Sarah's Sketches

Ha ha, yeah, no real explanation for this. Since yesterday's post was a bit more girly than usual, I thought I'd make today super ungirly, like with a big zombie or villainous something-or-other. This little girl and her elephant appeared in my sketchbook instead. Hope everyone has a happy new year :) Yay for the weekend!

I was telling Stephen last night how guilty I felt that my Great Aunt asked me for a drawing of a doll years ago and I still hadn't done it. He reminded me that it really wouldn't take much time, so I drew a doll today for the blog drawing to give to her. My Great Aunt made china dolls herself, right down to sewing them clothes and making wigs. She even made me a doll of me when I was little :)

And more story! (Click images for larger versions.)

(Click image for larger version.) I meant to continue the Dragon Girl story today, but since I finished this illustration this afternoon, here it is instead. The characters here have been borrowed from one of my old student films. I'd love to write a new story for them someday... just have to find enough time :)

Was running about doing Christmas tree set-up etc. today so I just managed to add some colour to a sketch a did a couple days back. Merry Christmas! Hope everyone gets lots of presents and eats lots of chocolate goodies! I'll post again on Tuesday :)

No Dragon Girl story today... my sister-in-law is over hanging out and I didn't want to spend too long on the blog. We were discussing a guinea pig who violently eats vegetables though, so here he is :)

Thought I'd throw some colour on one of the Snow White sketches.

And more of the dragon girl story :) (Click images for larger versions.)

Some drawergeeks ideas and sketches. This week the topic is Snow White, and since I recently painted a Snow White drawing for the blog, I thought I'd try sketching some very different Snow Whites. I also missed the Raggedy Ann/Andy week while I was on vacation, so I did a sketch of Raggedy Ann based on my Blythe-like pullip dolls. If I have time I may draw a similarly themed Raggedy Andy. I'll probably try to paint a Snow White or too over the next few days :)

More of the Dragon Girl story. Yay for Friday!

This is for drawergeeks tomorrow. The subject is Santa. Our second wedding reception last week got me to thinking that Mr. and Mrs. Claus clearly got married once.... and I guess they maybe were a bit younger too :) Thank you all for the warm welcome back from my holidays. I've just switched to the new google blogger, so hopefully it won't muck anything up. Please let me know if it does. Also, I forgot to mention, that if you want to see a quick QUICK shot of me looking dorky and talking about animation, check out the special features on The Ant Bully DVD. I'm in the "It takes a colony" part representing the animation department. If I look mildly alarmed, it's because just before they started shooting the director guy told me my face was really shiny.

I've decided for the betterment of my work-day, I'm going to start posting in the late afternoon, rather than morning. It seemed lately that by the time I finished a blog drawing, I'd check a whole slew of other people's blogs, answer some e-mail, eat lunch, excercise and then by the time I started real work it was already two or three in the afternoon. Very bad. This way, I can wake up, work eight/nine hours and THEN do the blog drawing. The blog will be updated every day though... so keep on checking whatever time of day is good for you and there will be something new!

Ha ha, the title of this seems to indicate this drawing is supposed to be me.... and no. Just some girl I doodled on the phone while talking to my mom this morning. I experimented with painting on a multiply layer and although the colours are a little too 'barbie', I'm pretty happy with the results. So I had a great vacation up in Canada. I visited with a slew of relatives I rarely see, met my new nephew, celebrated an early Christmas with my family, Stephen and I had our long postponed Canadian wedding reception and saw a bit of Toronto with some visiting Texas family. One of the highlights was going to Casa Loma and watching our little nieces meet some women dressed up like fairies there. By the way, if anyone is in Toronto and is related to some little ones, Casa Loma has one of the best Santa Claus's I've ever seen. I rate him five candy canes.

I don't usually post Sundays, but I'm going on vacation tomorrow! Yay! I'll try to keep up the daily post regardless, but since I'll only have my laptop with me and not all my other computer goodies (scanner and so forth), it may not work out. Since I don't like to post drawing-less, but I also have to get packing, here's some old work from my background painting class at Sheridan College. Posting this seems to hint that I may be heading off to someplace with warm sandy beaches, but no, this is more likely the chilly water of Lake Ontario. Brr!

