This week both Leonie and I got a cold, nothing life threatening, but many many tissues were used. So, after repeated requests at drawing more cuttlefish, the cold became the impetus for the most recent Cuddly. (or should it be Cuttly?

And just for giggles: this is the sketchwork behind the 'finished' piece. (if you could call it finished, since it really is just a sketch in and of itself). All this was done on the wacom pad, in illustrator (cs2, dont have 3 yet) with the simplest round brush, 3 point diameter, and a 2 point pressure variation. I have sorta come to like that setting for most everything. (after much tweaking. it gives me a nice range of sizes, and allows for some nice flowing strokes, but without going too big). Since i mostly like just using pencils on paper when i am going analog, i find this nice minimal setting to be similar in simplicity to pencils. I rarely use anything else on the wacom (when drawing in any case, once the piece is drawn, then i might go back and fiddle with stroke weights and go in a micro-manage the points, but for the initial drawing, all 3-point round brush for me)

Here is todays sketch, it is Cuddly the Cuttlefish! The original pencil sketch is there, and the digital re-draw. I dont use live trace or anything like that (although i have in the past, and it is really cool.) Instead i place the jpg of the pencil sketch into illustrator, then trace it with the paintbrush to get the outline right. With the wacom i can use the pressure and get some nice organic outlines.

For the colors i went to this cool site, and typed in 'fish' into the palette search and found a zillion nice sea-color-palettes.

After drawing 'twist' for illustration friday, i got quite caught up in the micro-doodling as background shading/texture idea. I think that next i am going to make one that is big enough to be my background image.

Also, i find that doodling like this is a great way to warm up. Somewhere i read, or heard that it takes 15 minutes to fully 'switch gears' in your brain. So, when i sit down to draw something, i have to doodle and do warm-up stuff for 15 minutes before i start producing stuff that is remotely decent. Anecdotally, i have found that doing this background, the first large chunk of shapes were just squares and triangles and circles, then suddenly i whipped out a little flower in a pot, then a little house, and so on.

If you are familiar with the Meisner Method of acting, i think that these texture-doodles are a similar form for myself as an illustrator. (if youa re not familiar, or need a badly-explained refresher: the idea is to get out of your 'head' while acting and get into the 'moment'. Ie stop thinking about what you are supposed to be 'pretending' to do, and just do it. This is much much harder than it sounds. some of the 'acting' exercises that you do to get into this 'in the moment' state is to pair up and do really really basic things (like repeat everything the other person says, and they do the same, which amounts to saying the same thing over and over again). at some point you will stop repeating and start saying other things and be 'in the moment' (this is possibly the worst explanation of this excercise ever, but i have done it and it is very cool once you get into it) ) Anyhow, similarly, with this strange rote sketching technique after awhile i just spontaneously draw something that is not a square a circle or a triangle. and i draw it quick, almost before i can think about it, and then usually it is pretty groovy.

The same thing happened with the twisty bits of 'twist'. I was just oging along drawing spirals and twisty lines when all of a sudded i busted out a twistly little face. After that i was sort of looking for inspiration in the shapes i was producing and when something came out that looked like an ear, or a nose, or a coffee cup, or bird, or Cthulu, or whatever, i would quickly fill in the other attributes. It is actually amazingly fun to be drawing simple shapes and all of a sudden just bust out some little masterpiece.

The other great thing i love about these micro-sketches is their simplicity. I dont have time to over think the forms, and just a few lines to convey the image. It is great fun.

These are some of the doodles that are in the 'Twist' image. Each one took me less than 10 seconds to draw (which is why they are so rough) but some of them turned out kinda cute, so i thought i would put them up.

I was doodling the other day and came up with a new concept for the Fight Me! Logo. Nobody asked for it, but i liked the idea so i went ahead and mocked it into a logo-esque form. I like it.

This is my first entry into the very cool Illustration Friday contest. I dont really hope to garner any notice from it, but i think that the idea behind IF is to force you to draw. And that is what i did. I drew so many little whorls and loops and 'twists' not to mention there are faces, at least one Cthulu, lots of spiders, a panda, a bunny, a cat, a bunch of DNA and many many other micro-sketches.

I did this on my brand-spanink-new Wacom intuos 3, which is pretty badass. I have been the king of the mouse-drive pen-tool in illustrator for years now, and i would never have done a piece like this one without the wacom. it took me a long time, but the i think that the diversity of the shape and width that i got automatically from the wacom really helped make the doodles look nice as a background texture. Had i used the mouse and the pen (or brush even) like i normally used to do all my illustrator work, it would have taken me ten times as long, and looked worse because all the lines would be the same width.

anyhoo, yay! wacom intuos 3!

This logo was one of the very first illustrations that i really did. Previously i had used my mad skillz to do simple stuff for web site designs and font treatments, but nothing that i would consider 'design'. The spyder logo was done about 7 years ago.

In this and the following few entries, i am gonna put up a bunch of the ones that i liked the most, and were the most fun to work on.

This is one of my very favorites, it is the logo for the very creative duo at Fatlab Music. These guys are good friends of mine, and when they redesigned their site last year, i offered to redesign their logo. We came up with their new logo, three very simple lines that are (IMHO) very expressive.

However, recently i have had some people ask for some more sketchy-drawie type stuff. Now, back in the day (way back in the day) i used to be quite a decent illustrator (or cartoonist depending on who you asked) back before the web was king (in high school and college for me) I used to doodle and draw all sorts of things from realistic still-life scenes, to portraits, to silly cartoony bits. Anyone who has done this kind of art (and i suspect other types of creative things as well) knows that the more you do it, the better you get. but the converse is also true, the less you do it the more your pencil muscles atrophy and die.

This is where i was last week when someone offered to pay me some cold hard cash to draw some illustrations for them. I decided to take on the very modest project and work overtime to get my draw muscles back in shape, at least enough to draw a few nice things for my 'client'. It was kinda frightening really, since i havent done any real pencil-to-paper sketching in a loooonng time. Anyhow, the whole point of this post was supposed to about my creative process when designing a sketch character, but it has turned into more of a history of my drawing skill.. so...

What i meant to write here before i got off on a ramble, was about how i design a new character (or picture, or whatever) i do this with my icons too, tho the process is usually much shorter with them because of the size and simplicity. When i was younger i had all those drawing how-to books where they start with a few circles and ovals and flesh it out into spiderman or some anime character. That is all well and good, my final products bear some resemblance to that method, ie light pencil shapes, darker pencil details, then finally a nice 4B or 5B final hit, then the ink. But how to you get to the final product? The picture here is a few steps in that process for one of the characters i am doing, which was simply a request for 'a pig with wings'. the bottom pig is near to what the 'final' sketch will look like (presuming the client picks that one). I did about a half dozen different shapes and styles, (and even more wing types, astute readers will notice the wings are both slightly different styles) so we will see which one they like.

After they pick one or two they like, i will finalize the sketch, and then move it into illustrator to put the final touches on it and make it a vector art piece.

(note: thie is cross posted on FTO)