Reference needed

Making a drawing without reference aint as easy as it seems.

So I'm watching this movie "the kid" from disney, with bruce willis in it. About him and his eight year old self who suddenly are stuck with each other. Some hilarity, some drama, and some enlightment, but overall a feel happy disney movie. Nothing to new. One of the scenes includes a woman closing a door after letting someone inside, smiling while doing so.

Of course I was foolish enough to think I could recaputre that scene from memory. I failed horribly, but I'd like to share this attempt with the world. No reasons whatsoever.

Distracted

Right now I don't really care much about making a drawing.

Instead off rushing myself in drawing something I decided to take one off the drawings I have in my "still working on it" folder and see what I can do with them. So I stumbled upon a drawing that I tweaked a bit before posting over here. This is by far "post worthy", but its in color. So thats the least I can do.

It seemed like a good idea to use the original sketch as a texture layer for the digital piece. The roughness in the sky and ground are off the original drawing. I put them in an overlay layer and played a bit with the shadows and lighting. Spiked up the hue/saturation filter and popped it as saved and classified.

So this drawing has now officialy left my "still working on it" folder and has been moved to the "finished stuff" folder. Though I guess I might as well just place it in the folder "sketches"

So that was FACTS 2010

So I didn't sell that much, at least I got to meet some nice people.

What started on saturday continued on sunday, two days that were sorta the same all over. Going in, putting all my drawings on a table, sitting down, and spending the day at facts. So what made the two days so different from each other? On the first day I was a bit shy you could say, not really knowing what I had to do or where to go to. This included a lot of going from here to there.

The first day I got to meet Nikki, one off the guys that is famous in the DAbelgium group. I didn't even realise it was him until he told me his name. He was there with some other people from DA, sharing tables and stuff. On my right was a guy who sold a "hot" comic. A very friendly chap thought. On my other side was first of course talisje, but next to that some older guy and his comic series. Both looked very professional, which made me look like a noob of course.

My first client was a german woman who bought this little one. I had to take a picture of my first client of course. One of the things I remember most of the first day is also pacman and his ghost, doing a chase throught the paths on facts. Hilarious to look at cause when the ghost was interupted by a thick crowd pacman was waiting and jumping up and down in anticipation.

The second day! It started with me being a bit early. I got to talk to a cosplay guy from a star wars club from which I learned some interesting things. At the beginning of the second day I checked out all the other stuff at facts before I really started my day. There were some cool star wars props, life size insides of a spaceship, and some other really big "toys". I even got to talk to the guy who made the original and unique facts 2010 figurine. He had some cool stuff to mention about it. He even asked which of four figurines was best painted, its funny to meet the person behind the props and art.

Again a lot of funny things to see during the second day and a lot off people that came by to say hi, some family and friends. The second day I had nobody on my right, and on my left was another artist then yesterday, besides talisa of course. Oh, and there was a replica off the toy car from toy story, kids sized.

At one moment in time I was sitting at my booth, making a drawing when suddenly this guy appears and gives me his card. He then starts talking in french to me, explaining something about who he is and what the card was all about. My french is not that good, so I actually lost him around the second line and only understood a few words like convention france and vampires. I just nodded and thanked him for the explenation.

My final impression of facts: The convention itself is filled with pretty cool and friendly people, the customers will buy very little, but the crowd is amazingly cute, funny, cool and sexy.
I'm not sure what my plans are going to be for next year, since I didn't sell enough to pay for the boothplace itself. So moneywise it wouldn't be a smart move to invest in it again. Well, not unless I'd have some comics to sell I guess.

One of the drawings that I made during the facts convention.

Mushroom hunting

Listening to music is one of the quick ways to get inspired.

A few days ago I was sitting on the bus, sketchbook in my lap and mp3 player activly playing a song in my ears. When suddenly I heard the words "mushroom hunting". It was a song from Cowboy bebop that was playing and for some odd reason it seemed like a good idea to make a drawing about those two intriging words.

What came next was a journey of sketching, erasing, sketching again and finaly the digitalisation of a drawing. That took me some time too. At first I had started with a very dirty style of shading, but after having the drawing lay on my desktop for a night I decided to go full cell shaded again. It had been a while and it seemed like the good way for this drawing.

