Category: Art

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

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Professional Education for Artists AKA Boondoggle Time!

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I recently made the switch from Adobe graphics software to Corel. Or rather, the switch back. The first graphics software package I owned was an early version of Corel, and I kept using Corel for years. But after a number of years, I began to notice that there were fewer and fewer tutorials and how-to books for Corel Draw and Photopaint, but there was plenty of material out there for Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.

So I decided to make the switch over to Adobe. It was more expensive (a LOT more expensive),  but Adobe was the industry standard, and there was plenty of learning material out there to help me make the switch.

That was maybe five years ago. And everything was going just fine… on the Photoshop side of things. I love Photoshop. The mask layers, the customizable brushes, blend modes. It was FANTASTIC.

Adobe Illustrator, though? Not so much.

I was using CS3, and I discovered that things that had been easy to do in Corel Draw, like setting up transparency and gradient fills, were not so easy in Illustrator. The fact that I had to create a layer mask to create a transparency for an object drove me crazy. And I never could seem to get the hang of selecting objects in layers. These were things that were much more intuitive in Corel, I thought.

Then to top things off, Adobe switched from selling software in actual boxes to a subscription only mode, and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I simply cannot afford to pay for the subscription model. When I buy graphics software, I usually upgrade maybe every other version, sometimes less frequently than that. It’s what I can afford.

Corel still sells its software in physical boxes as well as in download format, for far less than what I paid for Adobe CS3. And on top of that, I was able to find the most recent version of the Corel Draw suite on sale! The switch back was a no-brainer.

There are plenty of new features in both Corel Draw and Photopaint, so I have some catching up to do, and while there still aren’t as many tutorials for Corel as there are for Adobe, now that I’ve been on both sides of the fence, I’m better at translating Adobe tutorials into Corel. In fact, that’s what I spent most of the day yesterday doing.

I found this tutorial over at TutsPlusDesign. There were a few steps I decided to handle differently. I prefer to weld and trim shapes rather than use a clipping mask (called Power Clip in Corel). But the end result was the same!

Cool sword!

Drawn in Corel Draw 7!!

I’m pretty happy with how this turned out, and I look forward to spending more time working through tutorials for Corel. Yesterday was a very nice, relaxing day, spent focused only on artwork, with no time whatsoever spent on Girl Scouts (thus my reason for calling this a “boondoggle” day). Still, even for a boondoggle, I think it was time very well spent.

So what do you think? If you know of any resources for Corel Draw or Photopaint tutorials, let me know. I’m thinking of taking one day a week and devoting it to working through tutorials, just to improve my professional skills… and maybe enjoy a little boondoggle in the process.

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Evil Artwork – “Background Orc #6” and getting stuff done a little bit every day

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Handsome Orc!

Background Orc #6

Feast your eyes on this beauty! Isn’t he adorable?! He’s an orc, but not one of those big, bulky hero orcs that look all intimidating and muscle-bound. Sadly, this cutie is one of those guys that gets stuffed into the background in fantasy movies because he’d totally steal the scene from those insecure alpha-male type orcs. That’s why I decided to draw him. He deserves to get a spotlight all to himself!

And all of this is my way of saying that I’m still working on drawing every day, though this past month I dropped the ball for a while. Drawing is something I need to work into my schedule every day, and that can be tough. I work on the webcomics first thing in the morning (unless I’m overwhelmed by some other project, like I was last week). I spend my afternoons handling email and office admin stuff (and there are plenty of both right now, thanks to Girl Scout cookie season). And I spend my evenings just trying to keep up with the house and the kids.

But I think there may be a time when I can do a little drawing. The trick is to figure out how to remind myself every day.

I came across an article on Lifehacker this week entitled “Encourage New Habits by Stacking Them On Top of Preexisting Habits.” The basic idea here is that you create a new habit by building it on top of something you already do, and then you reward yourself for doing it. This is something that I have been playing with for a while. For example, I like to grab a cup of coffee in the afternoon before I sit down at my desk to work. Between grabbing that cup of coffee and heading to my desk, I walk right past my purse/giant-man-eating-bag-of-DOOOOOOOM, where I stuff all my receipts. As I walk past it, I have begun prompting myself to grab the bag and take it upstairs with me, so that I have all my receipts right by my desk. And doing that now triggers me to scan in the receipts as soon as I sit down to work, so that I now have all my expenses recorded and I no longer wonder what the hell I spent all my money on.

It’s a simple idea – set up one habit to trigger another I want to encourage. And since it’s worked so well for receipts, I’ve decided to use the same technique to get me to draw more as well.

First, I need to figure out what habit could trigger me to do the drawing. Since I do so much of my drawing on the iPad, I’m thinking that the trigger should be something I do every day on the iPad. I’ve gotten into the habit of scheduling the next day every night before I go to bed. So I’m thinking that once I’ve finished doing that, I can simply switch over to one of my drawing apps and do a short bit of sketching.

