back to the drawing board

There’s unfinished work in this picture, so that counts as sketchblog material, right? I got a drafting table recently to try and set up a better workspace for drawing, and my most wonderful husband assembled it tonight. :3 In general, it’s always a good thing to be able to spread out and work big when you’re drawing, which I’ve never really been able to do before. I’m hoping this helps my back some since I’ll be able to angle things how I want to and sit further away while I work. Yay for ergonomics!

Anyway, I’m trying out a new method for working on comics. I’ve got three pages (not the next three pages, these are down the line a bit) taped to the board together so I can keep things more consistent from page to page. So far the inks are looking pretty good. I like this. :D

milo j's house of noodles

We cook at home a lot, so the running joke in the kitchen is that we’re eating at “Milo J’s House of whatever”. I’m thinking about doing a series of these and making a big poster print of a menu board to hang on the kitchen wall. Not sure yet, because then I’d have to come up with one title and it wouldn’t be interchangable anymore. (Milo J’s House of Pancakes, Milo J’s House of Pizza, etc.)

Still, fun little test sketch thing.

So a while ago I was drawing bits of the current chapter of the comic, and contemplating how a Chio’s skeleton would work. I always find it easier to draw when I have some idea of how a joint works or moves, so it made sense to try and work that out. Since they’re supposed to be a human/animal hybrid thing, I decided to do things the “right” way and do some research. I broke out my anatomy book, my bio textbook, a book of dinosaur skeletons, and basically anything I could find that had pictures of skeletons. It’s better to draw from the real thing, but when this is the best you can get your hands on you just have to manage. I worked from a bunch of sources, and while my final result isn’t perfect, it helped me figure a few things out, and I learned a bit about bones and why they’re shaped the way they are. It was an interesting experiment, anyway.

Reference material included:

An Atlas of Anatomy for Artists, 1957 edition, Fritz Schider. This was one of my dad’s books from when he was in school that I wound up with, and it’s fantastic. Great reference material.

The text from my 200-level bio class, some edition specially printed for my school? It’s packed now so I can’t pull out the info, but basically just a generic university biology book.

This isn’t the exact edition, but I’m pretty sure it’s an earlier version of this book, which is also packed up now so I can’t find it, but I’ve had it for a zillion years since I was a kid. It’s probably fairly outdated now, but there are tons of photos of skeletons and it’s pretty interesting to flip though.

Today’s experiments (in addition to just doodling and playing around) included trying to work out a watercolor brush in Photoshop. I know it can be done, because Photoshop is the most amazing program known to mankind (according to my dad). After a little reading for ideas, I came up with something roughly similar. I ought to be able to work it into something more watercolory-correct in time.

My next step will be trying to do some comic-style drawings and see if I can come up with something similar enough to my current style of comicking to satisfy my inner consistency freak. I’d love to just drop what I’m doing and do the whole thing digitally, but the inconsistency would bother me forever. Real supplies cost too much, and are too inconvenient. If I can figure this out in a way that makes me happy, it would be better.

So I set up this sketchblog, fully intending to use it, and then I started packing to move. And then I didn’t have time to draw for a month. And then I did again, and here are the latest scrap bits from various experiments.

Still playing around with translating brush techniques onto digital work. It’s always such a different texture to work with a tablet. Not a BAD thing, just a thing. I wish I drew more consistently between real media/digitally. Working on that.