I also did a bunch of drawing for SnoogleZoo today.  I have a one-off, and part of a longer story arc in development, and I just need to get them out on paper. It’s hard starting over, but I’ve missed those little guys and I only ever stopped because I set the bar a little too high to begin with. So I’m taking more of a quality-over-quantity approach this time, which means I probably won’t manage a regular update schedule for a while, but at least each strip will be something I can be proud of. I’m working on drawing everybody consistently, and trying out a couple of different ways of inking- I think it’d be neat to ink SnoogleZoo with a brush because it seems like all the fur on the characters would work well with a fluid line, but then there are small details like the little round eyes that I’m worried I won’t be able to pull off with a brush. Plus, technical pens are just so darn comfortable. But really, how am I supposed to get comfortable with a new tool without using it?

I have to be careful about letting all this noodling get in the way of my actually moving forward with the project. I can keep practicing forever and never get a strip together If I’m not careful. So I’m aiming to at least start posting little paintings, if not a proper strip, by May 3rd. Yep, that’s  a week from tomorrow! I’m going to be pretty busy this week making that happen.

Tags: art, comics, doodles, drawing, owls, polymer clay, snooglezoo, works in progress

You wouldn’t know it by looking at this blog, but I’ve been drawing and doodling an awful lot lately. I finished this Stellar’s Jay this morning. I’m not thrilled with how it came out- it’s not bad, but it got away from me in the watercolor portions again. It’s easier to see in person than it is in this crappy camera phone pic. Right now I think I’d rather post to the blog more often with doodles and camphone pics than fuss with scanning and uploading things that aren’t exactly worth the time to deal with that way. Plus, my scanner isn’t scanning clearly anymore, so there’s not as much of an incentive for me to bother with it.

What do you think? Would you rather see more, even if it’s not as clear?

Tags: art, birds, drawing, ink, watercolor, works in progress

It’s too bad- I really liked the pencils for this, but I pretty much lost control of it as soon as I started to apply the color. I had really gotten used to the way I was doing the inks, and watercolor is just not going to behave the same way.

Well, whatever. It was actually kind of freeing to just mess with it without worrying about ruining the painting after I had already ruined it.  This one, I think, didn’t really stand a chance of turning out well- I started working on it pretty late at night, for one thing. For another thing I don’t have the slightest idea how to paint iridescent feathers with watercolor.

However, I’ve noticed that I’m finding ways to avoid sitting down to start another after I finish one, especially if it turned out well. I had been wanting to do a bird all day (look at my Twitter for Sunday to see how early I intended to start working on this), so by 10:30 at night I sat down and said “Damnit, I’m going to do a bird, and I give myself permission to do it badly if I have to!”

And I did. But at least I sat down and did it! And now I’m clearer about a few of the issues I’ll have when I come to do colorful, iridescent birds again.

Tags: art, being blocked, birds, painting, rufous hummingbird, watercolor, works in progress

I know, right? It’s been over a month since I last put up a post. I’ve had the winter blahs- I’m doing work,  but I haven’t been inclined to put it up. I took a week off work this week, and I have some stuff to show, like this little 6×6 of a black phoebe that I did yesterday.  And I have a few more days to work on a few other things. I feel like I’ve been creatively hibernating through the winter, but it’s time to wake up and get cracking on some projects. Like these birds. There will be a bunch more birds like this.

Tags: animals, art, birds, birdwatching, black phoebe, drawing, I'm alive!, ink

Started the year off with this fine specimen.It was 11:30 at night on January 1st and I was determined to start the year off on a good note by drawing something. I also found a mini-marathon of Star Trek: TNG, and got a little distracted. So I put the two together.

I did a bunch of animals, and played with ink washes and brushes:

A day or two later I got stuck. It happens to me a lot, because I get hung up on Working on My Career instead of just Drawing Pictures, which is sort of mission-critical for, y’know, working on my career. I had this funny little image of a cat in a flying sailboat that I kept putting off drawing because I didn’t know precisely what a sailboat looks like.

I let go of the precision I thought I wanted and got the idea down, just so I could move on to something else. Which is pretty much exactly what happened. I don’t know why it still surprises me that it works like that.

Plus,  I decided I liked the awkwardness of my little sailboat, and didn’t try to refine it when I went back and did a full painting based on my doodle a week or two later:

So that was last night. I’ve been wanting to work on my watercolor skills, so I went through the pages looking for something to paint (ohhhh, is that what sketchbooks are for? How novel!). I didn’t mean to finish it all in one go- I want to work on not rushing through projects and being able to finish things that I leave for more than one sitting, but I got carried away. It turned out pretty cute. There will probably be more flying sailboats this year.

But tonight I was going through my Drawer O’ Art Junk, and found an unused block of Master Carve. So I made a print block featuring my little buddy:

The speech bubble is empty on the block, so I can make the owl say anything by writing or typing into the speech bubble. I was thinking of using it as a personal bookplate.

So, stuff. The holidays were stressful at work and I spent a lot of my free time recovering. Then the new year got off to kind of a rough start- lots of sadness for a lot of my friends’ pets (in total, we lost two dogs, a cat, and a hamster within about two days of each other), then my dog got herself injured and needed stitches. Then we had a rather large earthquake here in Eureka. So it was just one thing after another that kept me away from the ol’ blog. But I kept drawing, so I had to share.

Tags: art, being blocked, cats, doodles, drawing, ink wash, linoleum, musk ox, owls, painting, pets, print, watercolor

I’m told it’s because of a Facebook-like site designed for kids called Club Penguin, which I checked out breifly, but I don’t really know much about it. What I do know is that I am lacking in penguin-related designs in my Zazzle shop, so I made one for my morning doodle today and did a few different colors.

