November Drawing – Day 09, Pirate Queen and Mushroom in Color!

Here’s today’s work!

 

Pirate Queen!

At this point, I’m slowly adding details like lip stick and scaly spots

 
I’ll get to the background (or are they foreground?) elements soon. Not sure yet how I’ll handle those.

Meanwhile, someone took me up on my offer to color the mushroom I posted a couple days back!

 

Oh, pretty colors!

Hello! I’m psychadelic!

 
Yeah baby! Isn’t he gorgeous?! This guy was colored by one of my very best friends, Patricia, and it makes me very happy to see her colors on my line art! And it inspires me to do another coloring picture. I have an idea of what to do, so come back tomorrow to see what it is!

November Drawing – Day 08, Definitely a Pirate Queen!

 

Pirate Queen!

She’s definitely a pirate queen… an UNDEAD pirate queen!

 
I’ve been having way too much fun playing with the colors on this one. The color palette is limited to Copic colors, with no way of mixing  your own colors, but that’s still a pretty big palette, and since I can EXPORT THIS IMAGE IN SVG, I can touch up the colors in CorelDraw. Yay!

November Drawing – Day 07, Pirate Queen of Hearts?

 

Pirate Queen?

I don’t know who she is yet, but maybe she’s a pirate queen.

 
I’m playing around in Concepts again today. They did a big update yesterday and added a new tool – the filled stroke tool. This tool does the same thing I’ve been doing with the brush tool in InkPad – tracing a shape and leaving a filled area with no outline around it. It’s great for setting up larger filled shapes too, like the ones in this drawing…  

Unlike InkPad, Concepts doesn’t let me adjust the nodes on the shape, so there’s no precise way for me to refine what I draw with Concepts filled stroke tool. And that’s okay! Because I want a different feel of drawing in Concepts, and having things be a litle different accomplishes that.

So I’m pretty pleased right now with Concepts. I’ll keep working on this drawing and on the other one I’m doing in InkPad and see what happens!

November Drawing – Day 05, How would you color this mushroom?

I don’t know if this interests anyone or not, but I made another mushroom, and I’m making it available to anyone who wants to color it!

Color me!

Color me! It’ll be fun… or weird… I don’t know…

I will do my own colors in Concepts for this one, but I’d love to see what other people make of my strange little doodle. I will probably draw more skulls, for folks like me who refuse to let the Halloween season end, and I will eventually make the mermaid I’m working on available as a coloring image as well.

Speaking of which, I got more work done on the mermaid today as well. The inking is almost done and I’ve started playing with the colors.

Mermaid!

A creepy, colorful mermaid!

Adding colors in InkPad is a bit like making a paper-cut image. I trace the shapes of the main colors using the pen toll, then go back with the brush tool to trace less precise shapes for shading and highlights. All the colors are flat, so it looks like layers of cut paper laid over each other to make an image. At least that’s how it feels to me.

Again, let me know if you like the mushroom coloring image, and I will work on making more to share with folks. There are so many coloring books out there on so many topics, but I don’t think there are any books that focus on creepy or gothic or scary subjects, so I think maybe we could fix that, right?

November Drawing – Robots and Vampires

So I spent all day thinking about what I want to do for November’s creative challenge (because I did a creative challenge in October, so why not do another one in November?) and I decided this month’s challenge would be ART.

Or doodling, at least.

The idea for this month is for me to get back to a regular drawing schedule. I love to draw, but like a lot of other things I love to do, when life gets really, painfully hectic, I jettison just about all but the essentials from my schedule.

I am hoping that this month will not be nearly as painful as last month. October just about did me in with all the events and volunteer work and making costumes I had to do. I’ll get into all that later this week when I do a final review of the whole October Crochet thing.

But for now, the plan is to draw every day. Just like with October Crochet, I do not plan to finish a drawing a day, but I do plan to complete more than one drawing this month. AND I plan to get back to a regular schedule for the webcomic as well. Assuming this month’s schedule goes as planned.

For my first entry this month, I present to you two quick doodles I did this evening on my iPad. First we have robots…

 

Robots!

“We are robots! We are handsome!”


And then we have a Vampire!

 Vampire!
Both of these drawings were done in Concepts, a vector drawing app. Concepts is similar to the old Adobe Ideas app that I used to use a lot, but it handles a little differntly, so I’m still working on how I want to use it and what kind of drawings I can make with it.

Unfortunately for me, Adobe Ideas was “retired” and replaced with Adobe Draw. Adobe Draw works just like Adobe Ideas used to, except for one very important little details. It will NOT let me export my artwork in SVG format. It will let me export my work directly to Adobe Creative Suite, but I don’t own a copy of Adobe Creative Suite because it’s TOO FUCKING EXPENSIVE! The only other option Adobe Draw gives me is to export my artwork as a PNG of suck low quality that I cannot then trace and convert to vector format in any graphics program I have. So I have pretty much quit using Adobe Draw.

So I’m making the switch to Concepts. And I’m hoping that if I spend a lot of time working with it this month, I’ll get pretty good with Concepts.

So that’s what’s up for this month! More drawings tomorrow!