Beaver

I showed some visiting friends the bar scene on a Tuesday night in NYC... ugh... haven't done that in ever. Especially since I was by the time I got home I was drunk more than I have been in years. So I ended up watching this on YouTube, hence the drawing. Not quite, but yeah. I was drunk, okay?

Jeffrey's Abs

I have an issue of HX in front of me where the model, Jeffrey, has the most perfectly defined abs, they're so perfect they're kinda inhuman. I wondered if drawing them out of context of a body would still make them sexy. They started looking pretty alien...

Night Girl

There's a character from the Legion of Super-Heroes comic called Night Girl. Her power is that she's super-strong, but only at night or deep shadow... which is why she's not a full-time member and just in the 'Substitute Legion.' I swear, I'm not making this up!

So they're bringing back a lot of the old characters from when I was a kid, and she's apparently one of them. They're even using her costume from the late 50s/early 60s, albeit updated a bit... but in my mind, not enough. For one thing, she's got an owl emblem on her chest (ah, to symbolize the night, right? Even if she's from another planet). Anyhow, I thought I'd do my own take on an update. It's not exactly futuristic, but with the owl so close to her hooters (an inevitable joke) I decided to just merge the two and make it some Balenciaga sort of strapwork/bustier. And kinda goth with a modernized updo. Anyhow, I tried to keep as much of the original elements/design proportions as possible, yet re-imagining it a tad. This was a quick idea sketch I thought of tonight, and decided to do.

Swashy Dove

Designing a holiday card for a client and thinking of doing either a swashy or a roughly rendered dove. This one is kinda both.

Child's Play

I had the idea to doodle like a child, but then I started getting into the different media on Painter. It's still quite nonsensical, although I kinda like it that way.

Leatherbound

One of my defaults when I have no sketching ideas is to draw leather-clad super-hero/S&M types. It's really a comics influence more than anything else. This is a doodle that will probably never go beyond this degree of finish.

Cutting

The female lead in the new movie "Wristcutters" has a really cool-looking haircut - it's a somewhat wavy bob with really short, uneven bangs. It makes her look like an anime character. I just had to try and draw it.

I normally draw people facing left - it's just my standard operational procedure. It felt weird drawing her facing the other way. It doesn't sit well with me as a result, but I wanted to try something different...

Chickens

I'm trying to remember my old cartoon style. I definitely had my own way of drawing different animal, but it's been so long I don't instinctively do the shapes and features I used to. My chicken feet have generally looked like this, but I may have to go back and look for my old sketches. That rooster doesn't look right. I kinda want them to be 'authentically' me... now where are those old cartoons?

Erwin Sleeping

My oldest friend in the world (as in, since 4th grade, not that he's Jurassic) came to NYC from DC and is spending the night at my apartment. I decided to do a quick chalk sketch of him in the dark since...well... he's here.

Blondie

I've never drawn blond hair like this before - I didn't know how to start. For some reason it seemed appropos to do it in a blended chalk (in Painter, of course). It doesn't look much like the kid in the photo, and the pic was so low in resolution it wasn't great for doing details, but it was certainly good for trying out new techniques.

Kiddie

I saw a pic on someone's flicker page, of a child whose face I liked. I decided to try and do a sketch of her. These are the beginnings of it. Not trying for a likeness so much as just to test out drawing new features.

Comics Bodies

I used to draw with defaults: standard poses, standard hairdos, standard bodies. It's the way comics train you, especially when you try to reproduce the action and beats on the page. But with my interest in comics as well as fashion waning, I'm not drawing on autopilot anymore, and I have to think about what I'm doing. I looked at some old drawings and realized my bodies have changed through the years. Granted, so have 'fashionable' bodies, i.e. proportions as style dictates, but Iately it seems I tended towards drawing really lean, skinny women. (i.e. emaciated runway models). This was an exercise in just trying to draw a comicbook woman's body, at least the way I would do one, not necessarily with enormous boobs like they usually warrant... Enh. It still doesn't look right...

Look Back

I found a new book on 100 years in Fashion Illustration. I kept on seeing an image of model Dorian Leigh in my head, and this was the quick study... That dress became a mass of lines... ugh...

Holiday

I'm doing a non-denominational Holiday card for a new client, and I'm trying to come up with some non-traditional motifs that would make a really interesting card, especially since the client is a special print technique house, allowing me to die-cut, foil stamp and sticker this job within an inch of its life. Naturally I have way too many ideas in my head...

Critters

Drawing Boris the other night made me remember that I haven't done my cartoons in quite a while. I used to make sheets and sheets of stories involving a whole menagerie of quirky animals, both real and imagined. I even had a short-lived comic strip in a magazine back in Manila., called "Critter City" I couldn't remember if Boris had spines along his back so i started sketching him and a few of my other critters, and found I didn't know how they looked anymore. I really need to find those old strips and maybe do a few again. I loved doing them.

Boris

This is a character I created back in my teens, a dragon name Boris who ate anything he could fit into his mouth. He used to have conversations with his food just to taunt them before eating them. I have sheets of cartoons of this guy, and I haven't drawn him in decades...