I like these little graphical designs of animals in candy colors. One of these days I might compile them all into a pattern, or maybe just do a series with one pattern for each animal.

Tags: animals, art, doodles, penguin, vector

This is from a few weeks ago, when I said I’d been painting peacocks all day. This is the first one I did. I wanted to play with my watercolors, so made a fairly random decision to do a designy-looking peacock and not look at any references, just start painting and let it come out however it wants. It doesn’t look anything like a real peacock, but I do like the simple shapes of the body, and I enjoyed the experience of painting those ridiculously long tail feathers. The flowers just decided they wanted to be there, so I let them.

This alphabet exercise that was sort of suggested in What It Is has really helped free me up and enable me to even work on something like that peacock above. What I have been doing pretty frequently* is writing the date and the alphabet on one sheet of paper, and then doodling around from there until I’ve filled the page up sufficiently to feel like it’s okay to stop. There have been a lot of Really Cool Things coming out of these pages, and some things that are just silly and wonderful.

I did one with a brush at one point, and a page or two afterwords, I did this:

…which is pretty funny because of the work I’ve been doing lately, and the possibility that a brush-and-ink comic is in my future. This is due in part to the acquisition of a very fancy sable-hair brush that everyone sings the praises of. I’d been doing the thing where I’d want to try the Very Exciting Tool, in this case, this brush, but instead of just buying the one I want, I’d keep buying brush after brush that was cheaper, but much lower quality, until I’d spent more than the cost of buying the one I wanted in the first place.

People fail at diets for the same reason. They want to eat a brownie, so they eat a bagel. Unsatisfied, they have a quesadilla, a salad, a smoothie, and maybe 4 oranges before they finally break down and eat the brownie they wanted all along, getting the brownie calories plus the everything-else calories to boot.

There’s this great comic called Octopus Pie, by Meredith Gran, that she inks with a brush. I was wanting something to practice on, so tonight I came up with a couple of figures that are in a similar style to the ones in Octopus Pie:

This is the second day after having gotten my fancy new sable brush. I like it a lot, though I still need some practice keeping my line under control. One thing, though? I am keeping way too much superfluous stuff on my drawing board, because some of the goofiness of some of these lines are a direct result of my arm movement being restricted by something. I need to organize my stuff!

Lastly, I have this little guy, which I did earlier this evening:

…who was also doodled in watercolor with  no particular plan. This might be me rebelling against the rigidity of doing watercolors the traditional way. But I do feel like a little planning can be a good thing. My little spatuletail hummingbird from the other day had just the tiniest bit of forethought**, and I think it came out pretty nicely. Whatever, I’m going slow, like the manatee says. I don’t need to make any masterpieces any time soon. I’m just happy to be turning out any kind of work I like.

*For the first month I was doing one of these alphabet pages daily, but I fell off the wagon just after my 24-hour comic experience, when I went out of town the very next day.

**no pencils, though! I spent a good ten minutes staring a a blank peice of paper, waving my wet-but-empty brush over it and going “hmm,” like an artist! XD

Tags: art, batman, doodles, drawing, felt pens, gumby, jerry garcia, journal comic, lynda barry, manatee, meredith gran, octopus pie, peacock, pie, sable brush, spock

There was this video that came to my attention earlier this week about an unusual little bird from Peru. The Spatuletail Hummingbird is this tiny little creature (endangered, of course) with only four tail feathers. In the males, two of those four tail feathers grow long and have these dark blue-violet paddles at the end (the spatules). Imagine a peacock’s tail, how huge and beautiful and totally, impractically unweildy it is. Now imagine that on an itty bitty hummingbird. The males don’t fly much, and when they do, it’s only for a few seconds, and it’s just to impress a lady (of course!).

I love hummingbirds, and I’ve been playing around with ink and watercolor in this little spiral-bound watercolor book lately, and the spatuletail hummingbird kind of captured my imagination, so I had to have one for myself. I wish I hadn’t done the leaves- it would’ve been a stronger composition- so if I do it again on nice paper I’ll take them out. But go watch the video, because they are really amazing.

Tags: art, bbc, doodles, hummingbird, ink, painting, power animals, spatule hummingbird, spatuletail hummingbird, watercolor

I haven’t been posting them, but I’ve been playing with seamless repeating patterns since the beginning of the year. While it’s mostly been flowers and other sort of geometric shapes, there was this one file I started with the intention to fill with as many unique, organic shapes as I could, and this pattern of sea critters started to take shape. It took me a three or four sesssions to finish it (over the course of several months!), but it’s finally done!

I learned a little trick while I was working on this one. I kept testing it out and in spite of all of the unique shapes, I was still really aware of exactly where the tiles were seaming. I had overlapping shapes, but it wasn’t until I started using certain motifs over again within the tile that the rhythm finally broke up enough for me and the pattern started to feel more natural to my eyes. The tiling isn’t 100% invisible, especially at this small size, but it’s a lot better than where it started (I don’t see any strong path of  white running through it anymore, for instance), and I’m really proud of this one

Tags: animals, art, ocean, patterns, sea life, vector

I spent the weekend doing just about anything but drawing. I slept a lot, I watched cartoons, I raked the yard clean of leaves. I think last week was just too much- too busy at work, too emotionally draining- and I needed a vacation from thinking.

Now we’re on to a new week, and I’m feeling recharged and ready to start a Very Big Project at the beginning of November. And I drew a toucan.

I stumbled across a neat little trick in illustrator that I probably already knew, but forgot. I made these fern leaves and grouped them so that I could easily fill the tree with foliage. I had it all one color, and then accidentally selected an individual leaf within the group with the white arrow. So I shift-selected a few more and changed the tone of just those leaves. I think it worked pretty nicely to give the cloned fronds a little more variation.

Tags: adobe illustrator, art, interesting, technique, vector