Just a test of a new series sketched up to take an entertaining look at Sea Monsters!

These were drawn in Inkscape, exported to an image and brought into Art Rage Studio Pro and then painted using a large roller. The colours are a bit dim, not so much my liking. Perhaps I’ll revisit when time (or interest) permits.

Update (the following day)

Colour isn’t my strong suit, so I spent a partial evening re-imaging the drawing. As ArtRage provides stencil functionality using your own images, I loaded up a grunge photo to add new texture to the image. I’m still finding the overall colours to be too muted, I’ll want to try bolder hues next time.

Update (the following, following day)

As much as ‘working the colour’ sounds impressive (to me at least), my confession is this: when it comes to colour I’m just guessing which ones work (or don’t) with others. Here’s a third and, for the time being, final attempted. Yes, its an orange ocean.

On the heels of an interesting email conversation about finding and developing a personal style or artistic voice, I took a good, hard look at my own work and its straight-forwardness. When contrasted (and contrast is the correct term here) with works I’m attracted to, it became clear to me that injecting intentionality in my drawing process would be a Good Thing for me.

The above drawing arose from the prior blog entry. This is the wonder of digital drawing: one can save a new branch from the main tree and explore it simply by saving a new file and making changes. In this instance, I attempted to extend the curled branches into the rest of the drawing as well as reducing the background to a simple colour field.

Know that this process was very challenging for me: I went through hundreds of tree shapes before using (giving-up?) with the half-circle; I like the colours but find them out of tune; I resisted all attempts to change the robots and the dogs (something I really should change); and struggled to drop the Law of Accurate Form for whimsy and playful forms.

Work continues on the ‘Robots Treed’ composition that I began earlier this November. For the most part I’m quite satisfied with the tree and the robots in it (although I intend to draw in more robots). But the green scale used in the foreground and distant hills is still unsatisfying to me. Turns out, finding the right six-step sequence of greens (which go from a vibrant foreground to a dulled background) is harder than it looks.

Click to see in full detail.

Here’s what I do on Friday nights: fiddle, draw and compose. Enjoy!

The above work-in-progress is a vector image built in Inkscape and textured with photographic elements. Half way through this session, Inkscape started pasting low-resolution bitmaps instead of the expected vector objects. Needless to say this was a major freaking pain that only a series of restarts and reboots ‘fixed.’

While drawing, listened to Weezer (blue album), Leonard Cohen’s “The Future” and The Byrds “Greatest Hits”. Then had a Scotch.

A new project I’m on involves using Inkscape to prepare images for print, cut-out and hand-animating. Inkscape, as you may already know, is an open source vector creation application for Windows, Linux and Mac. I’ve been using this particular program for some time now and recently discovered an interesting feature: I can texturize my drawings.

Here’s a composition test for an animation I’m busy putting together. Note how graphical the image is:

By ‘graphical’ I do mean ‘flat’ – the image is cartoon-y in nature, with solid colour fields and crisp edges (the blurred foreground hills are an effect available in Inkscape – I was trying to preview a shallow depth of field.)

Now this is all fine and good, but I’ve always admired graphics with more illustration flavours – textures and imperfections – signals that a human hand was directly involved in the manufacturing process. Something with character.

Using a combination of photographic elements and textures, I was able to create masks in Inkscape and overlay those over the graphical vector drawing. For instance, a photo of tree bark would be superimposed over the area of the tree trunk. Grass over the hills. Barn-board over the fence posts, etc. And over everything, a scan of old, yellowed paper. Here is a test result:

Overall, I’m quite pleased with the results. I am now able to draft objects in Inkscape and, in short order, add significant character to everything – something I haven’t been able to do yet.

More "Monsteroke" - little red devil and the invisible man

While I’ve got scribbles on paper to draw more monsters singing karaoke (Frankenstein, his lovely wife, Dracula, King Kong and the Wolfman) here are two more “Monsteroke” drawings: a little red devil and the invisible man.

I wasn’t sure at first how to draw the invisible man (no kidding eh). There is the traditional wrapped in bandages, wearing a fedora, glasses and a long coat… but so many details don’t translate well into the style I’m using here. So, to keep it simple, I built up a the shape of the man (using circles and rounded rectangle primitives), welded them together, painted it with fully transparent paint and gave it a dashed outline. Perfect!

I had so much fun with the first Monsteroke drawing (that’s Monster Karaoke, folks) that I decided to follow up with a second.

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Work-in-progress, Monsteroke, using Inkscape on a PC

So there I was, bumming around my “inspiration folder” when I saw a pic of a Pac-man arcade cabinet. The ghosts (did you know they were named? The North American names were Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde. Who knew?) made me think of a stubby-tentacled monster.

Putting mechanical pencil to paper, I started scribbling out my own versions. Which evolved here and there, this way and that way until it became a tentacled monster singing karaoke. Ta dah — “Monsteroke!” Above is a work-in-progress screenshot. The software I’m using is, you guessed it, Inkscape on PC.