"She's got plastic doll eyes..."

The eyes are a little too "Bratz-ish" for my taste, but a fairly satisfying doodle nonetheless.

Drawergeeks: Dragon

Here's my submission for Drawergeeks this week:

Pencil sketch colored in Photoshop

Wow! Sometimes the Drawergeeks subject just leaves me cold and other times, such as this one, I have more ideas than I know what to do with. I started some preliminary sketches for this last week but got caught up with some other projects and forgot about finishing this until 2 nights ago, so the final color was a bit more rushed than I would have liked. Still, there's at least 6 hrs of work in this, and I'm pretty darned happy with it. Check out the other entries here.

Cookies!

Girl quick sketch

This really didn't start out as a drawing of my wife but it kinda turned into one.

What are you looking at?!

B is for Buzzard

I didn't realize how difficult this little self imposed project would be. I whipped out that Anteater in under a half hour, but when it came to finding an animal for B, for some reason I struggled. I didn't want to go with a totally obvious animal like a bear. I tried sketching bobcats, beavers, and bats. For some reason none of those turned out very well. Then last night, all of the sudden buzzards seemed to have whatever spark I needed to get some good drawings. So here they are...

Buzzard

Drawergeeks- Tiki

Here's my submission for Drawergeeks this week. The theme is

"Tiki"

You can check out the other cool entries this week here.

A is for Anteater

I've decided to create a little assignment for myself. Faced with the prospect of not being able to post my work for Disney any longer, I started wondering what sort of material I would be able to put up on this blog with any regularity. I don't get out to figure draw nearly as much as I'd like and honestly my favorite/most successful drawings are generally quick character sketches. But even those are few and far between without a specific assignment to spur them into being. So I decided, simply to give myself some structure, I'm going to go through the alphabet, doing an animal sketch for each letter. I don't know that it will be every day, but at least when I get that "gotta post something feeling", at least I will have a starting place. I may go all the way to color with some of these, or they may just be quick sketches- the point is just to keep drawing.

And so I present the letter A...

Anteater

Anteater- a poem by Eric

(written very late at night)

Oh if I were an anteater

How grand life would be

On a branch I would teeter

way up in my tree

And the ants would all swarm

in their special ant way

but I'd never eat 'em-

I like burritos.

©Eric Scales 2009

Sabrina

I used to really enjoy, and get good drawings when drawing little kids. Being so active, they present a myriad of poses, whereas us adults tend to make more, um, sedentary, models. My daughter Sabrina is very active, however, I never seem to have my sketchbook unless she's quietly reading or coloring.

I'm always amazed at how when you really look, kids fit some of the cartoon stereotypes so perfectly, and yet some very distinct characteristics aren't as often captured. Obviously their faces are chubby, and their eyes are big, but when drawing all of these, I find I'm surprised at how small her neck and shoulders are, but that they are not necessarily compact.

Once, after having mentioned off handedly to Sabrina that a good way to make a drawing cute was to have the bridge of the nose to be short, thus bringing it closer in line with the eyes, Sabrina and I were drawing together. We used each other as models. As I roughly sketched out a quick pencil portrait of her, she peered over and said, "Um, that's good Daddy, but could you make my nose closer to my eyes please?"

Playground sketches

Just three quick sketches from the local park.

Blondes have more fun...

...even though they don't seem to be doing much in these 2 quick sketches. I get frustrated when I see other artists beautiful drawings of gorgeous women; they make me feel like a rank amateur. Still, I do find a certain amount of satisfaction in these that I've done. As an artist, I go back and forth between being depressed that I'm not as amazing as some other artists out there, and keeping it all in perspective and knowing that every day I get a little better. I need to remind myself that so far I've never really finished my drawings to the extent that some of these other artists do, and that with another cleanup pass or two, my drawings might be a little closer to theirs in quality. I guess I'm not too interested in the fine details, so much as the overall gesture of the girls I draw. One day when I have scads of free time lying around I'll do a nice cleanup of one of these and either do some digital color like my Martini Girl, or, dare I say, actually paint it for real.