It’ll take a little while to set up the new drawing habit, but I’m hopeful. And to reinforce building this – and other – new habits, I make sure to reward myself using Habit RPG . Habit RPG lets me set up a check list of habits and daily tasks and assign a certain amount of virtual gold coins as a reward for completing them. When I collect enough coins, I then spend my REAL money on a REAL reward for myself, like a new book, yarn, lunch out, a day off to do nothing but watch TV and crochet, etc. I keep the rewards small/inexpensive to keep from breaking the bank, but still, I make sure I reward myself.

But the real reward is in setting up these new habits. Because more drawing means more finished artwork, and more artwork means more fun/weird products on Zazzle and that could mean more money! Yay!

But for now, I’ll settle just for getting more drawing done. Especially if I get to draw cuties like the Background Orc #6.

WIP!

Original sketch done in Sketchclub on the iPad

Sketch imported into Adobe Illustrator Draw for the iPad.

Sketch imported into Adobe Illustrator Draw for the iPad.

Pretty colors!

What pretty eyes he has!.

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What are the rules for the Weekly Art Challenge?

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So I decided to do this weekly art challenge at the beginning of last month, with the idea that it would force me to do more drawing that I had been doing. Well, I was right about that! In the last month, I think I’ve done some drawing or digital painting every night.

But I haven’t done what I initially thought I would do – turn out a new drawing every week.

The first week, I completed 3 digital paintings. Just in the first week! But then I tried working with an app that didn’t give me the results I wanted, so I ended up with an unfinished doodle and since I didn’t like how the app in question handled, I decided to abandon that picture and move on.

Weekly art challenge - unfinished monster

Abandoned sketch. He started out cute, but the app wasn’t cooperating.

Then I started work on the current painting, the “Zombie Portrait.” I’ve spent a lot of time on this one. The pencil sketch alone took at least a week. Now I’m slowly getting the painting part of this done, and since I’m doing this as a painting instead of a sketch or cartoon, I know there’s no way it will be finished this week.

But does that matter? Is it against the “rules” if I don’t turn out a new image every week for the “weekly art challenge?” I don’t know. I started out with no more specific a goal than to draw or paint something every day. So I think if I do that, I think I’m doing pretty well.

Anyway, here are the latest images of the work in progress. I’ll keep working on this one until it’s done, and then move onto the next piece!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/cynicalwoman/15307397193/

The almost finished pencil sketch for the “Zombie Portrait…”

Weekly Art Challenge - Zombie Portrait

And the current painting in progress! Ta-daa!

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Weekly Art Challenge and a Year of Halloween – A Priority for this Year

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I recently realized that I really wanted to make more artwork. I love drawing. I always have. And I’ve always thought of myself as an artist. The problem is that to be an artist, you have to make art.

Drawing and painting is one of those things that had fallen by the wayside over the past two years. I was drawing the webcomic, but I never seemed to have the time or energy to create anything else. Like I’ve mentioned in previous posts, volunteering for Girl Scouts and the kids’ school had managed to devour most of my waking hours.

This was really starting to bother me, especially since I thought I had set myself up two years ago with all the tools I needed (a new iPad, a Surface Pro tablet – very expensive tools) to do my artwork on the go. Of course, two years ago, part of being “on the go” meant I sat on the side lines a couple times a week while the kids took karate classes. When the kids’ homework load made it impossible to take them to karate classes after school, I lost my best opportunity to just sit and draw.

So I stopped drawing, except for the webcomic. And I was really starting to get angry about it.

Around the start of October this year, I was bit so hard by the urge to create that I couldn’t ignore it no matter how hard I tried. I crocheted a zombie cupcake. I make a gorgeous sugar skull applique and stitched it to black shirt for Halloween. I pulled out some unfinished Halloween projects from last year (zombie Barbies, anyone?) and finished them. I opened up a few of my long unfinished pieces on the iPad and got back to work on them. Spurred by longings for creepy art and the gothic atmosphere of Halloween, I started to get back my creative groove. On Halloween night, I felt like the Queen of the World!

On November 1st, I woke up and mourned the loss of what I thought was my best excuse for throwing myself headlong into my creative urges.

It reminded me of waking up on New Year’s day, after the holidays are over and the ball has dropped. All I was left with was a bunch of empty candy wrappers scattered over my yard and the remains of the new projects I had started but not completed during “Halloween Season.” I hated it.

But then I thought, “Why can’t Halloween last all year long?” And then I thought, “Why can’t Halloween last all year long?!” And so I decided that Halloween would last all year long, because in my world, it does.

To make certain that Halloween, and thus my “excuse” to make art, lasted all year long, I decided I needed to set a goal, something that I would work on all year long, that gave me that Halloween feeling. And I decided the best place to start was a weekly art challenge. I would work on a new drawing each week from November 1st of this year until October 31st of next year, to turn out 52 pieces of creepy, spooky art that made me feel like an artist again.

This is, perhaps, the strangest and most roundabout way I could have found to motivate myself to draw again, to give me a reason to make my work a higher priority than the volunteer work that has almost engulfed my life. Don’t get me wrong – I love working with Girl Scouts and the school. Just not at the expense of giving up those things that make me who I am.

