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A friend, a brother, some strangers, and a duck.

January 11, 2013

These sketches don’t share any sort of theme or anything. Just some random stuff from the past month or so…

Here is my friend Jess at her baby shower (obviously). Since I am neither a mother, nor motherly, I made sure to bring my sketchbook so that I would have something to do while all the other women were talking about boppies and rompers and whatever the hell baby parents are into these days.  Of course I totally forgot that a sketchbook is basically a kid magnet. Shortly after beginning this sketch I looked up to find a whole crowd of little girls sitting around watching me. The most common question they asked: “Are you drawing?”
jess shower

Here we have Richard in a waiting room. If you want to know why he is nervous, the answer is that he is always nervous. I like this drawing because I actually managed to pull off that whole across the page thing. Richard likes it because I gave him cool hair.
nervous richard

Here we have Scrooge McDuck. I copied this from the cover of an old comic book I found. Kind of a nostalgic thing for me. I first learned to draw by copying Disney characters out of comic books.

scrooge mcduck

Next up is a guy from a play reading that I went to a couple weeks ago. With this guy I was trying to focus on the wrinkles in his clothing, and in doing so I forgot to pay attention to the angles on his glasses. I see now that I’ve drawn them askew.
Sp55 reading man

Here is another gal from that same reading.

Sp55 reading scarf woman

This woman was also from that reading. When I did this one I was trying to capture her posture in the chair, and also her Chuck Taylors. I kinda blew the proportions. Her head is too big.

Sp55 reading woman

Here is a quick gesture of a couple eating together at a restaurant in Sedona. I thought it was kind of weird how close they were sitting together. They must have been a newly in love couple.

couple eating gesture

This is what my little brother Tanner would look like if he had an enormous chin. I don’t know what’s up with the chin. I think I was sitting at a weird angle or something. Yeah that’s it. The angle. Nothing to do with my lack of ability. Anyway, I remember a long time ago, like 10+ years ago, I was doing a sketch of my family one night when we were out to dinner, and I ran out of room before I got a chance to draw Tanner. So basically I had drawn a family portrait sans Tanner. When he looked at it and saw that he’d been excluded it made him cry (he was like 7 at the time). I felt horrible. So now I try to draw that kid whenever I get a chance.  (You’d think by now I’d get his chin right.)

tanner profile

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Rough Sketch to Final Draft 2

December 30, 2012

A while ago I wrote about how I created the poster for Night of the Chicken 2. A few months after doing that play I was fortunate enough to see another play I wrote get produced. Actually it was a series of short plays, all of which had monsters in them. I also made the poster for this play. And once again, it was a sometimes fun, sometimes frustrating experience. But I learned a lot, and I am proud of the finished product.

Here is my initial concept sketch, which I did with markers. Very sloppy. Very messy. Very crowded.

I was trying to go for that old B-movie horror/sci fi poster look. Corny, but cool.

Forbiddenplanetposter

Originally I planned to feature all the monsters from each play, with a big robot/cyborg in front. But the robot I came up with was just too cute.

I had this other sketch of a zombie that was more gross, and therefore more appropriate for the poster. So I traded the robot for him and dropped the other characters.

big zombie in marker

Once I had my concept narrowed down to one giant zombie stomping around in a post-apocalyptic world, I began to create the image digitally. I decided to make this poster in Adobe Illustrator, which I did not know how to use. But my awesome and patient friends Brad and Sharon gave me some lessons.

First I made the zombie by scanning in my original drawing, and then tracing it in Illustrator using a Wacom tablet. This process took a really long time, because I didn’t know what the heck I was doing.

Then for the burned out city in the background I took inspiration from a computer game called Canabalt, which Sharon told me about. This sounds stupid, but my initial sketch had only one layer of city silhouette. When I saw the two layers in the background of this game it BLEW MY MIND. Of course! Two layers of city silhouettes. Only an idiot would put in one layer. Total lightbulb moment.

canabalt

So I drew the city in Illustrator, slapped my zombie in front of it, added some text, and…

Well here is an early version of the poster. Not so hot, but at least I had something to work with.

