Tag: Sketch Machine

Norton and Fenroy’s Most Excellent Used Book Dealership

Savant Booksellers SketchThe further illustrated (and mundane) adventures of Mister Savant! Still after books, this time he seems to be negotiating the price on a tome. Typical, the man is so obsessed with cheap and obscure paperbacks when he should be trying to get his hosts to part with their hats!

This drawing started off in my 15x18cm notebook with a vague idea in my head late one night, and so I ended up tackling it a little differently. I didn’t thumbnail or roughly draw in the entire scene, instead finishing the pencils on one character entirely and then moving onto the next.

The result is apparent (to me at least); the quality and styles of the figures vary wildly. Savant (back to us) was drawn in first, hence the lines are tentative and ‘noodly’, lacking definition. The short man (is it Norton or Fenroy, I haven’t decided) came next, and by now I was warming up and starting to have some fun; the snow globe hats, for instance, were a last second addition. The pink fairy was next, and since her pose was somewhat unconventional the lines are a bit uneven here too, although I’m happy with the way she turned out.

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In order to fill the rest of the space I wondered if I should perhaps draw in some background material such as stacks of books or shelves, but since I’m not very comfortable drawing backgrounds (and I’d already drawn more than enough books in Mister Savant’s Stupid Quest for the Book Whose Name He Simply, Well.. Forgot!), I decided a couple more figures might fill in the page nicely. I had the most fun drawing these two figures, namely the tall man and Sophie, and I think it shows. The lines are the most confident here. Indeed, the visual difference between Savant and Sophie makes me a bit uncomfortable, but I didn’t want to rub it out and start over. It’s only a sketch!

The second fairy was added in as an afterthought as I had by then decided on having no background elements whatsoever, and to put in some kind of chandelier or something in that space to balance the composition would have seemed out of place.

As usual with my sketches, I left in the construction lines. I scanned it in and coloured it in GIMP; just a simple flat colour pass and one for adding in dodge/burn highlights and shadows. Not the most elegant job I’ve done (probably has something to do with the fact that I only used fuzzy round brushes) but satisfactory.

I like doing these Savant sketches. They’re a lot of fun and even as I completed this one I thought up a bunch more to do. I like them even more when they have a bit of colour on them. I’ve mostly always been a black-and-white sketch person, leaving colour for more finished pieces, but I’m starting to see its merits even in quick work. Also it’s one more place to practice colour theory and hone my skills.

I think that on the next ones I should definitely ‘rough in’ the scene before going to finished pencils to avoid those awkward style changes. Im not practiced or proficient enough a cartoonist to even have a style yet, so I should remember that warmup time is needed.

Oh, and next time I promise he won’t be doing anything boring.

V

Swamp Crash, the Second

Swamp Crash Sketch, v2The last time I visited the swamp, things were a little different. Now, as you can see, the neighbourhood has developed a bit with proper buildings and nicely made roads (er, their somewhat unconventional building material notwithstanding).

Don’t assume that this urban renewal has done anything for the property rathes, though. Sure, the locals are friendly, will greet you with tooty grins (and they can’t wait to have you for dinner), but it’s sill a swamp that is prone to space ship crashes. Parking’s a bit of an issue, then.

My first sketch was in a notebook size, and I was very happy with it. I knew there was a lot that could be improved, and that the final illustration would be on a larger paper. So for this second try at it, I drew it on an A4 sheet. Also, this time I didn’t ink it in; the larger space allowed me to put down more pencil work without ending up with a grey mess (the main reason I ball-point inked the last one).

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I’m not very happy with this sketch. The temples in the background certainly add intrigue, but much of the drama and atmosphere of the first sketch — the fact that very little could be seen in the shadows — was gone. The crashed space vessel’s new position allows me to show more of the wreckage, but it a finished piece the detail at play there may take away from the main part of the illustration, which is the two space exploreres and the monster. Also, the ‘camera angle’ of the image still needs to be made more dynamic and tightened up.

I find that I’m still a little too used to drawing small; as you can see the edges of this sheet are barely drawn in, and the people and the monster at the centre are much smaller in proportion with the whole page than they were in the first sketch. There was, admittedly, an attempt to make the scope of the image bigger in this, but that is only partly responsible of the small figures.

I think I might do one or two more goes at this before the final. One of them should be coloured in, as I haven’t experimented with how that will affect it (honestly, I hadn’t even decided on whether or not it would be a colour or black-and-white picture until now). That decision will affect how the final pencils or inks are done.

Oh well, live and learn, practice makes perfect, etc etc.

V

Mister Savant’s Stupid Quest for the Book whose Name he simply, well… Forgot!

Mister Savant's Stupid Quest for the Book whose Name he simply, well... Forgot!

This pic is both in Sketch Machine and Illustration because it started off as a pencil sketch in my little notebook, and by the time it was done I figured I might as well colour it up in the GIMP.

I did a bit of cleanup to the pencil work, which was actually a lot harder than I thought because I couldn’t just erase things like construction lines without destroying the texture of the paper that was also scanned in. So, I ended up using the clone brush, and it worked out. I mainly got rid of, as I said, construction lines (which I never bother to erase until I ink something) and especially Xaria’s eyes, which were originally open but horribly done.

