Stow Lake Perspectives

As usual, when I get busy, I fall behind on updating this art blog. Let's start catching up with some location drawings from Stow Lake in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, one of my favorite nearby nature haunts. I drew these as perspective examples for a guest class I recently taught for the wonderful John Muir Laws.

They Might Be Giant Pictures

During this semester of teaching, I've been making some large-scale demo drawings during my Fantastic Figure class. The idea here is to composite together multiple poses from the model into a single big illustration. I started off relatively small, with single sheets of 25x30 inch paper...

 Then I tried covering an entire chalkboard with paper, giving me an image area of about 60x45 inches.

For the school's twice-annual Costume Carnival, I tried using a bunch of acrylic paint pens on individual 25x30 sheets.

The next logical step was full color on a 60x45 canvas, which ended up taking ages - I had to stay a couple hours after class to finish this one up.

So the last couple weeks, I've gone with either smaller canvases or less color.

One way or another, I'm going to try to keep working big. It's challenging, but a lot of fun!

Inking Demos: Oz and Tortoise

It's wacky inking demo time again! These each took about 30-40 minutes, with some ink wash and spatter and such. I didn't end up finger-painting this time, but you can't have everything.

This is, of course, a composite Wizard of Oz companion character made up of part Scarecrow, part Lion, and part Tin Man. He's having some trouble deciding what to ask the Wizard for.

And this, on the other hand, is what you get when you ask your students for subject prompts.

Odds and Ends

Clearing out the metaphorical basement, I present for your diversion and amusement...

A complete lineup of the Mu Gundam robots so far. All to scale, naturally; man, the Kingdam is really huge.

A silly inking demo for my comics class.

Another silly inking demo. Next week I'll be demonstrating ink wash, spatter, finger-painting, etc, which is always fun; plus, that means I'll probably have time to actually finish the illustrations.

More Inky Demos

And here are today's "stupid inking tricks" demos for my college-level comics class. These took about 40 minutes each, and being a good sport, I let my students pick the subjects as long as they included monsters.

Yes, those are fingerprints in her hair. I think after students see you literally inking with your fingers, it reduces the pressure of expectations a little bit.

More Demos

Oh, and I forgot to post these. More quickie inking technique demos from my summer comics class.

Obviously Man-Rat needed a tragic origin story. Here he mourns the comrades he's lost to the perfidious rat-catcher.

And a Joan of Arc-inspired sketch I was quite happy with.

Hello World!

I may have dropped off the face of the earth these last few months, but I haven't forgotten you, dear readers! Here, enjoy some recent nonsense. First, a quick ink techniques demo for my comics class. It's sort of an Alice in Wonderland thing...

And a few scribbles from a Quick Studies workshop. Wish I could get to these more often, but you know how it is.

Quickie Color Demo

Here's a stray page of art that I turned into a quick-and-simple Photoshop coloring sample for my comics class. This is from Viral, a collaboration I started with wife Julie that may yet see the light of day if I somehow get the time to finish it...

Planet Of The Demos

A quick inking techniques demo from today's comics class. A little bit of dry brush, a little bit of spatter, a little bit of ink wash, a girl, a gorilla...

Do As I Say, Not As I Demo

Just for filler fun, here are a few demos and examples I did during for my comics classes this summer. First, I did this for a quick in-class exercise where you're given the first and last panels of a story, and you need to fill in the story in between...



And this for another in-class exercise, where you have to include at least one example of every type of "camera angle."



Finally, this was a quick demo of using black and white shapes to create simple backgrounds. There was much discussion of the ominous owl pinata featured in the last scene...

Red Space Suit Again

I'm so torn! As much as I love the lurid yellow-orange I originally used for the shape-changing Space Wolf, it seems like I'm setting a bad example by using every crayon in the box. Just to ease my conscience, here's a modified version with a more subdued monster color scheme.



For comparison purposes, here's the Red Riding Hood lineup that Scotland Barnes did for his class. If we can just get George to post his lineup, we'll have a complete set!

More Red Space Suit

Working a little more on this Character Design class demo. This time, the lineup in color, and a turnaround for Little Red Space Suit herself...




I think I'm going to use these guys for a storyboard sample, too. There will be spaceships.

More Demos

Here's another in-class demo. This one was a quick sketch for my comics class, to demonstrate a few inking tricks.

Little Red Space Suit

I'm teaching a Character Design class again, and we're just finishing up the traditional "Little Red Riding Hood" assignment. To me, the main point of this one is to arrive at a wide range of character types - young and old, male and female, nice and nasty - and so I give my students a lot of leeway in interpreting the story. Last time, I did a cute Halloween-themed lineup as a demo, so this time I thought I'd do something with a (slightly) more realistic aesthetic:



This, of course, would be a Little Red Space Suit version, in which our heroine is taking a payload of oxygen to Grandmother's asteroid only to find that she's been replaced by a shape-changing alien. "What a lot of eyes you have, Granny!" "All the better to see you with, my dear."



Here's the rough draft, before I cleaned it up, reshuffled the characters, and redesigned the Hunter character. In the real world, you could do all this with Photoshop, but we're keeping it old-school in the classroom.



A few alternative candidates for the shape-changing Space Wolf.



And here's me working out a new design for the Hunter, including a high-tech laser axe for slaying monsters.

Scotland Barnes, who's teaching another section of the same class, posted his own awesome development drawings over on his blog. Go admire!

Red Riding Hood

Here's a little sample I made for a character design class I'm teaching. It's a quick and simple cast lineup for a Halloween-themed "Little Red Riding Hood" story, which would explain why our "hunter" and "wolf" characters are essentially cross-dressing.