Category: Art

Cartoons, webcomics, sketches, 3D art and other artwork.

No comments

November Drawing – The Mermaid in InkPad

  By , ,

 

Mermaid!

“The Mermaid” work-in-progress

 
There’s more than one way to draw with vectors. I’m working on this image in InkPad. InkPad is a more traditional sort of vector drawing app. While it has a brush tool, it doesn’t draw brush strokes in variable weight the way Concepts or Adobe Draw does. But you can mimick that effect by drawing the SHAPE of a brush stroke. In other words, I import a sketch from one of my drawing apps, then trace the shape of an ink stroke in a new layer above the original sketch, keeping the brush tool set to fill with no outer stroke. To color the image, I set up another layer below the “ink strokes” and trace the shapes of the fills. The shading is done the same way in layer between the inking and the color fills. It’s a little more complicated, but once you get the hang of it, the process goes pretty fast. And best of all, I can export the entire image in vector format to resize and touch up in Corel Draw, my preferred desktop vector drawing program. Ta-DAH!

No comments

November Drawing – Day 02, Skull in Concepts

  By , ,

 

Sugar Skull

Suguar Skull, by Helen Madden

 
I spent some time this morning experimenting with Concepts for the iPad, looking at how the different tools worked with various settings. Concepts offers vector versions of markers and various types of pens. The problem I have is getting the line widths to vary the way I want it to. There are also options for smoothing the lines, but I don’t really have the hang of that yet.

I do have a pressure sensative stylus for the iPad, so I will try that next.

No comments

November Drawing – Robots and Vampires

  By , , , ,

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!

No comments

Artwork in Progress – Undead Merlord

  By , ,

I do not have a good title for this one yet, but Undear Merlord is a pretty descriptive title. I’m drawing this one in Adobe Illustrator Draw on the iPad. I hate that Adobe Illustrator Draw won’t export its files in a vector format (it only exports to Adobe Illustrator CC), but I still think it’s one of the best vector drawing apps out there. Fortunately, I can export drawings from Adobe Creative Cloud to Threadless, and I have reserved myself one of their new artist shops, so I’m going to play with this to see if I can make some groovy t-shirt designs 🙂

Artwork in Progress

Work in Progress – Undead Merlord by Helen E. H. Madden

No comments

ACW Episode 279 – Don’t drink and paint

  By , , , , ,
Webcomic!

Click on the image above to see it bigger!

I had the opportunity last month to go out for a little “me” time. A local tea shop hosted a “Pinot & Painting” night, and it was fantastic! They served grown-up treats – cheese fondue, a chocolate fountain with strawberries, etc. And best of all, they had WINE!

I only had one glass, but let me tell you, when you are painting at a table with a dozen other women, and you’re all drinking wine and you all have cups of paint water sitting right next to you, it’s very easy to confuse the wine and the paint water. Until you drink it, that is. Then you realize you have made a horrible, horrible mistake.

Anyhoo, I had a lovely evening painting, although I must confess, the subject matter the instructor choose for painting was not exactly to my taste. She brought a reference photo of some local waterfowl. While her demo painting looked very nice, mine ended up looking more like the promotional poster for a movie entitled, “Psycho Ducks of DOOOOOOOOOOOM!”

Psycho Ducks of DOOOOOOM!

“Psycho Ducks of DOOOOOOM!” coming to a theater near you!

Again, this is not a subject matter I would normally paint. My paintings usually look more like this…

The Twisted Lip

“The Twisted Lip” by Helen E. H. Madden

Or they look something like this…

Fight Like a Girl!

Work in progress – “Fight Like A Girl (Black Widow) by Helen E. H. Madden

This last painting is one of a series that I’m doing for Pixie’s room. I found some images on the web of Black Widow, Katniss Everdeen, etc. I ran the images through Photoshop to break them down into basic colors and add the caption and background color. Then I traced that image onto the canvas. Now I’m doing a little DIY paint-by-numbers, matching the colors from my Photoshopped image as I paint. Not my most artistic work, but these paintings will look nice in Pixie’s room when they’re all done.

So yeah, crazy waterfowl are not my usual subject matter for painting. Although I could see doing a painting of Howard the Duck for our living room. Hmmmmmm… Maybe “Psychotic Ducks of DOOOOOOM!” belongs on my walls after all.

No comments

Random Sketches – Pavement Crack Psycho Bird

  By , , ,

I’ve been doing some more doodling lately, playing around with using random elements to create a character. Here’s a random crack I found in our road.

Crack in the road

Random crack in the road

And here’s the sketch I made based off that.

 

Psycho Bird

Psycho Bird from a Crack in the Road


If you don’t see the resemblence to the crack above, that’s because I turned it sideways to do the drawing.

The idea for this little drawing experiment comes from the book Drawing and Painting Imaginary Animals: A Mixed-Media Workshop with Carla Sonheim. It’s a fun read, lots of creative ideas in it, and yes, you can find the book on Amazon.

No comments

Night blogging?