Reality Check

I stopped by my friend Peter's place for a snack and we ended up watching a horribly good new train wreck of a reality show, America's Most Smartest Model. Not exactly what one would think would be a good source of inspiration for drawing, but the winning male model of the evening had a great profile, which inspired this quick drawing. So there.

Trace

I trace shapes that aren't there. Or rather, I trace shapes that I want to appear, especially in a face. I run line after line, then follow the ones that feel 'right' and make other lines based on those lines until a fuller drawing forms. Sometimes it's perfect, sometimes too many lines spoil what I might have thought I originally had. Guess it's just my style, but I love the fact that I do this. I remember copying other people's work when I was younger because I had no method of my own. After all these years, this seems to be one of my personal techniques.

Some things don't change though. I remember drawing hair tendrils that 'felt' like these locks, back in the 80s. Ha! This guy looks like a semi-caucasian version of a japanese anime character I've been watching...

Colored Water

The wet edges of Photoshop look like watercolor, but you can't just apply them with the same kind of hand as a natural media brush. I'm still trying to figure it out. Yeah, I decided to paint yesterday's linework after all...

Perfect Flow

I love this sketch. I was planned on doing something based on a fashion photo I saw in a magazine, because I loved how the model's pants draped, mid-leap, so I pulled the magazine out tonight. I altered the body position but the pants are pretty similar. I was thinking I would do something more finished, but I just love the odd angles, and how the lines just flow, so I left it simple and gestural, and in black and white.

Boredom

I have spent way too much time watching anime, but I took up yesterday's sheet and tried to add another sketch while I was downloading. I really didn't want to draw, but I promised myself I would do something everyday day. Not one of my finer days (that eye looked a lot less lopsided when I drew it. This is why one draws on slanted desks). Hell, not one of my finer weeks.

Pornobot

I copied this guy from a porn site video. I suppose I wasn't that entranced by him if I was sketching while his, er... movie was playing. But I wanted to test out my fine point pens some more. I'm really not loving them for sketches.

Two Minute Bunny

I was working all night on programming a job, so before bed, I gave myself exactly two minutes to do a drawing. Here's my two minute bunny:

Eyes Shadowed

An image stuck in my head last night as I was reading a fashion magazine, where the smoky eyes I tend to favor were a key element in the styling. Tonight I just wanted to do a basic makeup face with the wet edge brushes in Photoshop. Fashion types may see a bit of the doll-faced models in the vein of Sasha or Stam, but X-men aficionados may see the heavy Marc Silvestri influence (he did tend to draw these kinds of faces. I mean, I even have the distortions he sometimes had!).

edit: I'm so lazy and repetitive. She looks just like two of my drawings from February, with this hair and this makeup. I thought I had a strong sense of de ja vu when I drew this. But I always imagine women getting their makeup done with a headband to keep the hair off...

Pen Scribbles

I was in an art supply store to research logo design books and bought myself some sketch pads and pens. Man, I think I got too many fine points. I realized after trying to sketch that I much prefer the thicker nibs nowadays, as opposed to my high school days when I loved the .01 point technical pens, as we called them. I'm using the pen as an excuse for my tacky scribbles...!

Who Nose

I was trying to draw a different profile from the types I normally do... with a bigger nose. I think I may have to copy a few examples just to get the idea first. She's not exactly looking, pretty is she?

Quick Sketch

The evening ran away with me - I spent a lot of time researching logo designs for a job I'm doing, and I didn't have the energy to do a drawing after all the logo thumbnails I was making. So this is what I quickly churned out last night.

Haircut

I don't know anyone else who takes sketches of his desired haircuts to his hairstylist, but that's what I do. I usually have an idea what I want to do with my hair, that I may have created on my own with all sorts of undercutting and quirks (so, no celebrity shots to base them off of, thankyouverymuch) and my stylist of 18 years, Kevin, usually makes it work. He always adds his own twist to things, which I like, but he generally agrees with me too. It's a nice collaboration. I brought this to him yesterday, after drawing it the other night:

Gesture

I'm still determined to channel the sketchy, gestural style of Aitor Throup from yesterday's intro to him, and while I didn't know what clothing I would do, I was able to make a base figure that I liked. I suppose it's the sketchiness and the awkwardness of the pose that makes it for me. Let's see if I take this any further...

Currentcy

The discovery of the sketches of young designer Aitor Throup plus the arrival of the latest issue of Japanese Men's Non-no sparked the inspiration for a way for me to fashion sketches in styles more current than my 80s-borne fashion illustration mindset is used to. There's something to be said about drawing the way you were raised, but somewhere along the way I stopped sketching current fashion and I feel like I've lost my touch. Throup has a way of positioning bodies that evoke the the attitude of more avante garde stylings (despite still being very manga/comic-influenced, albeit in a more indie way), and I needed that model as a visual push. I always used to copy my favorite artists in hopes of finding out what I admire about their styles and hopefully learning from them. Perhaps I'll be able to incorporate it into my repertoire afterwards...

Chamelemonster

I loved drawing monsters as a child. I'd create all sorts of creatures, the more fantastic, the better. I used to be so good at it. I wanted to do one last night after I thought about it, but then I realized I wasn't so into it and I stopped half-way. It reminds me of a chameleon.