Transit Doodles!

Lately I've been trying to loosen up my drawings, thus making them more fun to do! Ever since attending a drawing workshop with Louis Gonzales I feel like I've been pushing my drawings into a new, very fun direction. I'm trying not to get bogged down in what's actually in front of me. Instead, I'm trying to capture a feeling. 

~Chris

Team Donatello

Here is a personal piece that I worked on during a couple weeks that I took off work. I wanted to stay sharp, and also I wanted to play with my new copy of Autodesk's Sketchbook Pro! Below is the finished piece and some work-in-progress stages.

Final. Light and dark tones added. The dark tones I added by painting different shades at full opacity. After doing so I realized that, even though this is something I'm doing for fun, I would have preferred to use just black on a semi-transparent layer. That's exactly what I did for the highlights (not using black, though... naturally) and I enjoyed that much more than hand-picking several different shades.

WIP #4. Base. I put down a base coat for all of the colours that I would work with. I put all of the base colours on one layer; since this was a personal project I didn't want to have to navigate through several different layers. Not if I didn't have to. The paint splotch however was its own layer. I used one of the pre-made brush designs as a starting point, but scaling it up this far made it extremely blurry, so I painted over most of it and just had fun designing an energetic splat!

WIP #3. Line Weight. After putting down all of the clean up lines, I went through and added more weight to some carefully selected areas.

WIP #2. Clean-up. After I was happy with the semi-rough I proceeded to create a clean version on a new layer. Looks like I jumped ahead and began adding some heavier lines before remembering to save a new version.

WIP #1. Semi Rough. After scanning the rough draft from my sketchbook I did a lot of plussing and re-constructing on a new layer inside Sketchbook.

Rough Draft. After a couple pages of brainstorming, this idea appealed to me with its energy and simplicity of design.

Ink And Watercolour Tones

Experimenting at home with my Pentel brush pen and a water brush, adding dimension to some sketches that I did while riding in transit.

~Chris

Transit Gestures

Having fun applying some wisdom gained from attending the Gesture Drawing Workshop with Louis Gonzales. What a great time that was, and what a blast this page was to draw!

~Chris

Life With Baby No. 1

Detective Sketch

I've been reading through some Blacksad comics that I got from the Library and they reminded of an old idea I'd had of taking one of my brother's short stories and developing it into some sort of visual medium.

I did a quick sketch of what I thought the main character might look like. It's nothing fancy right now but I wanted to get something out there into the Blogosphere.

Enjoy.

~Chris

Long Time No Post

It's been a while since I posted anything. This past year has been tumultuous with many ups and downs. I'm working on an exciting show that makes me very happy, but I still feel - as I'm sure I will always feel - a deep sense of loss since my brother's suicide.

The show I'm working on is one that I'm sure he would be equally excited about since it was such a large part of our childhood. I am not at liberty to say any further details about it right now however, and certainly not in this format.

Today is Saturday and I was going through my archives of saved artwork - both collected and created. It is my well of inspiration. My idea farm.

I found two images that I created some time ago that I still found to be appealing, so here they are.

~Chris