This is Harm, a character I designed. He's a big strong guy who's a real sweetie. I'm pretty happy with the shading of his face, but he looks a bit child-like. Also, I think i want to change his eyes. when I originally drew them they were more tilted up and i think that might help him not look so young, too. But that's something i'll work on later, detail work. I want to move on to the rest of him. And I have to give him feet. My sketch book was too short for how tall I made him. woops.

Ok, it's been a long time since I posted. I've been drawing some, but I've also been really busy. Work extended my hours from about 28 to 37 hours a week. On weekends I've been going off to cedar point in october, up to my old school, to friends, had my boyfriend over ect. Plus now that it's november, it's time for NaNoWriMo. I'm making a valient attempt at it this year, but I'm already behind. I have about 7,400 some words, and i should have about 19,000 at this point. But at least I'm finally writing the story i've been thinking about since LAST november. But unfortunately, since i'm now working three nine hour days a week, and have been having really busy weekends, I don't have a lot of free time in the evening. Drawing this month is falling a bit behind writing.

So on to a breif explanation of the drawings. Blogger posted them out of order for some reason, and i'm too lazy to try to fix it. The top one was done this weekend, it's a drawing of a dragon candle i have, and a little chinese dish that sits next to it. I got tired of drawing about the time i started on the dish, if you couldn't tell.

Next down are two cyborgs from the story i'm writing for nanowrimo. It didn't turn out at all like i wanted it to. I think i might take a figure drawing class. I didn't while i was in school, i didn't have the time and my school had weird rules about the number of art credits you could take if they did not apply directly to your major.

Next one was a really lame doodle that I spent no time at all on. It was really just a "i should draw, but i don't really feel like it" attempt, and probably wasn't worth posting, except that i figured since i was scanning things, I might as well.

Next down was from a couple weekends ago. My boyfriend and brother were playing video games and I felt like drawing, so this is a model out of a magazine. Her face isn't quite right, i think her mouth's lopsided. But since i only spent about an hour on it, i'm pretty happy with it.

The next three were from several weekends ago, at a friend's house. I felt like drawing at about 2 am but really lacked the mental capabilites to think of anything interesting, or draw with any finesse. So they are also pretty lame. So really in this whole batch there were only two drawings worth posting, but oh well. At least anyone who still bothers to read this knows i'm alive.

worked on my salamanders a bit more. I havent really been in the creative groove lately, and when i've been making myself draw, it's been pretty bad. Still trying to figure out what to be for halloween, not having much luck there either. It just feels like all my creativity's gone away.

Just a tribaly thing i drew, a really bad face, and some girl who looks kinda shy. basically just tv-watching doodles. I've not been in the groove lately. this post and the last, the drawings are in no particular order since i got so backlogged.

Ok blogger's been giving me severe issues with not wanting to load pictures into my blog so i'm posting 5 pictures at once. 3 will be here, 2 in another post just so it doesnt balk to much at actually posting this. These are some tenative sketches for Alice again. Nothing too impressive, still feeling her out as a character. Sorry for the lack of posting. having lots of computer problems and lots of work. but i quit toys r us, so i should have more drawing time in the future, hence more posting.

Two characters I drew. The top's Ramona, an assassin. The bottom is Alice a rocker chick. She's got purple hair, you just don't know it yet. Still working on my character design abilites. The poses aren't real exciting, but I'm still getting the feel for how I want them to look, and it's hard to do that with extreme angles or action shots. Eventually I'll break them down into the face and expressions and the spread arms and legs postion doing front and back and side views. But for now just working on basic looks and feel.

Just some bears I drew. They're all inside jokes with my boyfriend and I. Their names from top left down are Squishy Wimpkins, Bonus bear, Bonus Hamster (he's a bear, really. it's on his shirt), Betsy Bearkins, Francesca in a cinnamon roll hat, Bubble Bear, and Pickle Bear.

Did a quick little sketch, had the image in my head and I felt like drawing. No reference photos or anything, so the gun's just a vague shape, and i know the hat's not right. And yes it's a girl with her hair pinned up, not a feminine guy.

Sorry I haven't posted a while. I started my second job monday, it was a lot longer day then expected. Then i've been working the rest of the week while fighting being sick. I really didn't feel like being creative today, so I just worked on coloring my salamandar picture. I didn't get real far but i feel pretty bad right now. I have to work all day tomorrow so there won't be a post tomorrow, i didn't know when else i'd get to post something. Don't expect a lot of updates in the next week or so, until i get used to my new schedual and get over being sick.

