Sarah's Sketches

Yay! Internet is still up so I can post today's post too! I was going to do two drawings for today but ran out of time.

AHHH! YAAAY! The Internet seems to be back up. I still haven't finished today's post, but here is yesterday's post in case I get cut off again. My apologies to people if I have not replied to e-mails etc. Any other people know what's been up with blogger lately too? It never seems to want to load and is being really finicky. Has anyone else switched to the new beta? Do you like it? Anyway, hopefully I'll have today's post up today soon too, if not, just know I'm still doing them and will post them as soon as I can :)

(Click image for larger version.) It was my turn to pick the drawergeeks topic this time round, so I picked Harry Potter! Whoo! Anyway, must get started early so I can squish in as much geeky wonderful Harry Potter drawing goodness as possible. Just did a line drawing for today because that took long enough, but I'll colour it for another post. Tried to forget the actors in the movies so I could draw the characters as I first imagined them reading the books.

Ran out of time, so just a could-be-better quickie for today. Was watching the TCM channel all yesterday while working and one of the movies I saw was "Sorority House" (1939). This lovely lady is a character called Merle who (gasp!) is not asked to join a sorority. She tears off into the bathroom and tries to drink poison. There is a lot of "No Merle! No!", face slapping and crying, but then she's okay. Anyway, I just liked the little random black neck ribbon in her 'hoping for sorority acceptance' dress.

Since our little friend left us for the big fishbowl in the sky yesterday in such a sad state, here he is before he became sick.

I love the way Pascal colours his illustrations so I wanted to give the clean colour stuff a try :) Anyone who has been to my place knows that I have a rather shameful collection of Pullips (big eyed Korean made dolls sold in Japan.) Each month a new doll is realeased, and Cornice here, with her rabbit, was for January '05. In December, her 'good' twin Raphia was also sold (blond hair/blue eyes/ white dress and bunny).

I had this image in my mind since last weekend while out dancing. Had intended at first to sketch/paint it like usual, but then this different sort of style happened.

And... as the title says, an interview! My good friend Matthew Russell, superstar animator at Valve and Animation Mentor mentorer, has been doing a series of animation industry people interviews on his blog. This time the interviewee is me! To read the interview, check out his site here :) (I tried to link directly to the post but I couldn't figure it out... ) Matthew, by the way, is the very cool person who convinced DNA to take a chance on me when I had no computer animation experience and hardly knew how to use Maya. He was a lead animator on Jimmy Neutron and also a lead animator on The Ant Bully. Three cheers for Matthew! Be sure to check out his site in the future too for more fun interviews.

(Too wide for the blog! Click on the image to see it actual size.) Hurrah for the pet parade! Yay for Zoe, Winter, Caspian, Spero and Jonah (formerly of the Gorski family)! The pet parade is about to get one fish shorter though, because poor Caspian is sick.

Not entirely happy with how this turned out. I meant to make this guy look skinnier and well, less punk. I kind of like some things about the way he ended up on paper, but if I had time to paint him again, I'd have redrawn the pose before painting to loosen it up a bit more.

Just something super quick and messy for today :)

I really enjoyed reading everyone's posts from yesterday. It was fun to have a bit of a debate. I'm going to ask more questions in the future :)

So I decided to take part in another drawing jam.... which I guess is most always a girly celebrity topic. I'm so of a mixed mind though when it comes to participating in drawing jams. I have long thought of the DrawingBoard site as a cool place for artists to get to know each other and I think it's great to have to draw things you wouldn't normally choose to draw.... but hmmm. Drawing stuff based on photos still feels like big time cheating to me, even if I'm changing proportions/simplifying stuff. And it seems like there are more people on there literally tracing the provided photos than finding original ways to draw them. I think if I were to draw this again, I'd want her head more 3/4 down, regardless of the photo. Anyway, here's the photo we were given to paint; I curious to know everyone elses thoughts on using photos for reference. Good idea? Bad idea? Can you still call it your original art when it's based so directly on a photo?

The end! Alex gets 50 points for figuring it out :) And yes.... next story gets a better font for absolute sure! I kept this one for consistency since I started with it, but yeah, even if I ever print it up, it will get a font change. No plans for fancy publishing, but probably I'll self-publish it at least for the San Diego Comic-Con. I do plan to put a link on the blog though to an html page with the story in it's entirety. And of course, stay tuned for a brand new story!

And more dindle!

As promised, more dindle stuff! Soon the story will be done :) No matter how I try to rush through these dindle drawings they still take me a couple hours.... and still are never my favorite posts art-wise. Oh well. Any practice drawing/painting is good practice I spose. For those of you who might not care for so much for the dindle, here's a rough little character design for the next blog story....

I apologize for sort of switching the style of the dindle paintings a bit, but the other way took me far too long and I need to get other art done in the mornings too. Anyway, over the next couple of days it's going to be all-dindle-all-the-time to conclude the dindle story! And then I'll be able to start new stories on the blog... next up is a fairy tale :)

For drawergeeks ...

Watched a little too much Alias yesterday. This would probably look better with some background/foreground elements to give it depth... but fun to draw regardless :)

Here's a quickie for Labour Day. My husband said he liked this Alice sketch I did a month or so ago while brainstorming for an old drawergeeks topic, so I threw some colour on it for today. Tried heavier colour at first, but it seemed to weigh down the sketchiness somehow.

Wanted to see how rough and quick I could go and still have things make sense. Good thing I did the top two last night because I accidentally slept through the time I usually like to draw this morning. These images are from a story I've been writing off and on. It's not the graphic novel, but I mistakenly drew the girl nearly identical to one of the GN characters. Guess that's bound to happen when you are drawing the same design all the time. (Click the images for slightly bigger versions if you like. The wide one I particularly can't make very big in order to fit it on the blog.)