Working on Anatomy/People

Lately I've been trying to work on gestures, anatomy, and general figure drawing. When I've tried this in the past, I always get stuck in the middle of a Loomis book (free downloads of these at Escape From Illustration Island in the link) or some anatomy text and just draw one or two static pictures and call it a day. Not terribly effective.

My current strategy is to play to my ADD and go to multiple sources. I've been reading digested/simplified anatomy at two blogs geared towards animation: Rad Sechrist's Rad How-To and Kris Anka's Design Lessons. Both of these break down more traditional anatomy and figure drawing basics into practical chunks.

I go back and forth between these blogs and Loomis's Figure Drawing For All It's Worth to get proportions, forms, and muscle relation studies, and then jump over to Pixelovely's Gesture Drawing Tool for practice with timed pictures (warning: nekkid people). Rinse and repeat. There are also some neat references at Posemaniacs, though all the models are generated by computer and can seem awkward.

In any case, I hope to get a better grip on drawing fluid, lifelike poses out of this.

Recent Work

Here are some models and renderings I did recently for Honolulu-based interior design company Retail Therapy. These models are of a proposed cell phone store somewhere in town. I'll update when the store is done.

Inktober 6, 7

Sketches:

What a reality TV show about me doing freelance design/art would be like, according to my girlfriend:

Inktober 5

I really like the look of twisted trees, and take lots of pictures them when I'm out hiking or relaxing at the beach. Here's a sketch of one such picture taken a little while back of a fallen tree branch on the North Shore of Oahu.

Mainly done with my current favorite pen, a Japanese Uni-ball Signo 0.28, with some help from the Pentel brush pen and 0.5 Signo.

Inktober 3,4

Some more ink sketches done with the Pentel ink brush:

Hands

Hello Kitty clock, with friend.

Also, here's a cool video on how ink is made, via gurneyjourney.

Happy Inktober!

In celebration of Inktober, here are a couple of inky sketches from the past couple of days.

Toby sleeping, Pentel brush pen

Vampire squid, Pentel brush pen on tracing paper, done while working on lettering for a client project.

Illustration Friday - Proverb

Hi.

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. Here's my entry for this week's Illustration Friday. The topic was "proverb," and after some thought, I decided to illustrate "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime."

Analog ink + digital color

So now you know how to fish.

Sketch:

Illustration Friday - Early

Here's my first entry for an Illustration Friday topic - "Early"

Ink and watercolor on bristol.

New Years Cards

So to follow up on the last sketch update, I made up some cards for thank yous for Christmas gifts and for the New Year. Since it's the year of the tiger as of whenever Chinese new year is this year, I drew a bunch of tigers. Because I'm clever like that. There's no clear picture of the top one for some reason, so I included a scan of it. I think it's one of the stronger ones.

Happy New Year

Some hands in pencil:

From An Atlas of Anatomy for Artists


Holding a lime and lemon

And tigers. Rawr.

These were from photos, in a couple of types of pens, pencils, marker, and some watercolor. Guess the ink wasn't water resistant. I like that walking guy though. More on this later.