Wolf Puppet Pt 2

Here are a few more sketches I did for the wolf puppet I talked about a week or two ago.

Just another way it could go. It's a bit more fanciful, and more clearly says "puppet" to me, though I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not. I really like the subtle menace of my previous design, but I still want this puppet to be fun. Though I'm an adult now (mostly), my first design almost made me wonder if I'd be able to be alone in a room late at night with that thing looking at me. I'm interested in Jarrod's feedback on these new sketches.

Wolf Puppet Designs Pt 1

A few years back, I met an absolutely amazing puppet builder, named Jarrod Boutcher. Actually I only met him through his website, and email. A few months back, he ended up visiting Disneyland and spent quite a while in my shop watching me paint. But he didn't connect my name to our emails years earlier, and I had no idea who this guy watching me paint was. Thanks to my blog and a few comments he left, we eventually connected the dots and had a good laugh. Anyway, we've decided to collaborate on a puppet design, and I suggested doing some sort of Big Bad Wolf character. This undoubtably stems from my childhood terror/fascination with wolves. Below are several of the sketches I came up with. Most of them are not puppet designs persay, merely quick sketches to work out proportions and ideas. Jarrod is going to take what I've done and try and refine them into a workable design.

This final one in color at the bottom is the one I like the best.

The only addition I am thinking of is maybe some article of clothing or unique feature that makes this character a little more identifiable, a hat or scarf or something. I think I always like my animal characters to have a bit of anthropomorphism like that, like the clothes wearing critters in the Uncle Remus stories- it helps tie them down to a time period.

I don't know what the final result will be. Jarrod has amazing instincts when it comes to puppet design, and I've asked him to please feel free to make changes and suggest ideas. He says he's going to show the progress on his blog which is seperate from his site and you can see it here. Check both our blogs for updates.

Girl with a Martini

This started out as just another sketch. I was pretty happy with it, but didn't get around to posting it. Then I decided I'd play around with some digital color. I really just wanted to do something quick, but I just kept going. I think I'm happy with it.

Of course, then I discover another blog by a very talented artist, filled with more gorgeous girl drawings, but these are all traditionally done and painted. Now I feel like such a follower doing the digital color. Maybe I should watercolor now....

Going Digital

I do a lot of digital coloring nowadays, but have never really drawn much digitally. I have a Wacom tablet, which is great for the coloring, but it's still a bit awkward to freely sketch while looking at the screen instead of your hand. But I've been looking a lot at Jenny Lerew's site, and her digital figure drawings are just amazing. With just quick bold strokes and a few finer details she draws the most beautiful sketches. Now a few clarifications- she's using a different kind of pad, one that I'm told is a screen in itself, so your hand is in the same place the image is. And, she probably draws in that bold quick style no matter the medium she's using. My drawings tend to be sketchy busy things, with lots of lighter lines and the finals being darker. Experimenting with my Wacom pad, I did this one:

It's allright. It's on par with a lot of my figure drawings in my paper sketchbook. But it's not as bold and confident as I had hoped. Part of that lies with it being from my head and really not having a pose in mind until halfway through- you get a lot of false starts and remnants of a changing mind in the drawing that way. I also used a brush tool that was set at a pretty low opacity, which lets me start light and then go over and over a line to build up it's darkness- just like with a pencil. However that's a real good way to allow yourself to hem and haw, and not be very commited to the lines your'e butting down. A friend of mine suggested using a bigger bolder brush and set it to full opacity.

I have to say, the bottom one shows the most skill I think. It's not pretty, but it's confident which is what I was going for in the first place. I would still like to get to a place where I could draw the female form with such confidence, but that certainly takes a skilled hand, and it seems I need some more practice. If you haven't allready, check out Jenny's site.

Oh, and Happy 107th Birthday, Walt Disney!