MMOTL-poster-early-version-

From there I just kept tweaking the colors, the fonts, the wording, until I couldn’t tweak no more.

I got a TON of help from my friend Kim, who is really good at giving constructive criticism, whether it’s for writing plays or making posters. I also got a lot of help from my friend Brad, who is a bad ass graphic designer.

Here is the end product…

It’s no masterpiece. It doesn’t even resemble an old B-movie poster like I had originally planned. But if you had showed this image to me a year ago and told me I had made it – in Illustrator no less – I would have NEVER believed you.

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Christmas Tree Line Up

December 28, 2012

Here is this year’s tannenbaum. This one was done in marker and pen.

tree3

And just to see the progression (or regression) here are the last two trees…

xmas tree 20112011 – Colored pencil and ink.

xmas tree2010 – Watercolor and Ink

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Sloppy Sketches

December 1, 2012

A few quick marker sketches. Messy, sloppy, and crude. But lots of fun to do…

GaZBriggs

RickDavis

KevinFlanagan

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Haunted Desk Calendar

November 4, 2012

I just came across these old pictures from 2008. When I first started my current job I inherited this ginormous desk calendar, which I never used. (I’m an Outlook Express kind of girl.) So I mostly just scribbled on it and drew random pictures. Until we got to October.
 

It started with one grinning jack on the October 31st square. Then it grew into a little pumpkin patch.

Then I added a graveyard and a haunted house, and the next thing I knew I had this whole Halloween scene.

It was a pretty fun challenge because I didn’t have my normal markers or colored pencils at my disposal. I was limited to whatever highlighters and colored pens I could scrounge up from the office.

For some real cool haunted house paintings check out The Haunted Studio. Local artist Lew Lehrman takes pictures of people’s homes and turns them into these spookishly cool haunted house scenes.

 

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SoDak Sketches

October 24, 2012

I went back to my home state of SoDak in early September. I brought along this new sketchbook that came free with a package of colored pencils. Both the sketchbook and the pencils were of cheap quality so it really wasn’t that much of a deal. But the sketchbook has this little pocket in the back, and a band that wraps around the outside, AND this built in ribbon thing to mark your page. So with all those accessories I keep thinking I love the book, but actually I don’t because the paper is too slick and makes for not so brilliant drawings. But whatever. Here they are…

We begin on the plane. No sleeper is safe around me.

Next we have the view from my gramma’s backyard. A random crane.

Now we head west to the Black Hills where me and my dad did some hiking and camping. One day I climbed up to Harney Peak, the highest mountain in SoDak, and did this sketch of the tower.

Moving along to Mt. Rushmore. I did this sketch in the evening as the sun was setting, causing me to keep making the shadows darker and darker. I remember being at Mt. Rushmore in 2003 and the exact same thing happened  then too. Those brown markings in the upper left corner are the result of me experimenting with combining a waterbrush with markers. Didn’t really work out as I had hoped.

And here is one that I did of my dad as we drove from the Black Hills back to Sioux Falls. This is probably my favorite drawing that I have ever done of him.

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From Rough Sketch to Final Draft

August 24, 2012

I write a live radio play series called Night of the Chicken. Last year I made a poster for the show that I was quite proud of. To be honest, I didn’t think I had the drawing ability, nor the graphic skills to make such an awesome poster. Luckily I got a TON of help from some of my friends and they helped me stumble through the process.

Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to see how it developed from the initial sketch to the final product.

I made this first sketch back when I was writing the first episode. I kind of did this drawing just for fun. Back then I never dreamed that Night of the Chicken would actually see an audience. Let alone have a sequel.

Sometime later my good friend, and kick-ass artist,  Jessica Hickman did this drawing for me as a gift. It’s pretty common for artists to draw pictures of their friends’ characters in their own style and give them as a present.

Sometime after that Night of the Chicken (ep. 1) found it’s way to Space 55 in Phoenix. And it was great. I didn’t make the poster for that show. They already had one made before I had a chance to take a crack at it, but I didn’t mind because the poster they made was actually pretty cool. Here it is.

