Benchmark

This is me, playing with my park bench background painting, putting in different characters and coloring them on the comp to see how they look. some, better than others.

Crow has "Toupee" for the bald man's humiliation.

The squirrel is about to explode with excitement from the rabbit's nutty gift.

and the turtle is probably going to be accosted for vagrancy.

New Markers

okay, so i haven't done any more work on my animation yet, but i did get some new markers today, and i've been trying them out for a little while. first i went through a couple of my sketchbooks looking for old pencil sketches to ink,
then i ran out of good ones, so I scribbled out a new drawing in pencil then inked it with a couple different sized pens, just experimenting a bit with thick-and-thin's.

BG- it stands for BackGround, not the Brothers Gibb

Mission accomplished!
no, the novel isn't done yet. But since i got ahead a little last night, when i got up this morning, I had time to work on my background painting for the animated scene I am working on. And now it's finished! That means it's time for the real work to begin. Here is a look at the background, with some old drawings of my characters colored to get an idea how they will look against the BG.


This is a palette of colors i gathered to use in choosing the paint colors for the BG. I got them by finding a bunch of pretty photos online and pulling out patches of color so i could see what went into the specific color schemes of each photo that made it so appealing.


Then i went with a combo of these colors that i chose from these by scribbling out some different ideas over my layout drawing in photoshop.


These are some sketches i did to try and finalize the construction of the characters, particularly the crow, who i find especially troublesome to draw from certain angles.


I can't decide yet whether i want to go with the version of the turtle below or the one in the first picture, where the top of his head just rises above the top of his eyes. I'm leaning toward this one.

Oh, well, back to the novel. I still have another 22600-ish words to go.

~the Jerk

Parked on the Bench

I have decided upon my next project- a full scene of animation, with a bit of dialogue, painted background, and the whole nine yards. I was going to call it "speaking of the weather," but that title was taken back in '37 by Warner's director Frank Tashlin.

I took a bit of dialogue I had come up with a while ago, and built a small scene around it using my Crow and Turtle characters (those aren't their names, just their species- I haven't decided what to name them yet, or even if such apellations are necessary).
I already have the whole scene planned out- I drew my "Storyboards" on strips of scrap paper I had lying around- 11" x 1.25". The drawings are little more than (and often less than) thumbnail sketches, but it was helpful to get down on paper everything that I want to get into the scene.
More to come as i progress on this project!

~The Jerk

P.S. Here is an object of possible interest- a while ago when I created the turtle character, and found it difficult to drawing him from different angles, I sculpted a small 3d model out of wood and painted it, to give me an idea of how he would look from any angle. As I don't have a digital camera, here are some pictureso got by laying the model on my scanner bed.

Crowprastination

Ta-daAAAh!

Well, the painting is finally pretty well done! (the color of the door seems a little bright, i may fix that... now im just not sure what to do with myself... think i'll fry a couple hudred more brain cells watching tv.

Crows Feat

Still workin' on it, but I'm taking another break to draw a graphic logo for a friend's youth group.

Why, you ask, is it taking me so long to paint such a simple (...and small) picture?

Because where most painters have oodles and oodles of tubes and cakes and tubs and buckets and bottles of paint, with every color of the rainbow and the dirt, I have only 5 colors: black, white, red, blue, and yellow. Therefore, before I can put brush to paper (or canvas, linen, wood, tile, etc.) I have to mix up the colors I want first. And since I have a very small pallet, I usually only mix enough colors for a couples areas of the painting at a time; Usually, I pick an object, find the right color (this is kind of like playing with mud sometimes- add water, stir, add more dirt, trying to find the perfect blend) then break it off into several dishes to lighten, darken, or mix with another color for highlights, shadows, and reflections.

So in between sessions, I stare at the thing for a while trying to decide where to go next and how I want to approach an area of the painting.

step by steppen...crow

You Say you Want an Evolution...

Over the last few days I have been working on a painting of my crow character, in between working, eating, sleeping, dvd watching, internet surfing, and varied-and-sundry other tasks. Here is my progression so far...

1.) Initial sketches: the idea was simple- a crow playing a sax under a streetlamp.
The difficult task was deciding how to stage and frame the scene, so I scribbled down a couple different ideas and chose the one i liked best.
2.) The first draft: after choosing the version that worked best, I drew it out on a 9" x 12" sheet of paper, and inked it in. I chose to draw boards across the window of the pawn shop because the stuff in the window was too distracting in the background. Unfortunately, after inking, I realized the crow was a bit "off-model."
3.) Photoshop!
After scanning the picture into my computer, I used Photoshop to erase the unwanted parts of the picture; not only the crow, but some water smudges from running through the rain to the house with the picture in hand. Then I printed it onto a new sheet of acrylic painting paper.
4.) Second Draft. after printing out the photoshop-corrected first draft, i drew in a more satisfactory version of the crow character.

5.) Commence Painting! After some additional touch-up on the crow's face, I spread a thin layer of white paint over the entire drawing so the ink was not so dark, and then filled in some flat gray on the walls of the building. The street (which I guess is supposed to be some kind of cobbled stone street, like in the central square of an older city) I painted a reddish brown undercoat, then with a dry brush dabbed in the high and low light colors- a yellowish white mixed into the initial color served as the light, and a black mixed with the reddish brown for the shadows. a slight edge of light & dark on each block helped to separate them from one another.
6.) More of the same. I used a similar technique to color the sidewalk, again mixing in a yellowish white for the light color, to reflect the glow that comes from the primary light source, the street light.

Stay tuned, and don't touch that scrollbutton! I've got a lot more work to do before this painting is done...I'll share more later!

~the Jerk

The Maltese Crow

here it is!!!
also, here's a few of the stops along the way:

Flat color....

a grayscale mock-up...
....and the original inked version.

spam shade, PI

okay, i'm working on another crow-related film noir pic, this time more in the line of a humphrey bogart movie. here's a peek.

The Third Crow

oh, well, maybe it's not perfect, but i'm done messing with it.

...and no, his name's not Jim

still toying with the coloring on this thing. definitely needs some shadows added, and of course, the rest of the colors.

white crow

this is a little drawing i'm working on... i still have to color it, but when it's done, it will hopefully be dark and shadowy like an old film noir scene...AND THE CROW WILL BE BLACK!
this will be kinda tricky, since it has a black outline, i may have to change the outline to a lighter color to make it look right, or make him a dark gray, like this picture- the face and wings show the one way, the feet show the other way...

hmm... not sure yet which way i'll go, especially if i add a bunch of shading to it.
Here's a similarly chromatic crow i did; i might end up going in this direction with it (minus the remote control and easy chair, of course).