I have left the construction lines in on the typography, however, mostly because I think it adds character to it and contributes to the sketch/underground comic art look that I love.

Or I’m just lazy.

V

Vishal vs Apartment

Vishal K. Bharadwaj, circa 1986, in the balcony of his family's apartment in Ghusais, Dubai. Photo by either Keshav or Sneha Bharadwaj.
My mother let me draw on walls. It was 1986, I was three, and we were living in a one bedroom apartment in Ghusais, back when there was nothing there except for a block of already decrepit government flats, Al Mulla Plaza (closed because of a border dispute), and a procession of electrical towers between there and Sharjah.

She got a lot of flack for it, of course. Neighbours would come round and wonder why on earth I was still alive after such a heinous crime, and then look worryingly at their own children as the young ones gaped at the sheer audacity of the red and green scrawls, their eyes luminous with the shock of seeing freedom, tolerance and understanding — and of course, whimsy — for perhaps the first time in their fragile lives. Several adults vowed never to bring their children into contact with my parents, not the first and certainly not the last time that was said to them.

The rationale my mother offered — since the simple truth of “Why not?” was far too much for others to bear — was that since it was a rental, once we moved out the landlord would paint it for the next tenant anyway as per the local norm; if the landlord objected, she was gladly willing to pay for the painting herself. They never objected, but I would have liked to see the look on whoever came to that apartment after we had gone. The building itself was torn down sometime in the 90s to make way for a compound of houses.

It was the only place I ever drew on the walls, and even I am not sure why exactly. The rationale to my three-year-old self probably had something to do with not wanting to waste paper, and the fact that if I drew straight on the walls it would forego entirely the costly and time-consuming framing and hanging processes.

Mostly I just wanted to draw, and my parents wanted great art on the walls, for which I gladly obliged.

Vishal K. Bharadwaj, circa 1986, at the door of his family's apartment im Ghusais, Dubai. Photo by either Keshav or Sneha Bharadwaj.

Fluffy Slippers Man

coloured sketch of a man wearing fluffy hotel slippers, carrying a shopping bag

You see some strange things at the mall. Most of the time it has to do with fashion accidents and, in the case of Dubai, kiosks selling ridiculous looking real estate, but once in a while you spot something you’d swear came out of a Katsuhito Ishii movie.

Take this guy, for example. Fairly normal looking white guy: shirt, loose trousers, glazed-over, pre-weekend look in his eyes, bag of shopping and… fluffy bathroom slippers?

I hope it was some kind of subversive fashion statement, but chances are that either his pair of snakeskin moccasins were off at the cleaners, or he was just too stoned to know what he had on.

V

garvan redux

When I last drew Garvan the Lapine I had to go back and read the text where he was first mentioned, because it always helps to freshen up on the details. I'm glad I did, because otherwise the picture might have ended up looking like the one above. It's true: the first time I read the story I actually thought Garvan was a giant rabbit. Personally I like my misconception better. The possibility of a giant magic rabit wearing a kilt living next door to you is a comforting one, and so this sketch has more heart put into it, even though technically it's all over the place. I don't think I'll ever want to draw him as a human again.

Sorry, Dan!

swamp crash sketch

The point of a sketch is to give you an idea of what a finished product will look like. It's a prototype, and all good prototypes leave room for changes. Take this sketch, for instance. It's my first attempt at a detailed sketch of an illustration, because while it has been fine for me to jump in on projects, previously, by just going direct to finished drawing without even a thumbnail sketch (I'll post an example later), those projects have usually involved computer colours (where the original pencils would never be seen), and have always been simple stuff — one, two, three figures at most.

Now, however, I need to expand, quite literally. I want to do a relatively complex, inked scene on a fairly large piece of paper. I had considered just going for it, but the feeling that if anything went less than well on the project (and I'd be stuck with a piece I didn't like and didn't want to complete) nagged me no end. So I decided to do a sketch in a small notebook, entirely in pencil and ball point pen.

The results were quite good, and I was happy even when it was bad. Confused? Let me explain:

Taking one look at this finished sketch, I can tell right away that it will make a good inked drawing. I also know that the composition doesn't quite work. I need to shift the 'camera' around a little. Now, I didn't know this before it was done, and if I'd have gone direct to the final I'd have a pretty but boring picture on my hands. The framing of the two silhouetted figures is also a bit forced, and composition-wise it makes the right side of the image too heavy — the picture is 'off-balance'. My inital plan on how to light the eyes of the creature is also wrong. You will note that the bottom left row of eyes appears to be lit from above, whereas the major light source is clearly the lantern the man is holding. The rest of the eyes are shaded right.

Also along the way, the scene has changed a lot. If you peek in the top corner of the pic you can maybe see a blurry pencilled mini-thumb of what I had initially planned, which was pretty-much the same scene but with a one-eyed monster and set against a moon-like outer-space setting. In fact, it wasn't even going to be a crashed ship, but some kind of ancient altar. Furthermore, I had planned more creatures attacking them, but I think I'll learn to draw creepy, gloomy swamps before I try to tackle hordes of anatomically correct running bipeds, thanks.