So far this month, I have worked on 4 drawings, all done with various apps on my iPad. I work on these drawings in the evenings when I sit down to watch the news with the Hubster. Prior to the start of my “Year of Halloween,” that was time I had used to collapse in exhaustion and play mindless video games on my iPad (yet another sneaky little thief of my time). But having made drawing such a high priority, now I make sure to click on my drawing apps before clicking on a game. “I only have to do a few minutes of drawing before I can switch to a game,” I tell myself. But once I start drawing, hey presto! I lose myself in the artwork for at least half an hour, and thus drawing gets done.

And I am happy about that. Very happy indeed.

So happy Halloween, everyone!

Weekly art challenge 04 - Gothic Portrait

Weekly Art Challenge #04 – “Gothic Portrait” by Helen E. H. Madden, work-in-progress

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I lurve DOODLING!!

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Last Saturday I think I fractured a rib. Today, my back started going out. Obviously, the school year has started, because I can't recall a school year in recent history that hasn't started with me being sick or injured or both.
But that's okay, because now that the school year has started, it means I can once again indulge in my favorite past-times – watching really bad horror movies on SyFy while doodling and working on webcomics. The image above is the warm-up doodle I did today while watching some abysmal crime against cinema called “Headless Horseman.” It's not a huge piece of art, but I'm glad I can steal some time to doodle and watch bad movies. I can't do that while the kids are home during the summer, so at least there's one good thing about them going back to school.

 

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The webcomic is late, so enjoy some filler art!

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I was hard at work on last week's webcomic when I had to set everything aside to go off to a karate camp for 4 days. When four of the highest ranking instructors fly all the way from Okinawa to teach someplace you could actually manage to get to, you drop everything and go.

But I am home now and back at work on the webcomic. It's still not ready yet, though, so here's some other artwork I've been working on. Let me know what you think!

(It's BMO, but not exactly BMO. I'll explain it when I finish if, if it needs explaining then.)

 

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Artwork – “Adventure of the Heart”

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“Adventure of the Heart” by Helen E. H. Madden

I finished this drawing a lot faster that I thought I would. I'm still not sure why I decided to draw this or what I was trying to do. Finn looks like he's either been made out of fuzzy yarn or he's been taking a lot of psychodelic drugs. But this is “Adventure Time” fan art, so I guess either would be about right.

This was drawn in Sketchclub on my iPad. I love the brushes and tools in Sketchclub, but I recently discovered that another app, Procreate, has a feature that may soon make it my new favorite. In Sketchclub, you can record while you draw, and you can export that video afterwards. BUT you have to select the record button before you start to do the recording. In Procreate, the recording is done automatically. You don't have to worry about hitting any buttons, it just happens. It seems to work a lot better than the Sketchclub video recording as well, in that it doesn't seem to slow down the app at all, or cause it to crash (I've had both happen in Sketchclub while recording video, though the crashing doesn't happen very often).

If only I could combine Sketchclub's brushes and tools with Procreate's video recording ability. Maybe someday that will happen. Until then, enjoy this very fuzzy drawing of Finn from “Adventure Time.”

 

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Work-in-Progress – Adventure of the Heart

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Work-in-Progress – “Adventure of the Heart”

I'm too lazy to do much of anything this morning, so I decided to doodle instead. This hopefully looks like Finn from “Adventure Time.” No great dramatic pose, just some doodling and playing with colors and brushes. I'm doing this is SketchClub on my iPad.

Have a fun Sunday morning. I'm finally going to get up and move now.

 

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Zombie Dolly and the Eye-Screams of Doom, plus new Zazzle products!

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I started a new piece of artwork last night. I’m calling this one “Zombie Dolly and the Eye-Screams of Doom.” I have no idea where the idea came from, beyond the fact that I like drawing zombies and I love kawaii-style artwork and ice cream cones.

I’ve taken some of my other recently finished art pieces and set them up on Zazzle as coffee mugs and other items. Take a look!

Bleeding Heart Mug Mugs
Bleeding Heart Mug Mugs by Cynical_Woman
Design your own personal coffee mugs online at Zazzle.
I’m still working on getting the Tiki-bot artwork set up on Zazzle. I’m thinking of making it a print, and possible putting it on a mug. If anybody has any other products they’d like to see some artwork on, let me know. I’m hoping this summer to beef up the Zazzle store and get plenty of new stuff set up on it.
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I am on vacation, so here is some art!

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We're on vacation in Georgia this week. Hubster has a conference in Atlanta. We left Saturday for Savannah, spent Sunday touring around there. Among other things, we ate at the Pirate House (best fried chicken ever!) and visited the Juliette Gordon Lowe house (a must for all Girl Scouts). Then we drove to Atlanta. Today the girls and I are resting up in the hotel room. We're too worn out from all the driving and walking. Tomorrow, we'll go see the sights.

But while we're here this week, I'm spending our down time catching up on some unfinished artwork. Here are some screen shots of the piece I worked on today. The title is “We'll Have Drinks in Hell.” I'm painting this one on the iPad using Procreate.