End of September

So I finished the drawing. Not in love with it, but not everything can be a fave. I posted the character description on CBR.

September

Procrastinating on work. I am so bad at beginning new jobs because I have all these ideas but hold back so much on putting them down. Instead, I did another drawing for the CBRunway Play Along. This one is based on a challenge where you have to choose a month of the year (in this case, my birth month September) that your super-villainous character should somehow embody or reflect, and be named after. For some reason I envisioned a very long and lean, super-tall S&M albino guy with dreads. I try not to post images so close to being finished yet not quite polished (the anatomy and shading need much work - not to mention the boot details!), but, enh, there you have it. Plus I really need to stop drawing this thing and get bck to work!

Scott, Too

I'm so bad - I'm completely redrawing the sketch of Scott. I decided that the linework I did in Photoshop wasn't how I wanted it to look, so... retool, revamp, redo. I was just going to tweak it a bit to show it to my model, but then... as usual... I get carried away with perfecting it. So it'll be a while before Scott sees it... always happens when I have a model I feel like I want to do right by. And Scott, as you can see, is quite the model.

Great Scott

I had started a drawing of my friend Scott a while back, and got very far along with it but left it lying unfinished for a while. I recently went back into it to finalize it but, as whims go, find myself redrawing the entire thing! Ugh, perfectionism. Anyhow, I turned off the color layers and worked a bit on his face tonight.

Cheesy Makeup Drawing

Oh gawd, doesn't she look like one of those drawings from an 80s How To Apply Makeup manual? Or maybe an instructional in Seventeen Magazine circa 1983? Maybe by Way Bandy? Haha! I'm so cheesy!

Shaping Up

I didn't love yesterday's face drawing, but because I didn't want to go to the Queer Workshop tonight, I figured I'd just continue it today and see where it goes. Not caring so much sometimes yields better results than I'd expect. I like how specific she's looking, but not as bad as I originally thought... certainly not perfect, a little sharp still, with features that could be lower or higher in places...but whose face really is perfect? Well, aside from the likes of Christie Turlington.

She feels kinda like I based her on some model, but it's all freehand...

Hard?

My faces have always been somewhat angular. I remember loving drawing really strong, square jaws back when I was a kid, and I wonder if it's because Filipino faces are so soft and rounded that I wanted to go for that which I didn't find too familiar? In any case, I find myself at odds with current fashion, as well as with certain artists whose faces I admire: I feel like mine are too hard edged, and tend towards the masculine, bordering on looking like drag queens. Does that seem to be the case? I try to draw rounder chins and jaws, and I often find them too indistinct and not strong enough. Am I just too 80s?

Dazzler '07

Here it is - I kinda like this new version a lot, here all colored. I love the casual tee with the silver tights and gloves. She's very Jem & the Holograms! Glow, girl!

Glam Rocker

So I completely revamped the drawing and concept, and started from a very 80s fashion standpoint. I like the simplicity of the outfit in a drawing, but I'm not sure about it standing the test of time in a comic book as a character. In any case, she'd look very up-to-the-minute in 2007! Silver tights and above-elbow length gloves (Fashion's accessory of choice nowadays, although old hat for super-heroines), paying homage to her old disco outfit; au courant lucite platform wedges built into the tights (very Balenciaga) and a simple tee in clingy holographic latex or lurex (I can't decide, but techno fabrics will be all the rage next spring, trust me), in an Yves Klein blue, printed with her starburst logo recalling her blue outfit. Tres trendy!

80s Redux

This Dazzler costume is taking over the blog (just like the Marvel Girl one did!) and I'm currently vascillating between full-on 80s Bad girl or toning down the fashion edge for a comicbook audience, which is vastly different . All I know is I had to change her pose and face completely to give her more of a fashion "I'm looking down my nose at the lens" attitude. I'll fix the features later...

Pose

Still drawing my Dazzler entry, but I'm constantly revising the pose. I really shouldn't concentrate on that if the costume is the main point of the drawing, so I think I'm getting bogged down with making a drawing more than I am showing a costume. This is one of the steps along the likely - not necessarily where it will end...

Dazzle

I'm working on an entry for CBR's Play Along Challenge 3: Dazzler. I pulled out an old sketch I never finished of Dazzler and think maybe I can retool it to work. We'll see... Just played around with the face tonight... not anywhere near done, though. Those eyes need work.

Coelacanth

For some reason I decided to look up Coelacanths again. I remember reading about their first rediscovery back in 1938, from a book I borrowed from the library in grade school. They're uglylooking things - but completely fascinating since they're living fossils long thought to be extinct for millions of years.

Waiting In Vain

I love that Annie Lennox version of the song. While waiting for some comps to download off a stock illustration site, I sketched on a post-it note. No you won't be waiting in vain, but I'll have to post it later.

edit: here it is. It kinda looks like a drawing of one of those ecstatically happy religious fanatics in illustrated Mormon pamphlets.

Don't ask me how I know that.

Hair Color

I thought I'd paint in the drawing a bit. Then I got all wacky with gradients!

