Standing figure with Drapery

A quick 3 minute sketch from a figure drawing class.

A crayon portrait

Just a quick portrait I did over the Thanksgiving weekend. Sabrina and I did lots of coloring and drawing to pass the time.

Drawergeeks: Starbelly

The original inspiration for this week's theme on drawergeeks.com was the Dr. Seuss story "The Sneetches".

But as you can see from my entry below, and the others, people have done some other interpretations of the term "starbelly".

Now to give credit where credit is due: my design owes a ton of inspiration to artist Frank Cho, creator of the Liberty Meadows comic books. His drawings, and specifically his covers, of his main character Brandy are awe-inspiring. The pose in my initial sketch for my Starbelly design bore quite a resemblance to his cover for Liberty Meadows: Eden Book 1. Ok, maybe it isn't a big mystery why, because that is the only copy of his stuff that I have, but it really wasn't an intentional imitation. Once I went to clean up my drawing, I noticed the similarity of pose and intentionally imitated his color and shading style- hey there's no shame in imitating the best is there?

Fellow Students

Often I would come out a Figure Drawing class with passable drawings of the model but great drawings of the students.

Here are two that I found. The top one is actually Disney Imagineer Gene Wiskerson who oversaw the class and who was sculpting the model in this session. The other is a student.

The lady on the table

A quick sketch from my figure drawing class.

Gorilla sketches

A pair of gorilla sketches from the LA Zoo.

Figure Drawing

These are some figure drawings I came across in one of my sketchbooks. They're unusual in that I drew the model several times from different angles.

Send in the Clowns

Yikes! Has it really been over two months since my last post?! There's nothing I hate more than a blog that goes for weeks without an update. I did these quick sketches for Drawergeeks a few weeks ago.

You can check out the other submissions here.

Drawergeeks: Rabbit

The theme on Drawergeeks this week is "Rabbits". This entry has a lot of influences: It's a little bit "Little Golden Books", a little Richard Scarry, a lot of Uncle Remus' Brer Rabbit and maybe just a little "Prarie Home Companion" (since that's what I watched while painting it, though the whole concept came to me much earlier). I think the Golden Books (Poky Little Puppy and Tawny Scrawny Lion especially) stuck with me a lot when I was young, and even though the illustrations were somewhat simple by today's standards, they were very effective. Even living in Orange County suburbs, I think I liked the little illustrated peeks into the forests that these stories always took place in. So anyway the theme "Rabbits" instantly conjured up one of the cuddly clever animals from these mid century storybooks.

There's no more to the story than this verse, but it may be fun to write the rest of it someday. Check out the other entries here.

Drawergeeks: Aliens

Another quick Drawergeeks entry this week: Aliens.

Man, seeing some of the great stuff the other artists contribute I really wish I had more time to spend on my entries. Course, I'm greatful that it's work keeping me busy and not, say civil war or chronic hiccupping or something. This is another quick pencil sketch with some digital shading and text. And, you can view the other entries here.

Cinderella just loves mice...

This weeks theme on Drawergeeks is Cinderella. Doing Disney Princesses all the time, you'd think this idea wouldn't excite me much, but really, I was kinda interested in rethinking something that's so firmly established in everyone's mind. I mean, Disney's isn't the first or only Cinderella, it's simply the most heartily ingrained in everyone's mind. I mean, you could do anything to reimagine the story and characters. I could go with a gritty harsh view of the class system in France in the 1600's, with Cinderella as a sickly but beautiful abused girl living as a slave in her own home. Or I could have done an ornate heavily illuminated take, where the characters and sets are just filled with lavish details worthy of an expensive engraving. So what was my take? I did what all non Disney studios do when they decide to tackle something with such endless possibilities- I changed all the characters to cats.

Inspired, I know. Now all it needs is a cutesy pun in the title. Cinderwhiskers? No. Whiskerella? Um no. CinderFluffyTail? You might want to check back, this might take a while... In the meantime you can check out the other drawergeeks submissions here.

Princess Leia

This weeks theme on DrawerGeeks is Princess Leia. Here's mine:This is my first submission to DrawerGeeks that I've painted traditionally. The others may have used a quick sketch but were mostly digital color. I want to try and make each submission unique in style and approach. Check the other artists' submissions here.

The Titans

This week's theme on Drawergeeks is "Titans". Unfortunately, I didn't have much time to devote to such a powerful theme, however I'm still pretty happy with the two things I came up with- constraints (time, financial, or otherwise) really do force you to be creative. Anyway below are my two submissions. The first is a quick sketch with some quick digital tones thrown in. The second is all digital.

Gorilla My Dreams

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...