Okay so fast forward some time after that. Night of the Chicken (ep. 2) was ready to take the stage and I was ready to take on the challenge of making the poster myself. Using the drawing that Jess did as inspiration, I came up with this line drawing of my character.

Then I scanned her into Photoshop and added some color, as well as a background and title.

Jess gave me a lot of guidance (via email) about how to use Photoshop to add shadow and color your characters. I also got a lot of technical advice from Brad, the graphic designer at work. I made several attempts to draw my own set of lockers, but was never happy with them. Then like a miracle I found some free clip art of this perfect locker, which I messed around with until it became a wall of receding lockers.

Once this initial post card image was done, I had to turn it into a poster with all the showtimes and stuff on it. That’s when my friend Kim came in. Kim has zero skill with photoshop, but tons of experience with telling her husband how to make the posters for her shows. So she came over one night and we worked on it together. Actually she did most of the creative thinking, while I sat in front of the computer and carried out her bidding in a somewhat Igor-like manner.

In the end, we came up with this little gem. I have no shame in bragging about it, because even though I technically performed all the physical actions to create this image–it was the advice I got from Jess, Brad, and Kim that made it so awesome.

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Harry and the Potters

August 1, 2012

 

 

 

Today (July 31st) is the birthday of JK Rowling and Harry Potter. Therefore it seems like the right day to post this sketch. This was from the Harry and the Potters concert at the library last week. The band is made up of two geeky yet adorable brothers who put on glasses and Gryffindor ties and travel the country singing songs about Harry Potter. I’ve been luck enough to see them twice now. They put on a fun show.

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Sloping Houses and Translucent Trees

July 20, 2012

Here is a really old sketchbook drawing I came across. It’s the view from the front window of our old house, and it must be at least 10 years old. I did this back in the days when I thought it was cheating to sketch things out in pencil first. One clue (aside from the fact that the house appears to be sitting on a hill that slopes downward from left to right) is that you can see the lines from the roof of the house showing through the palm tree. Since most palm trees are not translucent I must have added the palm tree as an afterthought. And look at that other tree. Nice big hatch marks, Carrie. Way to flatten out a drawing.

By the way, the candle in the foreground is fake.

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Who’s Scruffy Looking?

July 15, 2012

On the flight home from Buffalo I got trapped in the window seat, with Richard in the middle and a somewhat portly fellow in the aisle. Given this obstacle, as well as the wonderful hospitality of the Southwest Airlines flight crew and their “No standing in the aisle!” rule, I never attempted to leave my seat. Also there were several (I’m talking dozens) of crying babies on the plane, so it truly was the skyway to hell.

To distract myself from this excruciating insanity I did what I always do…got out my sketchbook and started drawing Richard. And since I had a lot of time and no place to go, I gave it way more attention than I normally would and really tried to focus on capturing what was actually there, versus what I thought was there.

The biggest challenge was that section that goes from his chin to his neck. My natural instinct would be to make that more of a horizontal angle, which is what I did at first. But as I studied and restudied it I realized that the chin/neck thing actually angled downward, and at a much greater degree than I would have thought. At least, that’s how it appeared in that moment from where I was sitting.

I really struggled with this because drawing it the way I truly saw it made him appear, well, kinda fat. I went back and forth a dozen times, sketching and erasing, sketching and erasing. By drawing it the way I thought it was, it came out looking more like Richard. By drawing what I saw, he came out looking fat. In the end I went with the downward angle version because the whole point of the exercise was to draw what I saw, and dammit that’s what I saw.

As you can see, this was done at the end of our vacation, when he hadn’t shaved for several days.

I sketched the whole thing out in pencil first and then went over it in ink, adding details and using pens of various thickness. Richard watched as I put the finishing touches on the hair–which is one of the things I have the most trouble with. As I continued to add more swoops, and curls, and hatch marks, he warned me to stop before I went too far.

“Otherwise the entire focus will be on the hair,” he said.

I think Richard may have learned a few things by osmosis.