More mythological creatures. This is my selkie man. The books I read say selkies in human form aren't much different than any other human, except they'll be walking along the beach for hours with their hems still wet and water and seaweed pooled in their footprints. This was hard to caputre in just a rough pencil sketch. I find water really hard to convey with just greyscale, and particularly with pencil. Maybe if I get a bit more spare time and inspiration I'll clean it up a lot and make it much more detailed. I also had some trouble with the angle. Forshortening from behind and all that. I'll have to use some photo references or make someone model for me if I do a full illustration of it. Maybe I'll add a selkie lass next to him with her skirt hems all wet as well.

I've been reading Mercedes Lackey's fairy tale books lately. I just finished reading Pheonix from Ashes, which is a cinderella re-mix with elemental magic. I liked the little salamandar fire elementals so i thought i would draw a couple as I imagine them. Little salamandars that curl up in the flames. I might color this in photoshop sometime.

Just a quick dragon sketch. It's based off a dragon figurine I painted a while back. I wasn't in the mood to do a fully rendered image. Today was all gray and gloomy, I wanted to draw I just couldn't muster up the energy to care. Plus the easer on my pencil was bad and I couldnt' find my good mechanical eraser so I didn't feel like getting overly detailed when I couldn't even erase my mistakes.

I spent about 2 hours finishing this up. So probably around 4 hours on the whole drawing. I know sketch books are usually places to do quick drawings, not really thorough rendered peices, but I feel I'm learning a lot from these studies. Working on getting different textures like stone, metal, plants, water ect. I'm really proud how this turned out. I like the little guy. I have a few more gargoyle pictures, maybe sometime i'll give them a try too. I think i'm going to take a break from really thorough drawings for a bit, however, and go back to some quick sketching studies.

I like gargoyles. I like the buildings in New York that still have little ones hidden away. I think it's a shame how boring modern buildings are. Just big walls of concrete with windows thrown in. I like all the gothic architecture with the swooping arches, gargoyles, intricate carvings and everything. It makes buildings so much more interesting. I found some stock photos of gargoyles, I decided to start drawing this one because I like the expression on his face. Rather than doing smooth shading with lots of smudging, i decided to use a quasi-pointilism shading to give it more stone-like texture. It's not done yet, my hand was wearing out. I'll finish and post it tomorrow probably. Hopefully i'll have more than one image tomorrow, since it's my day off.

I finished my engine picture. It turned out ok i guess. I think i'm going to give myself lead poisoning one of these days. Fingers work so much better for smudging then those little paper stick things or tissues or anything else. this probably took about 4 hours all together.

This isn't done yet, but it's about 2 hours worth of sketching. I decided that since I'm not very good at drawing mechanical stuff, maybe i should work on it. As you can see, it's very sketchy and not very mechanical looking yet. hopefully it'll get better as i work. Maybe i'll start a new trend of organic machinery. But anyway, i'm tired of working on it now and its late, so i'm calling it good for a night.

I've been slacking a bit this week, haven't had a lot to post. So I made myself draw tonight. Not terribly impressed with the results. Its funny how things go. The waterfall sketch I meant to be more of a doodle to pass time turned into this really elaborate drawing that i got really into. I wanted this to be this big dramatic cloudscape full of subtle shadings and i just got bored with it. I also discovred conte crayons are really not my favorite medium, i greatly prefer charcoal. They dont smudge well enough and layer on too thick too fast. I couldnt get the smudgin to go dark enough, but the initial marks to lay down color wouldn't smudge into blobs, they stayed too sharp. So it looks more like blobs of black instead of a dramatically lit cloudscape.

I meant to post this pictures before leaving for Soak City yesterday, but blogger was acting up. I tried about 10 times before giving up, and I got home too late at night to post them then. I worked all day today, so I guess late's better than never. The first is just a dragon doodle. The second is a picture that started out as a idle sketch of a waterfall picture and turned into a 2 hour plus drawing focusing on value and texture.

No art today. I cleaned all day and then when I sat down to draw, nothing would come to me. I just coudn't get into it. I have some vague markings on a page where I started to sketch a forest based on an image I found, but I just wasn't feeling it. its nothing dark enough to even scan in, it wouldn't show up. I carried around my sketchbook for 2 hours, trying to get inspired, it just wasn't happening tonight. I won't be posting for a few days either, I'm going to my boyfriends after work tomorrow. I'll hopefully draw when I'm up there, so I should have several pages to scan when I get home. Sorry about the lack of art today.

bonus post to make up for missing several. I was doodling in photoshop. These are moon bears. They live on the moon and sing little songs all day that sound something like "loo loo loooo". Sometimes they wear fishbowls on their heads because they saw silly people walking around on the moon wearing them, so they thought it was the thing to do.

