What Is Happening: Clip Art & Crustaceans Edition

That’s right: It’s time for another installment of What Is Happening! Here’s some of what I’ve been up to in the last week or so.

1. Uh… Crustaceans: There is seemingly no end to the weird shit I am going to have to learn to draw for this Secret Project I have mentioned a few times before. In this case, it isn’t necessarily that I’m going to have to draw any particular type of shellfish; rather I’m incorporating crustacean-inspired design elements into some stuff, so I’m practicing drawing them to internalize their parts and the ways their anatomy hangs together:

crustaceans

I drew the above things (two terrifying crab-like creatures and I guess a tail?) based on a couple pictures in one of the amazing clip art books—yes BOOKS—that I discovered this week. Which leads me to the next thing that’s been taking up my time…

2. Clip art books are the best thing that has ever happened to me: They are seriously awesome. First of all they only cost like barely anything because all the pictures contained within are in the public domain. Second of all, they are better than the internet because you can have them all in one place and let’s be honest—for visual references, Google image search is ALMOST ALWAYS totally useless. Unless you’re looking for something incredibly specific.

clipart

Clip art books are definitely better because I can have pictures of unicorns and men coming out of other men’s heads and overly ornate suits of armor and terrifying crabs without going to the trouble of knowing what I’m looking for before I find it.

For practicing drawing random things, and for fast visual inspiration in well-defined categories, I cannot recommend these more.

And also here is this picture of a woman dancing with a bear, which is going to be very useful in my artistic career:

bear-lady

3. Victoria: I did another character design for Secret Project. This is Victoria:

victoria

I haven’t figured out what her costume is going to be quite yet, but I have done a design of one of her swords that I’m pretty satisfied with:sword-1

She’s going to carry two of those, which may be very slightly different from one another. They are going to be proportionally ridiculous, in the style of Cloud Strife’s Buster Sword. But TWO TIMES that. Because there will be two swords.

4. 25-minute nude sketch: Here’s another one from my Art Students League life-drawing class. Like last time, I made this with pen and compressed charcoal:

nude-1

That’s all for the moment—I’m pretty deep into the next piece of Lost In Hong Kong and the first draft of text for part 3 of Manic Pixel Dream Girl, but I’ll blog again soon, promise!

What Is Happening: Gears & Gals Edition

Now that I’m doing art full-time, I am (not-surprisingly) drawing A LOT. So I think I’m going to do a regular feature on this blog just kind of taking you through some snippets of what I’ve been doing, maybe every other day or so. May I present to you the first of hopefully many such posts. Enjoy!

1. Elements of Steampunk: For this thing I’m working on, there are a few parts that rely heavily on the steampunk aesthetic, so I’ve been doodling steampunk visual elements to get a hang of them. I am definitely not like “into” steampunk at all, and I often actually dislike it, but daaaamn is it fun to draw:
steampunk-elements
2. Julia: I also am finally happy with one of the primary character designs (not steampunk!!) for that same secret project. Below, meet Julia:

julia-sketches
She’s wearing chunky heels on the right, but she’ll usually be wearing flat lace-up “booties.” God I hate that word. What I mean is, you know, ankle-high boots. Can I just say that instead?

3. 20-minute Nude Sketch: Moving on… Today I started taking a life-drawing class at the Art Students League, which I’ll be doing two mornings a week to keep those particular muscles warm. Here’s my favorite thing I did in today’s class:

20-minute nude
I drew the outlines freehand with pen, and did the shading with compressed charcoal. It was a 20-minute pose.

More soon!

Concept for a small piece of a large (secret) project

rsideorder

I’m working on kind of an extensive project (spoiler: it’s a comic.. thing) with a friend of mine. Here is a concept for a seal or crest from aforementioned Secret Project.

Eventually, I’d like to make the edges a little more ornate & distinctive, but what was important to get done at this stage was the basic composition of the circle. Decorative stuff will come later… Also I have no idea yet what the colors are going to be for this. I haven’t yet decided if they should be somewhat naturalistic or very logo-ish like maybe just two colors total (the hands and border white, for example, and the negative space black). Maybe next time I post this or another crest I’ll have figured that out….

(I’ll definitely be posting lots more cryptic stuff from Secret Project in the next few months… It has begun to consume a nice-sized chunk of my life.)