I mentioned a few days ago that I was starting to draw again, and hoped to have my first piece done over this weekend. The penciling turned out great, looked fabulous and made me quite proud! Now, I really wish I had scanned the pencil version before I inked it in, because it really doesn’t look so great anymore. As I’ve already lamented, the paper I drew on was really only suited for pencil sketches, so the inking nib pretty much shredded the paper. Grr.
Since I was so unhappy with the ink work, I decided not to even bother with the digital coloring process. Polishing a turd at this point, really. Still, I’ll own up to my failure and display it for the world (it’s not that bad!) Click the icon below to see it:
There you have it. It took a lot of cleanup work after scanning it to make it look that good, there was tons of bleeding from the nib etching into the paper. It’s drawn from a photo of Japanese model Reon Kadena, who could quite possibly be the most gorgeous woman on the planet, physically at least. I have no idea if she has the far more important inner beauty, but this was all about ogling a hot Japanese girl anyway. *wink*
And now, just to prove that I actually had some ability, once upon a time, I’ll show some of my older work now. These are all from a period between 1989 and 1993 when I was much more serious about drawing and practiced just about every day. Most of these are taken from some reference source, an existing drawing from somewhere. I looked at the process as kinda like learning to play the guitar by learning to play other people’s songs first, in this case I was learning to draw by working off of other’s art. My aspirations were mostly to be an inker anyway, so the penciling portion was just a means to an end. I still had a lot to learn about things like line weight and shading in most of these, but here they are nonetheless…
These first few are various sketches and doodles of characters from Dave Sim’s Cerebus, mostly of Cerebus himself: (I’m not sure why he’s pointing to his left in all these drawings. *laugh*)
Next, we have Bob Burden’s Flaming Carrot and Rorschach from Watchmen:
And, finally, a couple drawings of The Joker. The first taken from one of Dave McKean’s paintings for Arkham Asylum and the other a re-creation of Brian Bolland’s cover for The Killing Joke:
Okay, that should be enough for now. I hope to get back to where I was back then eventually, and hopefully even better. There’s something wonderfully therapeutic about the process, and it’s an excellent way to practice concentration, patience, and general mindfulness. An outlet I’m glad to have!