  By , , ,

I swear to you, I have been trying to get back  into the habit of regular blogging. I get all sorts of ideas for blogging late at night when I’m lying in bed, but then by the morning, these ideas have evaporated, or else I’ve lost the interest in writing about them.

I set aside the morings for working on the webcomic and for other drawing projects, which is partly why I don’t have the enthusiasm to blog in the morning. All my brain power has gone into drawing for a couple hours at that point, so the well is kind of dry by then. I can usually refresh myself with exercise, but by the time I’m done with that, it’s time to eat lunch and then it’s time to pick up the kids and then I have to deal with homework and chores and dinner, etc. I’m brain-dead once again by the time 8PM rolls around, which means I’d rather watch TV and crochet than write.

But once I get into bed, my brain once again starts to rev up, like it has now. I always read the news before I sleep (bad habit, I know), and usually after doing that, I’ve got ideas for a blog post I’d really like to write, and I know exactly what I’d say…

Except that it’s bedtime, and the lights are already out and Hubster is sound asleep beside me.

So right now, I’m experimenting. I have a wireless keyboard set up with my iPad, and I have a reading light clipped to the iPad/keyboard case. It gives me just enough light to see by. Hubster isn’t in bed yet – he always stays up later than me – so I’ve got a few quick minutes to write this post. I don’t know if I’ll be able to write like this on a regular basis, but it’s worth trying. I’m saving this as a draft tonight, and will post it in the morning. Then I’ll see if I can start other articles this week.

Maybe I’ll even be able to post some artwork from the iPad?

 

Zombie!

Test artwork for night time posting

Yerp! That seems to work!
 

No comments

“Orange You Glad to  See Me?!” One drawing, three apps

  By ,

I do a lot of artwork on my iPad, so I’m always on the lookout for new drawing and painting apps. I downloaded one last week that I thought looked promising – Tayasui Sketches. It had a lot of the same tools I see in other drawing apps, but there was something about the texture of the sample artwork that made me want to try it out. The basic app is free and allows you to sample the full version for an hour. The full version costs $4.99. Now $4.99 isn’t a lot, but I do prefer to try before I buy, so I did the one-hour trial and drew this quick image to test out all the tools:

Tayasui Sketches

Test drawing done in Tayasui Sketches

I really liked the paper grain texture on this. Tayasui Sketches is one of the few apps I’ve seen that includes the option of adjusting the background for paper grain as well as color. However, I did NOT like the way the text tool worked and I didn’t care at all for the way the app handles zooming and panning in the image. The tools had a nice texture (I especially loved the rough edge on the orange), but I knew some of the apps I already owned could produce similar results.

So I decided to draw the same image again in a couple of other apps I have. I tried Procreate first:

Procreate Orange

Same drawing recreated in Procreate

 

The biggest difference I noticed was the lack of paper texture. I don’t know if there’s a simple way to add a paper texture to artwork done in Procreate. I could always scan in a textured image and add it as an overlay layer, but I would prefer to have the option to add texture right there in the app. Also, Procreate doesn’t have a text tool, so I had to handwrite the text. On the plus side, I still get a lot of nice textured tools (again, I got that slightly rough edge around the orange) in Procreate and I found it much easier to adjust the brushes to get the effects I wanted. I can also create and save custom color palettes in Procreate, and it’s easier to pan and zoom artwork. Plus I can ROTATE the artwork on the fly, something Sketches doesn’t do.

For the last trial, I decided to do this drawing in SketchClub.

SketchClub Orange

And finally, done in SketchClub

SketchClub is one of my favorite drawing and painting apps on the iPad. I have a lot of control over the brushes and other tools, and can download or create new brushes. Procreate  will let me create new brushes, but doesn’t have the option to download brushes from a community of users. It also has a text tool, but since SketchClub didn’t seem to have access to the same fonts that Sketches does, I decided to handwrite the text again. And like Procreate, I can zoom, pan, and rotate the screen with ease.

One of the biggest differences I noticed between SketchClub and the other apps is the lack of an actual water color brush. In Sketches, there is a water color brush tool. In Procreate, there’s a setting for the brush tool that gives it a water color look. But I think if I played with some settings in SketchClub, I might be able to achieve a similar effect.

Anyway, that’s the same drawing done in three different apps. I still haven’t decided if I want to buy Sketches or not. The biggest drawback is the way it handles zooming and panning, and the inability to rotate the artwork. That makes a huge difference to me.

So what do you think?

One Comment

The Art Of Doodling

  By , , ,

last weekend, our Girl Scout troop worked on the art badge. Some of the girls were worried that they couldn’t draw, so I thought we would try doodling instead. I’ve recently picked up a bunch of books on doodling, Zen Tangles (TM), etc. I love to doodle, and I’ve been spending a lot of time doodling lately. I also picked up a bunch of blank cards with envelops for a really good price, so I spent an afternoon working with the girls on making greeting cards as part of their art badge activities. And I enjoyed that so much, that I decided to finish my card up and send it to mym mom for her birthday. Here are some pics of the artwork in progress.