Wednesday Figure Drawing


Here are this weeks Figure Drawings. The last for this year! If you look at the first two sketches, you can see that they are the same pose. Some of my previous posts have examples of this too. Often, after finishing a sketch, if there's time left on that pose, I'll do another quick sketch before time runs out. It is easier to bring out the pose in simple lines. When I put detail in, it quickly reduces the overall energy. Of course, you can't get that energy in detail without being able to do so with very little line either. That's one of the things I'm working on here.

Wednesday Figure Drawing




Here are this week's figure drawings. Wish I had time to go out and do some costumed figures as well...trying to simplify complex clothing would be a great thing to work on. Also, it would be interesting to see how much of the underlying movement I could bring out in the clothes..hmm.

Wednesday Figures



Here are today's figure drawings. I tried a few with more line. It's really tricky drawing a complete figure in ink straight away, but it helped that the two closeups were 10 minutes instead of 5. It takes me at least double the time to think out these lines if I start caring about making it a little more "refined". I've got to start moving somewhere new with this stuff...too busy with animation stuff lately, but eventually I'll do some more watercolors with a clear mind, hopefully for a few hours straight and things will start going somewhere from here. That's why I have no shame about stuffing my pockets with art supplies wherever I go...I've got too much to do and too little time to do it! Don't we all...

Saddle Ranch and Backstage Cafe



Two Birthdays. One night. Tons of new faces. The Saddle Ranch sketch kind of became a mess of color. I lost the structure and depth of it. I got too caught up in the details. The second sketch, from inside the Backstage Cafe turned out a bit better. I'll have to keep working out how to simplify all that detail into something that gets the idea across. Either way, it's fun, and people are always asking where all that stuff (art supplies) came from. My pockets are always full :).

Wednesday Figure Drawing


Here are this weeks figure drawings. Why so much green this time? Well there are many deep philosphical reasons for the use of this particular shade of green...but mostly it is the color I've used the least in my slowly diminishing watercolor set. I lay down the ink for these by drawing as if I really don't care what it looks like. Kind of like when you were a kid and your teacher forced you to write or draw something you didn't want to do and you made that pouty face and scribbled some stuff out of spite. Aww yeah. Except I'm not all pouty about it. I just don't care too much whether it looks good or not. I look at the figure, and make quick mental notes about where all the parts are, but when I lay down the line, I just let it be messy and don't try too hard to make it clean or correct. Then I add the color in much the same way. I put an almost random color down and then push a bit of contrast with some more colors, check out the shadows and light on the figure and finish it up. I think it's time to start reaching for that next step.

Kahani


I've put a lot of time into my personal animation work these days, so not much in the way of new paintings. I did however do 4 illustrations for the Fall 2006 issue of Kahani. It is a quarterly short story magazine for children.

If you'd like to see the work of other talented artists as well as the rest of my illustrations, you can order this issue. Visit the site for details about the current issue as well as contributer bios.

It was a lot of fun to work on, and nice to see the results in print.

PTV and Puppets 2



A few more puppets from the book and various musicians and actors from some more PTV shows. These are the last two pages to finish out the artwork from my vacation in Ohio from last week. The ink drawings helped me a great deal with these pages. These are all straight watercolors without laying down any kind of line. Thinking out the shapes, and modelling the forms with color is challenging and fun. I painted the details with a fine brush. It takes longer than inking, but if I have time, I think it adds a lot.

Manisha and Asha

I went to see Manisha Shahane and Ashwini Srikantiah perform with their bands at the Santa Monica Farmer's Market. Manisha has a great deal of variety in her set. For one song, she brought her friend's kids on stage to make train sounds when she pointed to them during the song. Asha was a lot of fun with her band (including Sandeep, playing guitar and later eating crepes in the green shirt) too!Here are a bunch of watercolor sketches from their performances and of the people around me. There's also a sketch of Aki and an unfinished one of Big D manning the camera. That one's unfinished because I drew the camera too small...in ink! I think the watercolor of Manisha, Beret and Asha is my favorite. It was the loosest of these sketches. Still can't capture a likeness in any kind of detail..especially very quickly...got to work on that.

Wednesday Figure Experimentation




Here are some figure drawings from today. I'm continuing to play with line and color. It's a lot of fun to see where I can take this! It's this kind of experimentation in short poses that really helps me try out different ideas. I feel like the first two(among the last I painted, are some of the most successful).