Another story page! (Click for bigger images.) Since it's a holiday, I feel like I had a hard time focusing on drawing this properly, but oh well :) It will do for today. Now it's time to go see movies and have fun! Also, there was supposed to be a post yesterday, I quickly scribbled something as I was running out the door with a casserole and whatnot for Thanksgiving dinner, but then my computer was acting up and I didn't have time to fix things. It was our cat Winter's first Thanksgiving and he responded by not knowing what to do, skittering about our place cooing and generally being crazy. Here is the scribble so you can imagine the ruckus for yourself.

Here's November 13th's post painted.

(Click images for bigger versions.) More story! Yay! Fairytale scary! I'm trying to get these up every other day so it's easy to follow along.

Since it's about time I start doing some photo studies to better my sense of colour and whatnot in general, here's one of my younger sister at my wedding. It's based on one of my favorite pictures of her... the original snapped by the amazing Leanna Bates . Most likely I'm doing neither the photo or how pretty my sister looks in it justice, but it was a good exercise. To remove the temptation of eye-dropping the colours, I put the photo album beside my computer... rather than pull up the digital photo :) I'll hopefully do more of these quick studies in the future.

(Click images for bigger versions.) More of Dragon Girl! If you have missed parts #1 and 2, they were posted on Nov 7th and 9th. I forgot that I was doing this in a square format, so it took a bit of working to get everything in frame once I scanned it :)

Sometimes werewolves need caffeine to stay awake and be evil all full moon long. For drawergeeks tomorrow :)

The very talented comic writer/artist Mike Maihack is putting together a collection of his Cow & Buffalo (check em out!) comic strips for publication. Here is some guest art I did for the book! While you are at Mike's site, be sure to check out all his art and comics. There's a whole slew of cool stuff.

I was going to draw the next page of the Dragon Girl story today, but then as I was looking up the text of the story in my computer, I checked yesterday's comments and realized it's Jessie's birthday today! Because I met Jessie through mutual appreciation of Jimmy Neutron, I thought I'd draw something Jimmy-esque to celebrate :) The Jimmy Neutron TV show was the most fun show/film/whatnot I've ever had the chance to animate on. Even though the hours were pretty brutal, I loved how we had so much creative freedom and I loved how I got to animate so many ridiculous things. Happy Birthday Jessie!!!

So over the next couple weeks I'll be updating my portfolio... which means occasionally I'll be posting drawings/paintings that I will have spent more time on than my usual posts. Anyway, here's the line drawing for an illustration I'm working on. The image is based on one of various stories I have in the perpetual works :) It was fun to do some circus poster research for this too.

I woke up this morning feeling uninspired blog-wise, so I asked Stephen what I should draw. He made some suggestions and I drew him as he was suggesting things. It's sort of a messy painting, but it'll do for today :) Yay 100th post!

More story! Again, click the images to see a larger version :)

When you full-moon transform into a werewolf, all your clothes would probably tear off.... but maybe not your watch. (For drawergeeks this week!)

And finally, the new story! I'm trying a different format with this one, putting the text on an opposite page rather than on the drawing. Click on either image to see a bigger version. I won't have a new installment every day, but most likely every 2-3 days :)

So the last little while I've been knuckling down on a project and I'm happy to announce it's pretty much done! Yay! So be sure to check out my short story, "The Forever Box" in the fourth volume of Flight, which will be released by Ballantine Books next summer. It's my first ever contribution to the comic anthology (or any comic anthology for that matter.) I'm very very excited about it and still feel so fortunate to have been given the opportunity. If you've never read any of the Flight books, I highly recommend checking them out (here is the link to the official site.) It's been a wonderful experience, not because I adore writing stories, but I was able to work with some of the crazy talented (and very nice too) Flight authors. Now that I'll have a bit more time on my hands, tune in tomorrow for the first installment of a new blog story :)

More messing about with colour today. Could have put more detail in the hands/apple probably, but I need to get back to other work :) Stay tuned for the new blog story I promised a while ago... it's all written and ready to be illustrated. Just tying up my big project loose ends today.

