"I want to do something splendid before I go into my castle, something heroic or wonderful that won't be forgotten after I'm dead. I don't know what, but I'm on the watch for it, and mean to astonish you all some day." -Louisa May Alcott
Hello, dear readers! :) Conference is over and it was amazing and I will probably be lettering some quotes from it soon, but for today here's a drawing of a girl playing a . . . string instrument of some kind. I'm not really sure what it is (I really should google it one of these days).
I started taking some process pictures, but the whole coloring idea did not exactly go as planned. So here's what I've got!
Pencil sketch
Inking . . .
. . . aaaand . . . inked!
Right after this one is where things started to go south, because I tried to color her skin peach, but it came out a very offensively bright sort of orange. (I'm not showing you that one because I don't want to give anyone nightmares! :P ) But that was the end of my grand coloring scheme :) I do want to try some more colored pieces in the future, though.
Hip hip hooray! Today is a very special day: it's the first day of General Conference AND the first day of Inktober! If you weren't reading this blog last Inktober, basically what this means is that I'll be endeavoring to post every day this month . . . so keep checking back :)
This year I'm starting off with a lil' bit of Sharpie hand lettering.
Sunday, September 25, 2016
This week's sketches are brought to you by me having some extra time to draw due to getting my wisdom teeth out on Thursday. I still have chipmunk cheeks and I can't play my trumpet yet, but I'm feeling a lot better than I was earlier!
Still working on clothing-simplifying while still keeping the silhouette and material believable.
I drew this when my family was watching some Alfred Hitchcock movie.
This was a tough pose to figure out, but fun in the end.
Reading/listening/watching recommendation of the week (I need a better name for this! Help me out, readers dear!): "Why the Mona Lisa Stands Out". It's an interesting read about what we consider "great" art, what actually constitutes great art, and whether or not the two are the same.
I am here today to tell you a tale of adventure, woe, potatoes, and eventual triumph . . . and also of hedgehogs. 114 of them, to be precise.
(yes, you heard that correctly.)
My cousins came to visit (hurrah!) and while they were here, we girls decided to make some crafts, one of which was painted t-shirts. We originally wanted to make potato stamps . . .
. . . and we even started taking pictures to document the process. It soon became apparent, however, that this wasn't going to work-the paint came out very blotchy and splodgy and just BLEH. Our efforts spiraled into a cycle of despair involving styrofoam, exact-o knives, and a lot of googling to try to save this project from the crash-and-burn that was already happening. Clearly a new approach was necessary, so we finally decided to just paint the shirts! I was still very attached to my hedgehog idea, so I decided to make a stencil, trace it in pen, and paint over it.
I had fun designing the lil' hedgehog and I actually had in mind something I read from E. H. Shepard about his design of Pooh-I can't find the exact quote now, but it was something about how his eye being just the little cartoon dot so far back in the head made him look particularly Pooh-ish. I'm rather fond of that look, and I thought it suite my little hedgehog quite well. I've decided to name him Ernest as an homage, actually. :)
I'm very happy with my new shirt! Also, now that I have a vector version of my hedgehog design, I'll have to make a pattern with it once I figure out how to do that in Inkscape. :)
However, this turned out to be more of a "why-buy-the-thing-when-you-could-make-the-thing-in-fifty-million-hours-of-work-for-yourself" project . . . I did some number crunching and found out that I spent about 6 hours on it (okay, 5 hours, 57 minutes, and 12 seconds or 5.953 hours, assuming a constant rate of 3 minutes 8 seconds or 3.13 minutes per hedgehogs at a total of 114 hedgehogs. This number is based on a smallish sample size, but the data points were close enough together that I'm fairly confident in this average.) If I'm being paid $7.25 per hour, the current national minimum wage, that comes out to $43.16. Adding the cost of the t shirt ($5.99) the total cost of making this shirt is $49.15. And that's a minimum estimate, considering that I definitely wasn't working at maximum efficiency the whole time and that I feel like I should be paid more than minimum wage for this. (can you tell AP Calc is getting to me already? We take our math too very seriously here at Something Splendid Studios Inc. Sometimes we forget to think about other things.)
Anyway! I do feel pretty fancy wearing this shirt, mixed with a certain amount of concern over my life choices in spending that much time on a hedgehog t-shirt. I had fun making it, though, so I think it was worth it.
In other news, I want to start sharing some of what I've been reading or listening to with y'all, and this video is one I've been listening to a lot recently. It's absolutely gorgeous and inspiring and it will fill your day with happiness. :)
To get better at drawing, I have to continually push myself to learn new skills and expand myvisual library. I'm working on drawing kids, which is a whole different skill set than drawing adults-and one I haven't practiced as much in the past. While I was looking for reference, I also found this puppy picture and I took the opportunity to work on some animal drawing skills as well. So here's a daily dose of cuteness for you!
I try to understand the forms and simplify them so the drawing reads well, and I think about the forms in 3D space-Glen Keane always talks about "drawing sculpturally", and that's a helpful though for me to keep in mind as I draw.
I've been testing out various digital sketching apps on my phone, and I did this sketch in Autodesk Sketchbook (the best free drawing app I've found so far). Unfortunately, it's not super hi-res, but I like the ability to customize the brushes and the different tools they have available. It's also the only free app I've seen with layer capabilities, a major plus.(Although you're limited to three, which is a bummer. I did a loose sketch on the first, a cleanup on the second after moving the opacity on Layer 1 down so I could see what I was doing. Then a coloring later in between the two, and since I was out of layers, I went back to the scribbly layer and turned it into a simple background. Now that I think of it, I'll put process pics at the end for anyone who's curious.) I'll definitely be playing around with this app more in the future.
I'm not really sure who this sketch is supposed to be-I was playing around with exaggerated, caricatured facial features (hence the nose! heh) and trying to do some lighting, and I this is where I ended up.
I've also been thinking a bit about changing the blog name, but I'm struggling to come up with ideas. I want to play around with the look and name to get a bit more of a professional feel, so suggestions would really be appreciated! :)
Here are some process pictures.
The super-loose-and-messy scribble
Cleaned up (scribbly version is hiding underneath at 25% opacity)
