Alien She?

Drew this all the way back in the winter. Had a bizarre urge to draw some ruffly old school lolita threads on a really tall, freakishly distorted girl who may or may not be an alien.

Or maybe she just loves wearing her sclera contact lenses a lot. Who knows?

The truth is out there...

Omigawd, People With EARS?!

I could have started this with an "OMIGAWD I'M STILL DRAWING?!?!" joke but that would just be really predictable and lame. 

Anyways, these are just some sketches where I would just let my pen roam and see where it would take me. I also tried to play around with different facial and body types. I even decided to get super experimental and add EARS (honest-to-god EARS! ) on my people.

Let me know what you think. 

Giraffes Make For Great Gifts

Woohoo! My first upload of 2012!

Well, technically, I started drawing this about a month ago but then, well, holiday craziness combined with utterly bizarre medical issues crept up on me and prevented me from finishing this earlier.

Anyways, this is a sketch for the lovely LAMunster926 (of DeviantART and an all around good friend) who asked me to draw a giraffe and incorporate herself and her boyfriend (the super cool, also an all around good friend Anthony R., he of the web series "Music Freak"). It was great fun drawing my good friends as well as the giraffe itself. No really, they're freaking cool animals.

Hope you like it, Lee Ann!

SKETCHAVEMBER 2011 Day 17-ish: Another Batch of Toony Stew

Whoops.

Sorry for the Sketchavember schedule slip-up, guys. (To make a long story short; what was originally meant to be game night with friends turned into a night at the movie theatre watching the newest "Twilight" film. D-: Yeah. Alcohol did help, though.)

However, I did technically work on these sketches a good majority of the day yesterday.

To make up for my faux-pas, I'll do another drawing today and post it tonight as well.

Heh. I should do more of these toony people. ;-)

SKETCHAVEMBER 2011 Day 14: Oh, Monty...

Mmmkay, so I've been working on a drawing that's gotten a little too detailed to be completed in one day...but I just couldn't walk away from Day 14 of Sketchavember empty (drawing) hand...ed.

So here's a goofy little cartoon of my hyperactive attention hound (technically a miniature schnauzer) Monty (full name Charles Montgomery Burns). Excellent.

SKETCHAVEMBER 2011 Day 13: Blotty Dotty

I may have spent most of the day out and about but I still managed to squeeze in another drawing for Day 13 of Sketchavember.

In case you were wondering about the title (because I totally know that you are ;-P), I was trying to go for leopard spots on her cardigan but they ended up looking more like blots you'd see on a Rorschach test. If there's one thing I've learned tonight, it's that leopard spots are trickier to pull off with inking pens as opposed to markers.

Have fun looking for my signature. ;-)

SKETCHAVEMBER 2011 Day 12: Biba

Day 12 of Sketchavember ended up becoming some sort of classic movie bender day. (Translation: Turner Classic Movies has quickly become one of my favorite TV channels. Throw in a PVR and I'm a happy camper.)

One of the movies I watched today was Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times". I've always had a huge love and appreciation for silent films and today's drawing kind of reflects that. Also a strong influence for this drawing is one of the photographs in Kevyn Aucoin's book "Making Faces" in which he and Kate Moss recreate the look of "The Biba" (as in the 60's era London boutique). Here's the photograph in question.

Heh. So all in all, I drew some psuedo-fan art of Kate Moss (even if I don't have any particular feelings about her) today. That's Sketchavember for ya! ;-P

SKETCHAVEMBER 2011 Day 10: Just...FFFFFFFUUUUUU---

*sigh*

Ever have one of those days where it seems like everything you draw turns out completely wrong in your eyes? Day 10 of Sketchavember was one of those days.

They're frustrating as hell but as soon as I channeled all that irritation and annoyance into this ridiculous little doodle, whatever crappy mood I was dwelling in slowly melted away. I hate to dust out an old cliche but tomorrow's another day!

SKETCHAVEMBER 2011 Day 6: A Girl Like Me

Ever had a random piece of dialogue that you've been itching to work into a poem, story, song, comic or prose of some kind? Yeah, I just had to get it out of my head and onto paper for Day 6 of Sketchavember.

It's been a while since I last did one of these single panel, devoid-of-context "cryptic comics" but they're always so much fun to do. I love pieces that let you draw your own conclusions and let your imagination fill in the blanks.

What do you guys think?

I will give you one hint: I listened to a helluva lot of Depeche Mode. "Music for the Masses" era Depeche Mode to be exact. ;-)

SKETCHAVEMBER 2011 Day 1: Miss Polly Pegleg

It's baaaaack!

That's right folks, I'm joyfully subjecting myself to another round of Sketchavember! Don't know what it is? Morbidly curious? Learn more about it by clicking here. Take on the challenge...if you dare.

Anyways, this initially started out as a random character design. Of course, having the overactive imagination that I do, I ended up conjuring this whole story in my mind of how Polly Pegleg (that's her nickname) came to be and what hijinks she'd get herself into. I'm actually pretty tempted to turn it into some short comic story. We'll see. 8-)

Too Trololololicious For You...

Nyan Cat, can you handle this?
Numa Numa Guy, can you handle this?
Drama Prairie Dog, can you handle this?
I DON'T THINK YOU CAN HANDLE THIS!

Don't act like you didn't see this one coming! I gave you people fair warning in one of my recent journals...well, if you could call it that.

This may be both my goofiest and most blatantly cheesecake drawings that I've done.

I promise my next upload will have much more substance to it. ;-)

Cyber-Kei Cutie: V. 2.0 (Plus WIP Pics)

By a show of hands, who here remembers my "Cyber-Kei Cutie" drawing? Well, in case you don't remember (it was four years ago) here it is.