So hopefully when I'm feeling confident enough I'll put this one down on a large sheet of paper and ink it. Until then, I hope you enjoy the sketch.

V

professor enoki niku


I figured, a superhero is only as good as his supervillain. Any veggie superhero needs a suffciently non-veg adversary, hence the good professor here.

Enoki is a kind of Japanese mushroom (although the ones I've drawn look more like porcinis), and Niku is Japanese for meat.

The pencils have been left in and aren't very visible except on his leg (I didn't draw as many construction lines as I usually do, for whatever reason). It was inked with both the fat and thin brush pens. As you use them each pen deveolps a unique 'signature' — a flaw or uneveness to the stroke that can be used for various effects. The large brush pen, being used less, still delivers a thick, uniform black, but the small one, perhaps though my overzealousness, has developed a U-shaped hook to small strokes (i.e. a straight line is black on the outer edges and less so in the middle). This worked to my advantage in the shading of the mushrooms, and you can also see the signature in the lines that run across the 'accordion' portions of his right leg and abdomen.

I also busted out my older brush pen, the first I bought. This is the pen I used to draw the image in the post "Man Thing" — you can see its signature in his hair. The pen is a little larger than the current one and has gone to grey unless I really press it into the paper. Here I used it to shade in the metal fingers, the abdomen and the right leg. I'm sure that when it's completely out of ink I may still be able to smoosh the thing against an ink pad and use it and its unique signature.

Colouring was done in the Gimp. I just flat coloured it because I liked the ink shading and didn't want to risk it clashing with any dodge/burn effects on the colour. Colour-based shadows and highlights work in a drawing which has bolder inks, like the Cosmocolli image, because the inks there are going more towards structure and texture and less to volume, but in linework that has many greys a simpler colour process works. It's like pen and wash techniques.

Unlike the previous veggie sketches I didn't use a vector process. Like I said, I liked the ink shading, and any conversion to vector would have resulted in:

  1. a loss of much of the grey tones and shapes that give the image its character in my opinion.
  2. a massive vector shape that would have destroyed my computer and be fundamentally useless to actually work with. Any simplifications to that vector conversion would have further destroyed the structure of the piece.

Elaborating on that second point, even in the Cosmocolli image (which was vectorised but not simplified, thereby preserving much of the original sketch — again, this was down to the bolder lines), the resulting vector trace was eating up memory like anything. I had to make a low-res bitmap copy to act as a guide for me to colour under, and keep the vector traced sketch on a hidden layer until colouring was finished and I could export the image to a bitmap with the vector trace visible.

It's a bit of a hack, but it works, and that's the important bit. All those seconds the computer takes to redraw a heavy shape everytime you zoom in and out of an area (which can easily be thousands of times) can add up to hours over the long run.

Here's the wallpaper version, a big close up where you can see many of the details not apparent in the small version above: 

Note that the wallpaper version (1600×1200) is around 500kb. Sorry Dial-Up users, but that's as good as I could get it without a noticeable drop in quality.

All in all I'm happy with the image. The shading style reminds me of British comics, for some reason, although I couldn't really pinpoint any particualr one. After colouring was done I chuckled at the resemblence to Bronze Age Lex Luthor. Always been one of my favourite villain designs.

V

dr. irving cosmocolli

Dr. Irv's cruciferous cosmic cranium pulverises his enemies with purple power blasts. He used to wear yellow tights before his transformation too — it was the uniform at his med school.

(1600×1200 wallpaper)

the spud

I figured that if I was going to spend time inventing a group of superheroes based on Spyder's suggestion of veggie influences, I might as well colour them up and give each his own post. This is Spud, who, in addition to being a lame potato-based ripoff of the Thing, also has purple nipples, and these are important.

Go on, tell me why.


(close-up wallpaper version, 1600×1200)

domo arigato, mr roboto

My first attempt at something orthographic. Drew the graph lines myself, so they are a bit askew. I had attempted a cityscape in a pitch to a client for their Season's Greetings card, and you can see a few lines of that off to the left of this picture. No, they didn't go for it, but I blame that squarely (no pun intended) on my crappy ortho/brush pen art skills. Maybe if I'd pitched the robot instead…

On an unrelated note: I don't draw enough robots. Also: no, I've never actually heard the song that inspired this title.

anime girl


Come on, nobody really needs an excuse to draw a hot anime girl, do they?

Despite being coloured, this is under Sketch Machine because:

1) It really was a sketch, at least until I scanned it in and decided to see how quickly I could get a coloured* version I would be satisfied with (Answer: 2 hrs, but only because I was listening to some slow piano music. Once I put on Jet’s Get Born it sped up).

2) Late in the colouring I realised that I had done the bonehead mistake of drawing her thumbs on the outside and had to fix that as best I could.

3) It’s crappy enough.

*Coloured in inkscape. My tablet isn’t working, and vector is much easier with a mouse.

In case you want my crap cluttering your desktop, here’s a wallpaper (1600×1200, sorry widescreen laptop people):