Minor Update for January 2018

Allos again! It seemed time to finally (finally) put out an update. Work’s been a bit tough lately — I blame the holidays — and I’ve been trying to find freelance jobs that will allow me to spend more time doing what I enjoy. I also took an unneeded break from making artwork, namely because I could not find any good inspiration for things I wanted to draw. Well, things appear to be looking up in that regard; I was able to work on a number of things that expanded my horizons.

In any case, on to the art!

Exhumation

 Can be found on my DeviantArt, here.

This was another of those lunch-time sketches that I’ve been working on for roughly a month. It was inspired by videos of exhumations. I don’t know why, but I was intrigued by the way rainwater would seep into a burial vault and remain trapped there, slowly flooding the casket and leaving the body in a grim soup… That’s disgusting, heh!

In any case, this was the piece that served as my warm-up for getting back into art. I needed to draw something. I think the shaky start is visible in the quality of the piece; the dark areas have little definition and the wrinkles don’t make a whole lot of sense.  I did put a lot more work into the body beneath than is actually visible, but I lost that detail when I “flooded” the casket. I suppose there’s a bit of irony there.

At’thania Atka (Color Version)

 Can be found on my DeviantArt, here.

O.K. To be fair, this isn’t a new piece. Rather, it’s an old one that I decided to color digitally. However, it does demonstrate my first real leap into working with color on a piece of my finished artwork.

 See that gallery? Finally, some color!

It took about four hours. I used Krita to multiply in the color layers, as per the advice of numerous artists on YouTube. I also colored Magwalbi — as can be seen in that picture of my gallery — but don’t feel like I did as good of a job with it. I’ll redraw that dog one of these days, and give him a more professional style…

Slinkster

 Also can be found on my DeviantArt, here.

And this is what I spent a good few hours working on last night: an image of my pet corn snake. I did this in ballpoint pen, as per the suggestion of my brother. He really likes the look of my ink work, and I haven’t worked in the medium in quite a while. I started with pencil guidelines, as always, and completed the shading and outlines in pen. The ferns in the background, with their variable hatching took by far the longest out of anything in this drawing. In the end, I kind of like the effect they produced. What do you guys think?

That’s it for this update. I am working on some more artwork to the side of this that I hope to document here, soon. I also have a new composition method that I’ve been meaning to try out and demonstrate for a friend — I believe I’m something along the order of four months late on that one, heh!

Where did I go? Am I back?

There is a cruel irony to this post. I was ready to really start pounding away at the keyboard and manning the sketchbooks— I wanted to show you my working process as I started work on several projects. I even managed to pull this off with a portrait I had done for my friend. Then… silence for nearly two months.

What happened? Well, first on the list of hobby-crippling events: I moved into a new apartment with my brother and old roommate from college. This happened right at the end of July and carried through into the first half of August. Needless to say, there was a good bit of unpacking and cleaning to do; the previous tenants left us the absolutely lovely gift of an under-sink cabinet encrusted in black mold.

Yeah, my brother and roommate did a much better job of cleaning that up.

In addition to the woes of moving — nothing ground-breaking there — I visited my parents a couple of times. While that did not inherently prevent me from drawing, it did take me away from my set-up. Actually, I just forgot to bring my clipboard, heh… That and their scanner has a little story of its own, below.

It looked a bit different from this, but I'll spare you the details.

The real issue came shortly after I finished the final sketch, below. I was having some major problems regarding my lower digestive-tract. So severe were they, in fact, that I ended up missing three days of work and going on medical leave. Yay! Time away from work that I can spend making art! Right? Unfortunately, given the nature of the illness, I was… precluded… from any of my hobbies. I’ll leave that to you’re imagination. It ended up being chronic, which is also fun.

That leave lasted about a month — the last half of August, and the first half of September — which brings us to now. I finally got that old drawing uploaded, and I managed to get something done while I was out. I’ll let you see them, below!

You can find this on my DeviantArt, here.

I am a nerd. There is no avoiding that fact, I’m afraid. And, being the nerd that I am, I joined an online role-playing site. Essentially, I can play D&D with random strangers without having to worry about coordinating a sit-down game. My character is a tribal ranger, and her companion is a large hound. I drew the dog first, using a mastiff for the pose — I wanted a monstrous-looking form — and worked in the fur of a bearded collie. A big point for me was to have the braided fur along his sides.  It's a tribal thing.  The style is pretty rough and sketchy, but I think it might be alright for a graphic novel — provided I can work out the problems with the cross-hatching.

You can also find this on my DeviantArt, here.

And here is my character, herself. I stayed up a little too late working on this one and am still trying to turn my sleep-cycle around, heh. I wanted to mix my detailed shading with heavy outlines to make the drawing a bit more “stylized,” I suppose the word would be. That’s a topic I’d like to cover some day; I have what you might call an unpopular opinion of it. Mostly, I am happy to have had more portrait practice, and D&D characters always make interesting subjects.

