Tresses

Sketch for a new piece, another male nude hopefully done with little to no photo references. I want a slightly awkward pose and I think I have the head tilt just right but need to find a way for the body to be slightly off kilter. That left arm needs to do something else, and more off...

Hitomi and her friend Heron

Hitomi and her friend Heron are quite pleased that White is a hot new trend for spring.

Next Layer 4

I thought about adding a portrait element to this series to make it seem more editorial and less like a collection of sketches, but I'm not sure how detailed to go (or not). And these boys are a mite too delicate... more Prada features than anything else...

New Layer 3

I love how the strokes look - I think I'm able to keep a dynamic flow in my strokes so that they look fairly confident. Dunno about the rest, but I suppose with practice I can find the forms I will like to revisit again and again.

Next Layer 2

So trying to figure out the pose and technique I need to do for this... and I woonder if the brush should determine the look and feel, or if the idea should? I think I'm just going to let whatever happens naturally take precedence, and trust in my drafting skills. :)

Blue Boy

Kyle Webster alerted customers to the fact that he's improving the textures on his brushes, and posted a video demo to prove it. I realized that I didn't even use the brush he demo'ed, much less could I tell what the improvement might be. So I pulled up that and a few other brushes just to play.

It's funny, I find myself emulating other people's work because of the brushes... like it forces you to work that way.

Next Layer

Well, the Layered studies went over so well I'm doing a commission for an invitation. This is the study for it...

Painter Doodle

So very tacky 80s, she is.

I opened up Painter Essentials yesterday, because I was watching a video of young fashion illustrator Mara Craspo painting so fluidly, I got envious. And I know how slow Photoshop takes to render a stroke, so I recalled Painter Essentials having a quicker response time. Not that it's any good in this case - this was just me putting quick stroke after stroke on the canvas. But I saw a favicon on my browser and my head interpreted it as something else that looked like this, so I ran with it.

Layered 6

Well, the 'client' seems to like this look, much to my surprise and delight, so I'm going with the looser watercolor style.

Layered 5

I saw a beautiful watercolor in a new FB friend's page and I decided to try and emulate the quality with a similarly minimal rendering, but for my still-unsettled illo project for brand Second Layer. I like it - and I ran with it. When you work with a watercolor brush, it kinda makes you do what it wants to do...

Desmond 4

Just because I need to keep at this one... but I think I'm daunted by the prospect of rendering all that hair!

Stark Contrast 2

I love the colors and style potential of this piece but I didn't really do enough work on the face - gawd it's awful. So I'm going to try and make her more like the deep-set eyed, Mark Ryden/Mel Odom creature she seems to want to be... and this is a step there though I'm not sure yet. This drawing looks more like her sister Arya than she does... not that it's meant to be an accurate  (or even vague) likeness of the actress who portrays Sansa. Then again, I've also made her hair more like the Red Woman's hair, so why even bother with any sort of faithfulness to the tv show?  Hehe.

Stark Contrast

I watched Game of Thrones' latest ep today, where Sansa builds a small snow Winterfell. In that scene, she wore a deap teal (or was it hunter green?) gown that made her red hair stand out , not to mention against all that snow as well. So I thought I'd channel the colors first, worry about the details later...

Horny Boy

One of my friends has been dealing with an errant bf, and it's upsetting because they've been together for so long, and I kind of project my ideals on them... nothing is ideal I suppose. There's a devil in all of us... so on a related note, horny Marko here is a character from a comic book series Saga, which has the most amazing art by Fiona Staples. The cover of the first trade paperback has been staring at me the whole while I've been working on this rush website, so I thought I'd do him as a quickie (I was surprised how quick I was too).

Driiiip

I'm dying for an ice cream cone. And since I'm stuck at my desk working, I suppose a drawing of one will have to do...

15 Minute Face

I was intrigued by the angle of a model's face in a particular shot, but I didn't take any great pains to get a likeness (and if you find the original, you'll see none). I was using the Thick and Thin watercolor brush from Kyle Webster and just playing with it to see what it could do. In 15 minutes I got to work well enough to get into it just for drawing's sake and not for any particular goal.

Quack!

I've been designing, and it's another rush project, so I have a feeling I won't be drawing much over the next three days...