I'm not sure if I kept to it thought. At one time I blurred a whole shadow, and started adding gradient shadows and textures. But overal it looks ok. I'm not to sure about the colors. I just noticed that a lot off the colors that I use are gray brown and blue. It seems like a returning color palette in most off my drawings. Not sure what that is all about.

Mushroom hunting by ~wulfnstein on deviantART

Anyway, this weekend is FACTS time. Hopefully I wont forget my camera cause I hope to make lotsa photos and stuff. Of course I might give a full blogupdate about the weekend this sunday evening. But first, I have to get a bit more excited, even though I already am =D

Soon

The countdown has begun, only 5 more days until F.A.C.T.S.

I might have mentioned it before, but next weekend, the 23 and 24 of october I'll be at FACTS, trying to show my art and illustrations to the world of geeks and fanboys/girls. It dawns on me that I still have a few things that I need to take care off. Little cards that people can take with them, a camera to take photos off the event and some other little trifals.

But most off all I'll need courage to get past the first hour. Right now I'm rather anxious for those days. Will they be fun days, or will they turn out to be a terrible disaster. Who knows? A lot of questions will surely poke inside my mind. Reminding me off all the things that can go wrong. So hopefully I'll be able to focus on all the fun things that might happen in those two days.

Let me tell you that there will be a lot off space for fun facts that weekend. Meeting people, maybe selling a few drawings, seeing some cool cosplayers, and generaly having a geeky experience. :)
*insert sketch now*

hey look its paint

Good old fashioned ms paint

When I was a kid I used to paint a lot in ms paint. I used it for making little software drawings. From altering existing Windows backgrounds too completly changing the sprites in bitmap games. Back in the day I even tried to change the winamp layout a bit as well. Which turned out to be a sort of stoneage thing. But most off the paint stuff from back in the day wasn't that spectacular.

Well, neither is this, but I think you can see that I'm not a rookie when you look at the next two images. Since they have a sort of flow in them that shows I'm not a little kid making the drawings. At least I'd like to think so. Aah, ms paint, never will I forget the gradients I tried to replicate with your darn stiff coloring system.

Colored sketches for once

And then the planet just went BOOM!

Yeah, can you imagine that, one day you're just sitting there relaxing and then boom, something happens that shakes the very foundations of the world. The sketch below is a continuation from my huge sketchpage, the file where I constantly work over previously drawn stuff. Right now I can still see some of the previous things that I had made in it.

But I'm sure you chaps can hardly recognise anything else besides a planet in an odd state of mind. I'm not sure if I'll continue detailing this thing out or if I'll just end up destroying this drawing by painting something else over it. mh, we'll see.




The figure below is a character from an animation that I'm working on right now. Its not yet finished and sometimes I wish I could just show something already. But as I only want to show the finished product, this little sketch will have to do. Maybe I'll even work this drawing out a bit more, but for now a sketched version will do. In the animation the character is more cartoony of course.

Air dragon eggs?

True to the blogs name, I have been procrastinating this week.

The little animation I am working on is still in need of a s**tload of work, but the result never feels satisfying. Hence the reason why I didn't work on it as much as I could have. Its just that I draw a lot of frame by frame movements and when I check the result its always over in less then a second. Hours of work and a few seconds of yay. It doesn't feel like a good deal sometimes.

One thing is for sure, the next movie I'm making will use a lot more tweens. Speaking of the next thing I'm making. This week I made a sketch on paper that I scanned for some digitalisation. Unlike what I usually do I started to draw over the sketch, and after a while I got to a point where most of the original sketchlines were removed by the digital colors I had added.

Its a drawing of an ageless egg in an ever changing environement. Someone said it might be an alien ship and another person said it might be an egg of the air dragons. Its funny and inspirational when I notice what other people see in the drawings.

The house and the egg by ~wulfnstein on deviantART

A mutant car

If you don't know Beardyman, I suggest you check it out right now.

Well, I havn't been that bussy with drawing sketches, though this popped up somewhere on the road to work. I took some words and started brainstorming on different stuff around me. I ended up with "mutant car" So that is what I tried to make.

At first I wanted to draw a normal car with fleshy stuff pooring out of the cracks and doors. But that didn't allow me to draw a lot of mutant, which was the thing that needed most focus. So I swapped to mutant car where "car" is just a the shape that a mutant animal has transformed into. Yes, its alive as well. *insert mad scientist laughter*