Hairdo

This piece came into being from four influences that I can see: my Manel (I know that profile/expression and nose came from there, I've spent so much time looking at it, it's definitely influenced by it even if I did not outright copy it), an image used by a club back in the 90s (from a 60s hairspray product); how they used to draw hair on the old Tiffany Jones strip; and a hairdo that I liked but didn't feel was fully resolved on Bravo's new tv show, Shear Genius. I'm so gay.

Plus, I wanted to do something refined after all the fat canaries.

Fat Canary, Pt.3

Now you know why it's so fat.

Fat Canary, Pt.2

Fat Canary

Kraken

The Nautilus character I came up with for the other day's post was originally going to be called Kraken, but I thought that might be too ominous. So I figured out that maybe she can get enough energy from other sources and convert to a pure ectoplasmic form, and be actually more formidable in her Kraken mode. Her carapace then extends, her visor comes down and her human form transforms into a more octopus-like manifestation. I think it could be cool...

Nautilus, Done

Well, I figure she's like some human jellyfish that needs her containment suit to hold her ectoplasmic energies together, not unlike Wildfire of the Legion of Superheroes. Otherwise, the ectoplasm would just radiate outward. I figure her headpiece/armor helps regulate the energies toward her head, closer to her mind, which would allow her greater control, and are the reason for her codename. haven't decided what her energies actually do, but the exercise was to design a character around an animal theme, but I figure I didn't need to suss out her whole story.

Yes, I'm a geek.

Nautilus

There's a contest called Project:CBRunway on CBR, modeled after Project:Runway, but for designing costumes for comic book characters. I never have the time to commit to the weekly schedule, but it's fun to play along. The first challenge is to create a super-heroic character based on an animal. I was on the threadmill at the gym yesterday watching a documentary on squid and octopuses, and I was amazed at how beautiful and elegant cephalopods are, and how deadly they can be. Of course, I couldn't name a character Squid or even Octopussy, so I decided on Nautilus, which is the name at this point. I figure she emitted ectoplasmic/telekinetic tendrils from her face, and she herself was very sinewy and fluid like an octopus. Anyhow, the contest deadline is tonight, but this is as much as I got done... might do some more to clean it up later.

Evil Bunny

It's rather fucked up, isn't it? Happy Easter!

Goth Easter Bunny

I added some roots. The more I drew this bunny, the more demonic it became. I kinda like it. But it's turning into a swamp thing.

Home Design Mode

I did a sketch at my friends' mansion up in Greenwhich, CT, and found myself being thematic since I was there to see their newly finished 24 room home. It's quite fantastic in size and scale, and we sat in one of the smallest rooms - the den - where I pulled out a pen and paper to sketch a bit for yesterday. Although this cheesy modern chair scene has nothing to do with their manse at all, since their space is much more contempo/trad. And I was rather distracted by my friend's choice of ultra cheese-beyond-frommage 80s ballads.

Yep, I forgot again

A friend came in from Cebu, and I spent last night working on projects. >sigh!< This Drawing A Day thing isn't as easy as it seems, even if I do quickies. Guess I have to double up again today...

So, I on the train to Greenwich, CT to visit friends and decided to draw while en route. I guess this is an Easter theme...

Chill Pills

Doodle, Too

I didn't want to draw anything, but while waiting for a file to download, I doodled this on a sheet I had in front of me.

Night Visions

I started out just drawing a face, a man's face, and it started morphing into a woman's. I think the features were informed by the angle, and the angle affected how I drew the features. I wasn't too pleased with the result. So I thought of adding in the things I see at night.

This is going to sound strange, but I see things at night. Any night. As long as the lighting is dim in my room (like maybe just the ambient light from the street), I can see waves of body heat emanating from my flesh and the sheets like heat rising out of a road on a hot day. I can bring up my hand and look at it in the dark and see an aura of heat flowing out of it like some transparent mini-rendition of the sun's plasma. And most nights, if I don't focus on any object in the dark room, other things come into view.

They look like paramecia, or plankton, or blobs of jelly. But they swim in the air all around me, like schools of fish, with surprising speed. Transparent and vast in numbers, I wondered if they might be floaters, or maybe cells that were pulled into the lenses of my eyes by gravity, because I often sleep on my stomach. Then, when I turn over and open my eyes, gravity takes hold of them and they flow to the back of my head, which would account for the 'swimming' action, as they usually seem to 'swim' towards me. Except one time I raised my hand into the air, to try and 'touch' these things, and they swirled all around my arm, as if attracted to it.

I had my eyes checked to see if it was something physical, but the doctor said I was fine and it's all in my head.

Stereotypical

You see a ton of naked male torsos nowadays - online, at workshops, at the gym, in person, in the media. I think I'm getting desensitized to them. It's weird, but what once used to turn me on so much visually doesn't do so much as it used to. I wonder if it's just overdosing on what was once a rarity? This sketch, for example, took hardly any doing - the idealized musculature is so part of my lexicon that it was such a quick study. Must be why I so meh about it - it's nothing special, just another torso. I tried to make his face atypical of my style, but I just wasn't too enthused with the sketch concept to begin with...

Forestry

There's something very calming about just doodling in additional details only when you want to, and without any preconceived idea of what a piece would look like in the end. Espcially since it's something I would never normally draw anyhow/