The Sandman

Well I was accepted onto the DrawerGeeks website. For those who didn't read the first post, DrawerGeeks.com is a bunch of people in various art industries who post their artwork on the web. They pick a common subject, and everyone interprets it in thier own style. It's basically just an excuse to have fun and keep in practice. Anyway they post each new batch of art Friday mornings, and I officially joined Thursday afternoon. Against my better judgement I stayed up late last night to do something quick for this weeks theme, the Sandman.

Sandman is a villian from the SpiderMan Comic Books. But DrawerGeeks generally has quite a wide range of interpretations of the theme, people riffing on whatever puns are in the name as well as straight interpretations. So far I'm the only one who didn't do the Spider Man character. I did a quick pencil sketch, then I scanned it into Photoshop and painted it digitally. The sketch took about 10 minutes and the color took about 2 hours. You can check out the other submissions here.

Tom Sawyer's Space Mountain

I took this picture a few weeks ago. I went over to Tom Sawyer Island to take some pictures before it began it's transformation into "Pirates Island". I just thought that this was a cool view. Thematically, Space Mountain is about as far from Tom Sawyers Island as you can get, but ironically it's easily seen from this one angle. I think Space Mountain is an absolutely beutiful building, though I've long taken it for granted. This sort of picture makes me want to go find what other lands you can see it from.

3 Types of Sketches

I have 3 types of figure sketches. The two from the previous post are the simplest in final form, the most impressive to myself. They are a handful of lines that tell you everything about the subject. There may be parts missing, legs or fingers or whatever, but if it's necessary to the pose, it's there in those few scratches of ink. More commonly they come out like this:


I'm generally happy with this sort of sketch too. It's much more worked over. But it tends to have a finished look and solidity that I like, even though you can tell it took a lot more work than my quicker ones. As quick sketches go, there's a lot of unnecessary information here, but not so much as too make the basic pose unreadable. Not sure which kind I like better.

The third kind of sketch I end up with is the kind that's a dead end. IF I finish them, they don't show anything of value. I won't be posting any examples of those. Just pretend I didn't mention them.

Two quick sketches

Mad Baby

I drew this because of a website called drawergeeks.com. It's a site where various professional artists submit artwork based on a single theme, generally something from the public consciousness that they can all riff on. I've always thought on of the weak areas with my portfolio was the lack of variety. I have so much Disney stuff, of which I'm very proud, but very little else. Drawergeeks got me excited about just having fun with a variety of subjects. It's an invitation only website, and while I am looking into that, I started this blog as another option, in case that doesn't pan out. Anyway their current theme is "Grrr Face" and so all the artists are submitting, well faces going "Grrrr...". This is mine. Just a quick 2 or 3 minute sketch. Don't know what the little guy is so upset about. Come to think about it perhaps he's just constipated...

Welcome to the ol' sketchbook

Well after having a registered domain and website for about 2 years now, with virtually no content on it, I've decided to create a blog. My main hurdle with the website has been my total lack of know-how, and even less time to figure it out. As I understand it, a blog is much quicker, and while I can't customize it nearly as much as a website, it'll give me a quick professional looking way of putting artwork on display, and that's all I really want. I'll try to update often, so please check back. I suspect most of what I put up will be sketches; not only do I prefer to sketch but that lack of time I mentioned earlier prohibits a lot of color stuff. But we'll see...