I should also thank my mother, as she provided me with the materials necessary to draw those pictures above. I didn’t have my truck, nor did I feel well enough to drive out to buy anything. I am blessed to have a family that cares so much about me, as well as friends and acquaintances that are all concerned with my well-being. I’m not sure if any of you will read this, but if you do, thank you.

This brings me back to the issue of the scanner. My parents use a Kodak ESP 7 All-in-One printer and scanner. As I’m sure every artist knows: printers and scanners are some of the most frustrating pieces of technology ever devised. This is doubly true for printers and triply true for all-in-ones. Further aggravating the issue, I exclusively use Linux for anything productive, and Kodak is not a decent enough company to provide drivers for the operating system. It took about three hours of work, but I got the open-source ones working — to a better standard than the proprietary Kodak photo-center-thing, might I add (smug smile) — and could finally scan things from my parents' house. Oddly, the scanner refused to function when directly connected via USB to the computer, and only worked over my home network… This is particularly befuddling because one would think scanning over a network would be the harder of the two methods. Oh well.

I’m definitely going to do a post one day about my experiences as an artist that uses Linux instead of Microsoft’s Windows, or Apple’s macOS (I think that’s what they’re calling it now). Most have actually been quite pleasant, and I would never consider returning to either of the others — particularly not Mac. No one should use Mac. It is objectively inferior both in terms of software and hardware to essentially any other offering. Needless to say, it saddens me to see that the company has entrenched its grossly over-priced products in the art community — a community that is certainly not known for its ability to accumulate wealth. I’ll stop here before the rant takes off, and I’ll share the details about why I feel this way in a later post.

This as well, here.

And finally, we get to that drawing I’ve been wanting to show you for the past two months. I was finally able to scan it and upload it after returning home. It only took about two hours to draw and finally gave me a passable result with cross-hatching. I should clarify: I can crosshatch with pen a lot better than I can with pencil. That’s not to say that I’m good at it… in fact, I think cross-hatching is still one of the weakest of my skills. But finally, I am not completely unhappy with the result. The saddest part of this entire story is that the drawing’s really nothing special. It certainly wasn’t worth waiting two months for.

That’s about it. I’m afraid. Sorry about the long post, but I felt a bit of explanation was in order. Looking ahead, there doesn’t appear to be much of anything in the way of my old, regular schedule. However, I have learned my lesson about optimism and I am not going to jinx it! Suffice it to say, I am hoping my luck holds out.

No.  It says "no."  It always says "no" unless a "yes" would be more damaging.

Drawing Attila the Hun

Today, I will be showing my process for drawing Attila the Hun — a drawing requested by a good friend of mine.

To start off with, I rendered out the contour lines for the figure. I decided to take the East-Asian approach to Attila, as there is a theory that the Huns originated somewhere in eastern Asia. Other than that, however, not much is known about the Huns. They were almost entirely erased by the Romans. Their language has been forgotten, save for a few words that seem similar to those in the Mongolian, Turkish, or the Altaic languages (which sucks for me, because I love linguistics and ancient languages). So, I had to take some liberties with this portrayal.

Again, I stress that this step is the most important when completing the image. No amount of shading is going to help save a bad base.

After laying out the basic framework for the drawing, the rest is actually fairly easy. In this step, I filled in the face. I wanted to get it done first, because it will end up being the focal point of the drawing.

I then finished the hair and started on the fluffy rim of his helm. Sorry about the white bar cutting through the hat — I think my scanner messed up. The hair was actually fairly easy to fill in. Though, I learned during the framing stage that the bangs had to remain high on his forehead. If I went lower with the hair, it would have looked like he had a woman’s haircut. It also helped to keep the “square” corners (the very edges above his ears) of his upper forehead revealed. Ultimately, I wish I had been able to make the hairs a bit thinner.

In this step, I completed the hat. The fluffy part of the hat was actually much easier than I thought it would be.  Other than that, the conical shape extending upward was fairly easy to fill in.

And then I moved down to the wrap of fabric around his neck, as well as the quilted pad of armor on his chest. Perhaps, by now, you’re seeing what I mean by the framing step being the most important; I haven’t done much in the following steps other than shade. That shading has been almost entirely reliant upon those lines I set up earlier. The only other thing that went into the shading was a basic understanding of how light tends to illuminate the face — those triangular regions of lighting falling from the upper cheeks to around the nose, for instance.

I also added a bit of stubble.

Finally, I filled in the shoulders with fur. I was originally going to make this a wrinkled fabric, but realized that my shading more readily resembled fur. I liked the change and thus kept it. And that’s it. A few hours of drawing — most of it spent in the framing stage — and we have this. For the final image, I cleaned off those dots of material around the head and played a bit with the contrast.

That contrast bump makes it look a bit more like it does in real life — I’ve noticed that the scanner tends to brighten the images I draw. I think I might have pushed this contrast a bit too far in Sepulchre, though. I was more cautious with this image, though, and feel that my restraint paid off.

I hope to see you in the next post!

Not much of a conqueror, eh?
That looks a bit more like a knit cap.