Bearly There

My company that I worked for for the past 3 years is quietly diminishing it's presence in my life, and I'm all for it. It's a tired little bear and it's going to sleep.

Katrina

I left the window of yesterday's sketch open on my Mac, so I just started tinkering with it to make it slightly better. The more I adjusted, the more she started looking like Dave Cockrum's version of X-man Kitty Pride, albeit Filipina. So I decided she should be named Katrina Prieto. :)

Filipina

I was inspired last night by googling 80s top model Anna Bayle's career to try and draw her without actually copying her face. Not very successful as a likeness at all, but I do think the face looks Filipina.

Cristy and her friend Heron

Cristy and her friend Heron end up sharing the bed.

Ditas and her friend Heron

Ditas and her friend Heron waited patiently on their host's daybed... some more patiently than others.

Mokona

I've been watching and reading a lot of "xxxholic," a manga series that also has several anime seasons and movies made based on it. While watching a movie I had never finished before, I decided to do a quick sketch of the super kawaii character from the series, Mokona.

Chalk Gal, v2

I tried to play with getting the tones darker on the drawing form the day before but I think I didn't lay in a proper color foundation for it (especially since I just went at her without thinking) so I think this variant is not as successful as I'd like it to be. Still, fun to play with.

Chalk Gal

Wow, I really should play more with this chalk tool in painter - there's so much freedom to not do anything, just to draw. I don't think I made any erasures in this quick sketch (maybe 15 minutes?) and I just placed strokes where I felt like it. Wow, I can't remember digital drawing being this free or fun in a while.

Fuzzy On The Details

I was emailing with my friend Rima about the work of a fashion illustrator, and upon exploring Bil Donovan's site, got both envious and inspired to try my hand at a looser fashion illustration style. My problem is often that I try to design the clothing as well, and that side of me can often get in the way of the illustration part that just wants to focus on technique. So I pulled up an image from the Chanel FW 2010 collection online and just rendered that. I simplified the outfit a bit more since it was about rendering the dress, and I kinda like the result. I don't know if it looks like me to anyone else except me, but there's a lot of my line in it despite the pastel being so different from what I've done recently. However, it won't necessarily come as a surprise to people who knew me in high school, when chalk pastel was my medium of choice. Still, the looseness of it all is something I'd like to explore in a fashion context. I wonder if Mr.Donovan would teach me?

Demented Doodles

My friend Greg was packing up our offices today to move most of his things to our New Jersey headquarters. In the tumult, many books got tossed into a For Recycling pile. Among them was a set of two volumes of some vintage German tome-- in German-- set in some appropriately archaic Fraktur font. Naturally I couldn't resist f*cking with it. This is dedicated to my German friend Rainer, who has learned to tolerate, and even appreciate, my demented humor.

On Deaf Ears

This unfinished ear was bugging me so I carefully redid it based on my own ear. A struggling comic book artist I met and did some work for in the 90s once criticized the way I drew ears, saying he hated the way I did them. I never paid them much attention until then, and really still don't (I didn't think he was particularly talented so his crit fell on... ahem... deaf ears). I have my usual lines that delineate them and that's it. Drawing too much detail just seems to draw too much attenion to them. Now you're totally looking at his ears, aren't you?

Runway Lines

Drew this while watching Project Runway online. Whenever they start on a challenge I often feel like I want to reach into my screen and grab the contestants' HP sketch pads and redraw their work because their sketches are so bad, so I usually feel inspired to sketch when I watch the show. Of course, not having any designs in mind, I stop at a few lines.

Juancho and his friend Heron

Juancho and his friend Heron overlooked the possibility that swings sets might not be scaled for very tall birds.

Clipped Ponytail 3

Got some color in, but with the color, the line work errors become apparent.

George and his friend Heron

George and his friend Heron relax in the hotel room before heading out for the evening.

Party Bimbo

Had a cocktail party earlier this evening so I'm a bit too buzzed to draw anything of substance. So here's a festive bimbo bird.

Confident Strokes

One compliment I get every so often is that my strokes are so certain. I'm not sure if that's anything I'm conscious of, but it certainly comes out when I do more fashion-style sketching. This sketch, for example, pretty much everything was placed with no manual erasing (although there were a few command Z undos) but pretty much each line is drawn in a fraction of a second. Maybe that's what they mean? That's the way my mom always sketched, perhaps I got it from her. I hope so.