Eh after I worked and then worked out I did not really feel like drawing much. I finished up my Envy drawing, but I really don't care for it. Her pose isn't really indicative of envy, and her face is rather flat. And it didn't capture the expression I wanted. And her hair looks silly. And her dress is kinda boring. In other words, I'll probably re-do her later. As I mentioned before, this isn't a journal for all finished works, so I'm posting my failures as well as my successes.

I had a request to post a review of Monster House, so here it goes. First of all, for being a kid's movie, it was really pretty creepy. It was a big house that ate people, and there was no pussyfooting around it like lots of movies do. No "oh and it was all a dream" or "only said kid can see it, nobody else". It was good though, lots of humor and good voice acting. I don't want to spoil it for anyone, so I won't go into the plot too much.

Graphics wise, I was really impressed. We paid a bit extra so we could wear silly glasses and see it in 3-D. I personally thought it was worth it. Most of the 3-d was subtle, but in the beginning there was a really awesome display of leafs blowing in the wind that worked really well in 3-d. The animation was also very good. They took a sensible approach, I felt, in not trying to be overly realistic. They were able to get very beleivable characters, and very beleivable expressions. When animators try to get too life-like, such as in Polar Express, I tend to focus more on what flaws keep it from being perfect, instead of how good the animation is. People have real life to compare realistic animation to, so any flaw is really noticable. This movie took the road of The Incredibles and Shrek, producing amazing animation that actually looks like animation.

All in all I would recomend the movie. It really didn't feel too much like a kid movie. If anything it seemed aimed more at the 12-15 range then the really young children. Several puberty references and ackward teen-boy-girl moments. Entertaining and nice to look at, what else is there to ask for in a movie?

I had work today, so I just squeezed out one drawing before heading to Monster House tonight. Well I started another, but I don't really want to post it just yet. I decided I want to do some roughs of women depicting the 7 deadly sins. I might do a full group illustration, or just a series of colored ones or something. This is my initial try at Pride. Just a rough sketch. Working on envy right now. I'll probably post that tomorrow.

Another day, another post. I had today off so I should have drawn a whole lot. Instead I just drew a page of faces. I did work a bit on a Flash movie I did for class. I didn't finish it to my satisfaction, so I'm trying to do so now. So here are some faces. I was just trying to draw from weird angles such as from below and from above. I have a hard time with both of those. Some turned out better than others, obviously

I know, I know, I'm not doing very well with the whole posting every day. I had three long days back to back, and now I'm too tired to draw. So as a consolation prize, I'm posting some "sketch photoshop work" as I am going to call it. The second two peices are ones my boyfriend and I worked on. We each picked a starting photo for the other, then swapped images every half hour, adding something new to them until we got tired. These are by no means finished work, and since we had time limits, some of the selections are shakey.

The top image is a composition I'm toying with, I just need to decide where to go with it. I just haven't had a chance to work on it more. This is pretty much a site for creative process, so this shows some of my photo manipulation creative process.

I decided to keep on a bit with the drawing of environments. This time I made it up entirely myself. I kinda based the idea off of Mercedes Lackey's Hawkbrother vales. They are essentially villages set into a forrest, and the people live in houses wrapped around trees. There is a lot of vegetation and hot springs. I had that in mind when drawing it, how I envision the environment.

Ok so my whole "posting every day" is off to a rough start. I have an excuse, that a major project came up last minute. I really did draw the next day, and I'm uploading those two pages now. I didn't get to draw yesterday due to finishing said project, then having to work til late. I didn't get home til almost 10:30, by then I was just exhausted and didn't even feel like scanning in the previous day's work, much less creating more. So I drew another page today, and am uploading three at once. I'll try to do better from now on.

The first image is a perspective study. I am not happy with it at all, but I figured I would post it just so this doesn't become a showcase of nothing but finished product. The point is supposed to show my creative process, and in my mind that means showing the rough spots as well.

The second two images are city scapes I pulled out of a "how to draw galactic worlds" book. I'm not the best at creating environments, particularly ones that involve made up structures or landscapes. I tried to personalize them a bit, but mostly they are just step by step drawings. I'm still pleased with the result, I think I learned a lot about how to draw and overview of a scene.

This is the first post in my new sketch-blog. I am making it a new goal to post at least one page, if not more, every day. By that, I mean pages of my sketchbook. Nothing fancy, just whatever doodles I did. I'm hoping this will be a way to force myself to draw more, and not be lazy. If I have people bugging me that I didn't post anything in 3 days, maybe I will be inspired to step it up a bit. As a note to friends or family that visit this, please remember that I might be sending this to potential employers to show how my creativity flows. So if you make comments, keep them appropriate. Nothing rude or overly personal, please.

These two pages are from the past couple days and today. I got a new book on facial expressions, so I have been practicing with them. The picture of the woman is adding a body to the face and working on modifying it a little to suit the image, not just coppying the face exactly.