When It Flows

It seems to be an outdated notion, this stroke that flows smoothly in a fashion illustration. Today it's all about copying a photo, which seems a bit redundant to me. Even if I will copy a photo for some pieces (albeit one that I take myself),  more often I will use a photo as a reference for anatomy, or a feeling, not necessarily to copy as is. Tonight, at a loss for what to sketch, I blindly scrolled through my folder of reference photos and chose one at random to base a sketch on. I loved the pose of the model, just slightly askew, and he had a smile on his face. For me, it was about sketching the photo as if I were in front of the model live, and I'm happy that the contour lines look the way they do. Plus it took all over like 6 minutes. Here's the original of model Romulo Pires. I was more interested in his body than the clothing, in case it wasn't obvi.

Her Name Is Bob

I saw a blog entry for one of the artists I follow, and I liked the heavy brush strokes of her sketch. So I took inspiration and I played a bit with aping her technique, and it went into the direction my own sensibilities would take it.

Rainer 14

Lip service. Funny how the more I just follow what's on the photo, the more I realize how wrong I was in my previous drawing. I wonder if it's because I can only compartmentalize so many elements before my natural handstrokes just flow through, making a nose the way I know it, pushing a stroke the way I normally do regardless of what's on the original reference...?

Desmond 3

Whenever I think I am finally making headway on all my planned art pieces that I juggle, I realise how many things I start! Ah well, a bit at a time helps more than doing nothing!

PosterPose 4 (Done?)

I think it's done. I certainly don't want to tinker with it anymore even if it's not as super-tight and clean as I imagined it to be, but I rather liked my 'watercolor hand' when I painted it, so it's in this form. For now.

Blue Elephant

I'm so drunk right now I have fallen asleep at the computer 3 times now. So this is - at beast - a stalling tactic for this blog. But here you go.

Layered 4

Just trying to create new poses for this story. Although it's feeling a bit 70s...

Layered 3

Still trying to find my angle for this story! But maybe I play up the word "layer" since that's part of the collection's name...

PosterPose 3

I gave him a nose job. And a hand job. Hehe.

I felt the original profile was too boyish, so I changed it slightly to be less pretty and more mannish. Also, his hand was a bit tiny so I fixed the fingers which I think addressed the scale.

Rainer 13

Ack! I was distracted all evening even if I worked on two different drawings today, and didn't get to post in time for the 5th of May. Gah!

Anyhow, more of Rainer. There often comes a point in my portraiture, shortly after I have found a stride and feel the piece looks like the subject, that I decide I got everything wrong. Or at least, a great deal of it. This is the point where I usually despair that I won't make a good piece. But I just need to slog through and keep finding the mistakes. I'm not one of those people who can get a perfect likeness. I can draw really quickly and make it look like the subject in less than 20 minutes, but give me a lot of time to work on it, and the details will BOG. ME. DOWN. And thats hwere I was (and still am) with this piece, because the more details I draw, the more I realize that the relationships between details need to be honed... workworkwork...

Old Volumes

I'm playing with the charcoal and graphite type brushes on Photoshop as I'm about to do another series for another menswear label, which is completely in black and white so it makes no sense to do it in full color. Plus, it will be fun for me to try and develop a style that might not be based on photography as much as the last digital graphite one I did. This particular piece doodle is very reminiscent of 80s fashion illustrations from Japan, when it was all about volume in the shapes of the clothing.

PosterPose 2

This guy is imaginary so I'm imbuing him with physical aspect that I think are ideal. He's a little younger looking than I originally intended, but I think I love him. Hehe. The ink line is looking more like I imagined. And I just need to clean up my arm anatomy (I spent so much time staring at my elbows at the gym tonight).

PosterPose

This is essentially a very standard pose, but I do have particular linework in mind. Here's hoping I can achieve it - was a bit distracted tonight by a distraught friend I chatted/spoke with for about 6 hours almost continuously. The anatomy is still a little wonky because I'm trying to draw this without a reference, although I've since gathered various images plus posed in front of the mirror to try and get certain features right (like elbows).

Rainer 12

My signature technique is to use an electric blue for the parts that are deepest shadow. The minute I threw that in there the portrait started feeling like vintage Me, as opposed to all the smoothing and blending that I had been doing with recent work. And I'm not against progressing forward in style, but I've always liked the chunky colors I did, it was always something I felt was my own.