Girl illustrations and a Conan fighting a cyclops illustration and I am finding it is easier to capture the pose and figure quicker. So I feel I am seeing some of the benefits from this regimen of daily drawings manifesting in my daily work:)

I really liked the pose 21.. there is something about the pose that is slightly turned away from the viewer that I thought was cool. I have a natural tendency to draw straight ahead, straight profile or straight 3/4 turns so it is fun to see more subtle rotations of the masses of the figure.

Sucking and why you have to push past it.

So...

... it has been ten days since I have posted any Daily Drawings and this is because they have sucked. I have fallen out of love with the whole idea and I did the drawings begrudgingly and the whole process became desultory. But I have slogged on. I have honored my commitment to doing thirty of these a day and though many of them I wouldn't show my best friend they currently reside in the folder marked "done".

Here are a few samples... "shudder"

The highly anticipated "Rollr Girl" full color signed and numbered print is now available for purchase. I am only going to print 25 of these and as many of you know my last print run sold out very fast! So if you want to purchase a signed and numbered great full color Rollr Girl print just follow this link! If you don't have PayPal contact me and we can work something out! Thanks so much!
T$

Rollr Girl 2 inks!

Inkf for the most recent Rollr Girl:) I thought these turned out pretty good! I will be coloring this this week and have prints a limited run of prints available!

Daily Drawings days 6 7 8

So I still knocked out my 30 drawings on Sunday morning (new years day) even tho I was pretty slungover following some late night debauchery on New Year's Eve with the lovely wife:) I am finding that I am still struggling with the basic standing pose. I think I don't have a strong enough visual icon in my mind of what that pose should look like. The relationships to the lats and the rib cage as it extends past the chest and the juxtaposition of the pelvis the upper torso mass (especially in the 3/4 and profile view) is where I start to get lost. So I spent most of today working on standing male poses, some from reference others just from my imagination.

Yesterday I did a bunch of cool drawings from reference of gymnasts. There is nothing about the human figure in motion depicting strength, grace an dynamism that you can't find in gymnast images! Wow! Just really cool stuff. Figured some stuff out about the twist and bend of the female torso and the relationship between the stretch and squash of the planes as the figure contorts. Keeping on trucking:)

Day 6 drawings:) I Liked this male standing pose. The feet look very planted and the figure reads very well.



Day 7 drawings:) I liked this series of sketches they were fast and loose.

Da7 8 drawings:) I really liked the upper left sketch! Very powerful and emotive with a very readable silhouette.

The coming of Poop McDouche!!

The first strip featuring Annie and Foosh and introducing an amazing new super villain Poop McDouche!

Daily drawings day 5! I really did not want to do today's drawings.. wasn't feeling it. I was trying to convince myself to do them tonight or do double tomorrow... scramble all you want little brain but we're doing this:)

I got a little lost today doing some of these sketches.. I started out thinking about an exercise that Tom did when I was TAing in his Super Heroes class. He drew a fairly pedestrian figure of Captain America on the wall and challenged the class to draw a much more dynamic Cap by altering the pose. So I tried doing some dynamic powerful male poses... your standard superhero fare.. and I really struggled with it. Which then led to the usual internal monologue when things start going wrong "why can't I draw better than this... this is embarrassing... 7 years and untold thousands invested in an education in sequential art and I can't draw a simple dynamic heroic pose!" which I flagellated myself with for about 15 minutes as I got more and more frustrated.

And then I stopped doing it.
Because that is one of my patterns... this isn't perfect.. why isn't this perfect... what an awful artists I am and an awful person and blah blah blah..
Hyper self scrutiny leading to self doubt then self abuse. How tragically dorky.
But I know I do this... so once I caught myself I dropped the bullshit and went back to what the intention of these daily drawings is... quick, gestural dynamic drawings.
Structure first... specifics later.
And the next 20 drawings were super fast and energetic and really scribbley and loose...
and I dug myself out.
Knowing your stupid patterns and the means in which you will attempt to kick the shit out of yourself when you are down helps if you can catch yourself doing it. I am getting better at this. Better every day:)




These are from yesterday.
Using the Scalera "People and Poses". I like the pose of the crouching male with the arms crossed over his face. I am always trying to think about silhouette... how the drawing will read if blacked out so there is no internal information, only contour. Even though the limbs are kind of stacked I think this pose sill reads emotively as a nice silhouette.
I find more and more how important this is. The figure has to be an easily and quickly readable shape otherwise the viewer gets confused. As drawing is a visual language the letters in your visual alphabet have to be quickly identifiable otherwise your "reader" stops "reading" and starts thinking "what the hell is all of this?" The "reader" is taken out of the visceral experience of "reading". Whether it is comics or movies or music or a video game or a newspaper article maintaining the connection with the audience is imperative.
Otherwise the connection is lost and the story isn't heard.
Which is why we are doing this, right?
Making a connection and wanting to be heard.

And making dough....
... tons and tons of dough.