As you can see, I felt like revamping one of my older drawings not only to fix some of my own errors (those damn fingers!!) but as a challenge of sorts to see what I can do to update it with my current drawing style and techniques. Once again, I felt like trying some more grey tone stuff.

Heh, four years from now I'll probably be revamping this again but for now, I'm still pretty satisfied with how this came out. At least I got the fingers on her left hand in their proper places.

Toony Stew

Here's a fun little drawing exercise I picked up from jeinu's excellent tutorials on DeviantART.

Draw a bunch of odd, random shapes and try to create a face out of them. They turned out much more cartoonier than what I usually do but y'know what? It's really fun to get super cartoony every once in a while. It also helps that I was watching a lot of episodes of "The Critic" ("Needs more love" is an understatement) so I had a lot of their looser, cartoony character designs in mind while working on these.

With all these bizarre shapes, I wanted to draw a range of different ages, genders, shapes and characterizations.

Top left corner is a mall loitering sceney-bopper (you know 'em when you see 'em), top right corner disapproves of your lower middle-class shenanigans and waistlines, middle right became some sort of willowy, pretty boy Michael Jackson goth type, bottom left corner is a mopey sadsack working a soulless 9 to 5 desk job and bottom right corner is such an adorable little Jabba (as in Jabba the Hut) girl.

Let me know what you think.

Ennui in Ebony

"Why do you keep doing this?"

(Semi) funny story, I actually had the pencils for this sketch card sitting at my drawing table since late August. I had been inking and penciling this one over the last two conventions I was at but I never managed to complete it all...UNTIL NOW!

I love drawing totally open ended pieces that let your imagination wander so I'm curious to know what kind of story you guys have in mind for these characters: who are they? What is their relationship? What events led up to this moment? What's gonna happen afterwards?

Let me know in the comments.

We Just Got Disneyfied

Ahh, it's about time I've finished this embarrassingly beyond belated sketch for my good friend Joe who asked for me to draw "us as Disney characters." (His exact words.)

At first, I wasn't sure which direction he wanted to me to take the "us" portion of the sketch ("us" as in just us two or "us" as in our circle of friends etc.) but once I finally settled on something, I needed to figure out how to tackle the Disney art style.

Let's just say it was even harder to figure out an approach to the sketch as well as mastering the style. Well, okay, more like trying to adapt to the style.

Hopefully I managed to pull it off in some way.

Yes, that is me on the left as sort of a sorceress/villain type and that's Joe on the right. He would SO be a Disney prince a'la Eric. He's got the pipes for it, that's for sure. ;-P

Wouldn't YOU Like To Know?

Here's a sketch card I completed at the Vancouver Comicon last Sunday. I've had this image in my mind for quite a few years but just had to wait until it was totally developed...or at least developed enough to satisfy me.

As you can tell, I was totally gettin' my Lichtenstein on. ;-)

The Gingerbread Lolita Improved (With WIP Scans)

I was going through my old Christmas Lolita card designs earlier this month and I couldn't help but notice how, well...amateurish they looked. I had a lot of weird things going on anatomy-wise, the coloring looked a little shoddy and some of the eyes looked lop-sideded. Sure, there's always room for improvement no matter where you are with your craft but looking at those cards elicited memories of older drawing and coloring techniques that I've long since drifted away from (my skin tone pencil crayons are probably happy and well rested because of this). They just no longer fit in with my current work.

I didn't have a whole lot of time to revamp the entire set so I just decided to focus on one design and update it just for my own personal sake.

For reference, here's how the Gingerbread Lolita looked three years ago...



Hope this is considered an upgrade of sorts!

SKETCHAVEMBER Day 30: Triumph: Sketchavember Style

So this is what it's all been leading up to. Day 30 of Sketchavember has wrapped up with...


...a goofy comic strip.

It's a pretty fair approximation of my creative process today...I mean, without the whole falling asleep at the drawing table bit. I would have liked to have done a nice, big colorful work to finish off the month but I couldn't settle on just one idea and time was already nagging away at me. Besides, it's been a while since I've done any artwork of the sequential nature.

Overall, I'd say the Sketchavember challenge was absolutely worth it and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. I highly reccomend it to anyone who wants to get back into a regular drawing groove, to challenge themselves or those who just love to draw plain and simple.

A big thanks goes out to Croaky for concieving this challenge and to all of you for sticking with me throughout all this glorious madness.

Don't think the art will stop here. Oh hell no. I've got ideas up the wazoo for future pieces and projects. Just you wait. ;-)

PS, that is so totally my drawing face. :-P

SKETCHAVEMBER Day 28: Zacho Fedro, Go

Oy, technology decided to be a finicky little bitch on Day 28 of Sketchavember. That still didn't stop me from completing this sketch of excelladon's (of DeviantART) original character Zacho Fedro.

I gotta say, Zacho's pretty different from what I usually do but I had quite a bit of fun playing around with big, thick, sharp lines like his hair and the lightning powers. I apologize for any inconsistencies with the character but I hope he likes it!

THUNDER!! Na na na na na naaa-aaahhh THUNDER!!

SKETCHAVEMBER Day 27: ...eserever ni olah...

Some days you just need to dive into a well of your own favorite cliches. Day 27 of Sketchavember just happened to be one of those days.

"You wear guilt
Like shackles on your feet
Like a halo in reverse..."

These particular lyrics from Depeche Mode's song "Halo" popped into my head earlier this evening and thus this drawing was born.