escapingbabylon.com

Can you believe that this is the 31st image that I’ve posted. I wonder if I’ve improved any. Well anyway, this is me working on that circus project again. I’m trying out designs for the detective and cannot get the character in the face that I’m looking for. However, I did a sketch of the Knife thrower and I think I found a design that works for her. I’ve been having a lot of trouble with doing a half decent face for lara, but I think this one works because it’s glamorous when made up, but can seem relatively normal when not.

So maybe I will be back on a regular updating schedule. If every day is like these last two days were, then I’m well on my way. Anyway, on to the art.

So the large picture is of this asian woman on the yesterday morning who was falling asleep a lot. I had read some artist saying that you should draw what you see, and not what you think you see, so that’s what I tried to do with this one. I think I got a pretty good likeness. The other, less realistic, sketches are two designs for the detective in the circus story, and for the little boy in the circus story. I think this is probably the closest to the design for the little boy. The author of the circus story really liked the other curly haired design, but this one is a bit younger which I feel works better for the story. Finally there are my doodles in the corner, still experimenting with my burgundy pen. It’s interesting how this doodle just sort of dominates the page. I think it came out really well though. keep an eye out for more stuff with that pen as I become more comfortable with two-tone drawings.

Finally, I’d like to direct your attention to Sam Brown of http://www.explodingdog.com/. This guy is great. I will slave over adding wrinkles and details to a drawing and yet still not get the character I want (like in the detective sketches above) yet he does these incredibly evocative images with little more than stick figures. The encouraging thing though, is to look at his archives. The archives go back to 2001 and you can see the progression that his work has made. It definitely gives me hope that if I continue working on this, and doing stuff for this blog, my art would become as good as the stuff you would see on Moleskinerie or MoleskineArt.com or even better.

This first set of sketches are designs for the kid in the circus story. Though they are a start, I didn’t (and don’t) feel that they work yet. Oh yeah, ignore the sucky head in the upper right corner.

Now this page is a smorgasbord. It’s me getting back to when I used to cram the pages full of sketches. So going from top to bottom on the left and then on the right. We start off with a generic non-referenced sketch of someone rapping. Then next we move on to this really cute kid who was sleeping on the backseat of the bus next to his father. The kid was totally lost inside his jacket and was completely adorable. Moving on down the page we have the costume design for Lara the knife thrower, and we have a hurried sketch of this costume at the top of the next page. Apart from that, some random scribbles, an aborted face, and a Robin (as in Batman and…)

On the left you have biking directions that I got off mapquest. I ended up getting pretty lost, but found my way to my destination (taking half an hour longer than I wanted to). On the right you have a sketch where I’m testing out my new burgundy pen, another design for the boy (this time with hair that reminds me of Jeremy Sumpter in Peter Pan) and this old guy with a press badge who was standing at the bus stop as I was heading to work this morning.

Well you got a mega-dose of sketches. Hope you enjoy.

Here’s two things I wanted to do before I leave. First I would like to thank Vacuum – Edward Vielmetti at Socialtext in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104 for linking to my humble site. I’d also like to point you guys to another comic book artist who I enjoy a lot. I discovered Cameron Stewart when he started to work on Catwoman, and he instantly became my favorite artist of the moment. There are things that I’ve taken from him, especially when doing brush stuff. But again, I’m no where near as talented as he is. Check out his stuff, on his website.

Ok, So blogger crashed while I was posting. So here’s the cliffs notes version.

The following 3 images are the last couple of pages of my old moleskine

The woman on the right hand side of the above is a bad sketch of a redesign of X-Men’s Storm. I’ve always pictured her as one of those African Supermodel types who is striking, and of unusual enough appearance that if someone asks if she’s beautiful that can lead to an argument.

The next two drawings are design sketches for a circus story that a friend of mine is writing and I will be drawing.

This first set of sketches is me trying to design the CircusMaster/Ringleader.

This second set mostly consists of designs for tattoos that will be on the back of two acrobats one who is billed as a half angel and the other as a half devil. Also in the upper left hand corner is a quick sketch of the female knife thrower known only as Lara.

So I wanted a fourth sketch, but I didn’t get it on Friday. So here is the page with the 3 sketches. The woman in the upper corner reminded me of when I lived in Jamaica, and you would see older women running errands in head-ties. Except I was most definitely in Minnesota, so my brain took a while to reconcile that.

Secondly, let me point you to the website of Tommy Lee Edwards. I like him because in a lot of his drawings he has a style that I can pretend is similar to mine (although he is a ton better). Still I really like his stuff. I discovered his art in an old issue of X-Force of all places. X-Force, particularly in it’s later days hosted a lot of good artists and writers, and some artists and writers that eventually became big names in the comic book world (Jim Cheung anyone?). It’s too bad that the only artist that people associate with it is Rob Liefeld.

Here’s the Raven T-shirt. Click the image and go vote.

Also, look forward to an actual sketchbook post later this evening, I want to add one more sketch to the page to round it out.