I love going to Trivia Night with my boyfriend and his posse, but the announcer waits forever between questions and last night I was stuck at the end of the table (not good for conversation), so I doodled.
My boyfriend swears the freckly-faced manga girl is me, but I'm pretty darn sure that I'm not projecting; our personalities are so different!
My manga style needs more refining, so I started this doodling something that would let me work on how I want to draw hair. Obviously, I got a little carried away. I really can't wait to have time to finish and ink this, though.
I've done a lot of art in the past month. Most of it I can't post, but I'll catch up on what I can.
I haven't seriously tried painting with acrylics since I graduated high school (almost a decade ago, oh my), because I was never very good at it; color eludes me. I thought it might be time to give it another go, so I got out a mini-canvas -- adorable at 3"x3" -- and attempted to recreate a tree that's on the drive home from work. For a while there the leaves were only turning on one side, from the top down, and I thought it looked interesting.
The photo isn't very good, but then again neither is the painting.
So here's the entire collection of ballpoint illustrations! I made a few changes to some of the ones I posted before, so I might as well post them all in their finished state.
So here we have "Generating Ideas" and "Pondering Use of Words." And ugh, the "Words" one took way longer than it should have! I think it was filling the bins with words that did it, that required translating (and somewhere in the middle of that I realized that the translator had switched from English-Swedish to Swedish-English, which meant I had to start all over, blargh).
Despite the excessive creation time, I'm rather pleased with both of these.
My client is currently chilling on the Thames River. I am so incredibly jealous. ^_^
So here are some pictures from the freelance project I'm working on. It's a book/calendar on writing to be published in Sweden. Ann is really delightful to work with; currently she's moving from Sweden to the UK by ship!
These two pieces are about connecting with readers' emotions and dealing with writer's block.
Oh, and a neat bit of trivia: the Swedish writing in the block picture is the opening paragraph from Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Sea-Maid, which shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. ;)
I decided that eyes and hair were the biggest things I needed to work on (besides inking, ugh), so today I just started drawing a bunch of different kinds of manga eyes. It's quite fun. I'll have to do more.
Apparently I cannot sketch loosely and then ink; I mess up all over the place. And when I start messing up, I unconsciously start pressing harder, which apparently will split the tip of a 005 Micron like nothing else. Time for a trip to the art store...
I am, however, very fond of this little doodle. Poor Don, drooling his little heart out...
I tried to make a companion piece for my previous pinup, and I like the outfit and the type of attractive I chose, but I'm just not sold on the pose yet.
Maybe it's okay and I'm just overtired. Or it might suck and I'll end up redoing it.
At any rate, I'm going to leave it for a bit and see how I feel.
I keep telling myself his was an exercise in detailed inking and pushing my usual self-imposed figure boundaries, but really I just wanted to draw something girly and sexy. I think it came out REALLY cute!
(The inking hand submits that eyelet lace was a frustrating choice. It is outvoted by the estrogen center, who contends that eyelet is adorable.)
I'm not sure if I'm going to leave this as flats, cell-shade it, or full-on paint it up. We'll see.
BTW, if this gives someone a bite from the cosplay bug, just let me know beforehand, okay? Some internet surprises give artists cardiac arrest.
