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

Where Are They Now?

The child actor gone sour.

~Chris

Punched By The Bat

Another one done for the Sketch After Work.

~Chris

The Page 100 Project: Pulp

A while ago I stumbled onto something called the Page 100 Project. This is a fun exercise where you turn to page 100 of any novel and adapt it into a comic! I thought to myself, "That sounds like fun!" So I grabbed Charles Bukowski's Pulp off of my shelf and this is what came of it.

~Chris

ILLUSTRATION GIG

When I was working in India I started illustrating this children's book. I moved back to Canada in the middle of the book's production and continued illustrating it from my Mom's kitchen table and then from my buddy's place in Vancouver while I looked for my own apartment. Once I had my apartment the illustrations were finished there. So this was really a multi-continental experience. It took up most of my waking hours for several, several months and I'm pleased to see that it's now on its way to bookshelves around the World.

~Chris

Facebook Doodling

I just realized that you can embed the saved brush strokes in the form of a movie when you draw something with Facebook's Graffiti application. I drew this little Godzilla-like thing when I was in Japan. Kind of fitting.

~Chris

Japan #1

Well, I'm in Japan now.

Two aeroplanes and 15 hours of travel time puts me on the other side of the planet. It's funny that just two days ago I spent almost the same amount of time on a bus and managed to cross one province. I guess you had to be there.

In the Vancouver airport I sat and watched all kinds of people coming and going, I bought a new sketchbook for the trip (which is made out of recycled paper and the cover simply has a blank, brownish canvas) and found a great opportunity to draw an image for the cover. There was this one slightly awkward looking girl that walked past and the image of her kind of lasted. I drew her several minutes after she passed, so the sketch is drawing upon my memory for the most part. Pun absolutely intended.

I had quite a lot of time to kill so I just kept my eyes open for more sketching opportunities but I didn't really find anything until I sat down to wait for my boarding call. Looking out across the runway I saw a nice opportunity to practice a Landscape.

Now that I'm actually in Japan I'll be keeping my eyes open and looking for opportunities to commit some images to paper. Failing that, I'll see what I can do in the realm of photography. One more day in Kawagoe, my Fiance's city of birth, and then we head to Okinawa for four days.

Stay tuned!