Clipped Ponytail 2

Just fleshed out the hair a bit more. When I start something like this, I sometimes don't get into the groove of how I render hair. I think I try too hard to render in a realistic way when I should just do the stylized comicbook hair I tend to do without thinking. Except I'm so out of practice drawing comicbook style, I don't even know what my style is anymore if I should do it. Anyhow, enough musing, here's the hair, part 2.

Clipped Ponytail

It's Fashion Week in New York, but while I love the actual looks, I'm surprised at how much I weary of the rigamarole (the fact that I used the word 'rigamarole' indicates how decrepit I am). It's funny, everything that used to excite me about this week is exactly what my mom tired of even in Manila, and that's curious for me - I just like the clothes and style, forget the attitude and surface personalities. Oh well, in some ways, those are inextricable.

This was an interesting hairstyle I saw while watching Prabal Gurung's show video.

Tobin, Seth and his friend Heron

Tobin, Seth and their friend Heron - known collectively in the party circuit as The Broken Dolls - were renowned for their spontaneous but flawlessly executed fashion tableaux.
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I spent so much time yesterday on the silly fashion illustration I created a couple of days ago - tweaking colors, cleaning lines - yet I completely forgot to draw something new last night. But since I've done make-up drawings in the past, it's only fair that if I do more than one drawing a day I can use one of those as a backup entry, since I spent so much time working on a drawing I don't wanna post anyhow (it's basically the same as two days ago). I did this one a few nights ago.

"Lifestyle"

I've decided why I don't like the 'fashion illustrations' I have to make for work: because the drawings are being done for a mass market, and the brand they're being applied to really isn't fashion at all, I have to draw what, to the public at large, reads as "fashion." Ugh. At that point, it really isn't fashion, it's "Lifestyle," which roughly translates to happy images of women in easily understood outfits that are neither hip nor forward, but contemporary enough for non-fashion people to interpret as fashion. In other words, water it down, George. I know I have to. And this is the result. My pseudo Mats Gustafson technique.

Edit: Her body is all wrong for fashion. It's almost super-hero-y in the size of her torso!

Quick Study

I found out that the illustration I was supposed to get for a product launch might be needed sooner than later, for store display. So I put together a quick sketch. That watercolor brush for the clothing will have to change though...

Going with the Flou

I have to do a fashion sketch for a client, but I know in my head they want something that's a bit dated, yet I know they won't respond well to something completely modern. So this is a movement study while I figure out what style to apply to the figure. It's very much like an old Charlie ad form the 70s and 80s...

Seth and his friend Heron

Seth and his friend Heron take their go-go dancing duties very seriously.

Fall Line

This is a sketch I've been planning on doing for over a year now, of a look from my friend Robert's Fall line last year. Thought I'd best take a break from my previous drawing to mix things up a bit.

Fuller

I thought, maybe I don't just stop at the face and really fully flesh out this guy. So here (aside from some tweaks to his eyes and jawline) is the initial fuller body sketch.

And I've adjusted it because he looked like a giraffe.

Pompadour, Colored

Yesterday's drawing was created for the purpose of specifically exploring this coloring technique I'd previously hatched, adding variety through color while maintaining a level of super-flatness. I quite like the technique and look forward to doing a full-on piece utilizing it. It's definitely influenced by animation, I think.

I like how different this face is for me - it wasn't done with any references at all, nor my standard features that I draw. It means I'm able to vary my feature set a bit. The nose is a bit tall, maybe a bit English-looking to my mind, and he's more elongated. Definitely more like a current male model than the 80s and 90s types I have tended to draw in the past.

Pompadour

That drawing of the bearded guy I sketched a couple of days or so ago taught me how to resolve a view of a man's face (particularly the lips and outer eye) in ways that I was never confident about before. This sketch sorta just came together, but this face is completely from imagination.

Mannequin Eye

One of the things that the Flickr group I joined has made me remember is the varying ways mannequin eyes are painted. We had a very particular way of doing it at D.G.Williams, and the leading company Rootstein had their own very unique way of painting a mannequin eye as well. While this was more of a Williams iris, I did try to incorporate some of the wet on wet techniques of Rootstein, or at least what I think is a Rootstein blending...

South Pacific Bunnyfeesh

I drew my Bunnyfeesh all wrong, I think. Or maybe it's completely right, if you're doing a rare South Pacific variant/species.