(Click on image for bigger version.) So my husband Stephen was playing this game Titan Quest with some of his friends and he thought it might be fun to network our computers and play together when we felt like being lazy at home. At first I was disappointed picking the character, my choice was either an oddly thick legged roman woman or large roman man. You couldn't even change their hair colour. Boring! But then it got better... as you run about fighting zombies and medusas and the like, you pick up shmancy armor (never mind that none of it actually matches... my poor girl looks like she got dressed with a blindfold on) and you get points you can put towards special powers. I put all my points into getting summons... creatures you can magically summon to follow you around and fight with you. So I have a wolf, giggly nymph girl and death king. I imagine if real life came with magic summons it would be pretty neat. The wolf could keep the cats in line, the death king could take care...

Watch out for the vampirate, he's out for blood.

I apologize for the nudity, but mermaids don't like wearing clothes. Used two brushes for this, which I think I like. A big fat flat one for the messy over all and then a softer oil to stick in some details. Friday I felt like all my painting practice last week hadn't paid off, but this came together more easily than I expected in about an hour, so yay! Look at me, drawing Halloween stuff all up to Halloween and then on actual Halloween I drop the ball :)

(Click image for a bigger version!) Although I've been going like crazy trying to finish a project the last few weeks, I was able to take a break for two Halloween parties! Which means costumes! Yay! My favorite! It was my plan to be Dorothy this year from the Wizard of Oz because I already have ruby slippers... but because I've been so busy the rest of the costume never happened. The pirate costume was for Deanna and Aaron's fantastic Halloween bash. I was, up until about fifteen minutes before leaving... having worked until that point, completely costume-less. But after discovering the hat in a box and rummaging around Stephen's closet, I was on my way. I think the key to a good pirate costume is putting on as much crap as you possibly can. Hopefully the sheer volume of costume parts will distract/confuse people and make them think it's a good pirate outfit you put lots of time into. I just realized I forgot to draw the winter scarf tied around one leg and note...

And posting again. First I posted my half finished painting, but it bothered me that it wasn't complete and couldn't afford to spend more time fixing it, so I pulled the post down. But determined to post something for Friday, here it is again and also a scribbly witch sketch so it's not right at the top of the blog annoying me all weekend :)

Okay I already feel like I can paint this cat in my sleep. Thank you everyone for bearing with me and my repetitive posts :) Today I lowered the horizon line to free up his body a bit more, there was a bit of a tangent with the tail yesterday. I also tried to work in darker darks and lighter lights so he'd stand out more from the bg. Instead of just values, I also worked in a cool-to-warm transition to push the background back even more and lightened the little details in the bg to make them seem even less important. I also remembered to paint his whiskers this time. Not sure if I will paint him again tomorrow, because I feel fairly happy with this for an hour painting. I might try attacking another drawing with paint and see how that goes.

I think today's attempt was better. Even though I didn't want to spend more than an hour, I tried to give a bit better indication of a background/environment. I also tried to choose light/dark local colours for Mr. In Boots that would help him stand out in general and also set him apart from his outfit. I still can't seem to get away from a final overall colour tweak, but didn't use it as much as I sometimes do. I used softer brushes and tried to make the lightest place in the painting his face to draw attention to it. I was thinking yesterday how strange it is that it's easier for us to quickly communicate visually with line drawings rather than light and shadow shadow paintings, considering lines don't exist when we look at things in real life.

Okay, not my best, I know. But I'm doing a bit of an experiment this week... I'm going to paint this drawing everyday for an hour (or less). I know I can paint okay if I spend days on a painting or use some sort of trick, like leaving the lines in on a multiply layer, but I want to be more confident with strait up digital painting. I think the fact that I consider it to be one of my weaknesses is why I generally fail at it.