Cartoons, webcomics, sketches, 3D art and other artwork.
Tiki-bot - work-in-progress by Helen E. H. Madden
I've said it before – I'm always happiest when I'm drawing robots. I don't know if I'm particularly good at drawing robots, but drawing them makes me happy.
This image is being done in my favorite iPad drawing app, Sketchclub. This was mostly done while. I was waiting for the kids to finish up with after-school activities today. I'll continue to post updates as this progresses.
More and more, I'm getting into the habit of drawing in bed in the morning before I get up to start the rest of my day. Actually, the routine has been a) wake up and feed the cats, b) grab a cup of coffee, c) get back in bed, d) read a comic book (this week I've been reading “Adventure Time”), and then e) draw for an hour or so. The end result is that I have a nice morning without being nagged by the cats and I get some artwork done. The rest of the day may go to hell in a hand basket, but at least I got some drawing done, and hey, coffee!
All this drawing is happening on my trusty iPad right now. For this particular drawing, I've been bouncing back and forth between a couple of different apps. The main work is being done in InkPad, a vector drawing app that I highly recommend. InkPad became open-source this year, so there are lots of copycats out there now, and you have to pay for those copycats. Don't. Get the original app. It's worth it.
Anyway, I'm using InkPad because I want to be able to resize this particular drawing to any size, and vector will let me do that. Plus I want to experiment with drawing in a more organic style in vectors. The previous piece I did, “Tree Lighter,” was drawn in SketchClub using their vector tool. It's not the same thing because SketchClub is a raster drawing program – it draws pixels, not vectors, so I can't increase the size of the drawing once I'm done, only shrink it down. But “Tree Lighter” had this nice cut-out feeling, like layers of colors that had been cut from translucent paper and layered over each other to make the final drawing. I liked it and wanted to see if I could do the same thing in InkPad, so that I would then have the advantage of being able to make the image bigger if I wanted to use it for posters, t-shirts, etc.
For “We Have Always Been Here,” I started with the background – sky, clouds, distant landscape, the ocean and some waves. I'm using a photo from an old National Geographic book for reference. Most of the pieces were given a gradient fill, from a solid to translucent color, to give a sense of shading and volume.
Once I had the background laid out, I took a snap shot of the image and imported that into SketchClub so I could sketch the focal piece of the image – a sort of clunky robot sitting on the remains of a giant, more sophisticated robot. The idea was to show this peaceful sort of post-apocalyptic scene. The robot society used to be this mighty empire, but they fell, and now the current generation of robots live a much simpler life. But there's also a hint that maybe the robots haven't always been here, because the ruined giant robot has very human features, unlike the current clunkier robot, so who came before the robots? And where are they now?
Yes, it's a deep theme. I'm deep like that.
Anyhoo, drawing the clunky robot has been easy. I used my normal style of sketching robots and drew one quickly in SketchClub, then imported that drawing back into InkPad where I traced over it with the vector tools, adding gradients to suggest a metal surface and then laying further gradients over top of that to suggest shadows and highlights.
And that was the easy part. Now I'm struggling with the giant robot head that my little robot guy is supposed to be sitting on. I had a nifty, angular mecha head drawn, but I couldn't get the perspective right no matter what I tried. So I finally turned to another app, 123Dsculpt, to get a new reference image. 123Dsculpt by Autodesk comes with some pre-made models that you can play with, including a human head! I loaded that up, rotated it around, and took a snapshot of that. Then I imported that snapshot into InkPad and began drawing over it. To get the shading right, I ran the snapshot from 123DSculpt through Phototropodelic, a fun little app that creates cutout/poserterized style effects for photos. When I'm ready to add my shading to the giant robot head, I'll import the Phototropodelic image into InkPad and do some tracing there.
So, long story short, I've bounced around between InkPad, SketchClub, 123Dsculpt, and Phototropodelic. I'm drawing freeform by hand and also tracing elements that are giving me trouble. I'm not doing any precise tracing, since I want this to look rather loose and organic. And I'm using lots of gradients for the shading and highlights. And the result so far is…
And there ya go! I'll post more images as this progresses, but that's it for this morning's drawing work.
I've been playing with my schedule lately. I know I've been all over the map with getting stuff up on the website. Adventures of Cynical Woman is behind and Bitchcraft is WAY behind. It all comes down to having to juggle my work with my responsibilities as a parent and a Girl Scout volunteer. I think if I only had the one volunteer job – troop leader OR cookie mom – I'd be okay. But instead I've spent a good part of this year putting together events for all the troops at the kids' school, and that's turned out to be a lot of work. Handling the email alone on that takes almost 2 hours every evening, and that's just handling the email! That doesn't include filling out paperwork, budgeting for events, meeting with troop leaders to plan events, preparing for meetings with troop leaders to plan events, etc.
I've also been sick most of this school year, which hasn't helped at all.
I've been working on ways to steal back time for myself. Again, 2 hours of Girl Scouts email every evening (unless I ignore it completely, which some days I HAVE to do, if I'm going to get anything done). And those 2 hours really cut into my free time. I consider free time to be any time I'm not spending on taking care of the house or the family. One hour of my free time goes into exercise because if I don't exercise my blood pressure goes up and my head explode (and that's not good). Another hour goes into getting cleaned up after exercise and doing some meditation (again, head will explode with out that). And that leaves me with about 15 minutes of free time, which I usually end up spending going to the bathroom (another thing I have to do to keep my head, or any other body parts, from exploding).
So how to find free time when my free time has all been used up by doing activities to keep my head from exploding? I think the first key may be prioritizing.
By prioritizing I don't mean deciding what's most important for me to do with my free time. I mean deciding whether Girl Scouts, house cleaning, taking care of Hubster and the kids, or doing my own work has the top priority.
I have a huge pile of “everything must be done NOW” tasks, but they can't all be done, so I have to sort through them everyday to decide which ones are going to the top of the heap and which ones are going to sit at the bottom and sort of ferment or compost until I really do have to deal with them. For example, my parents are coming to visit tomorrow. My to-do heap (not even a list anymore, it's a HEAP) includes exercise, plan the upcoming Girl Scout bridging ceremony, wash and fold laundry, clean Pixie's room (where my parents will be sleeping), draw webcomics, draw artwork for new cards and stuff on Zazzle, touch up the hair dye (it needs it, really), plan the next Girl Scout troop meeting, make some new jewelry because I have a really cool idea for a new ring, work on new clothes because my old ones are wearing out, buy new clothes for Hubster and the kids because their stuff is wearing out, go to karate class…
See, it just doesn't end. And I can't do all of this in one day, so I have to pick and choose. When I can, I pick a mix of things – something for Girl Scouts, something for the house, something for the kids and Hubster, something just for me.
Today, I started with me as the first priority. I have a robot drawing I'm working on, so I woke up at 6:30, grabbed a cup of coffee, and promptly went back to bed and read “Adventure Time” comic books. Because I should also mention that I deserve a little down time each day, and the best way for me to wake up is comics and coffee. I read one comic book, and then I pulled out my iPad and worked on the robot drawing for an hour. I didn't get as far as I wanted, but an hour is all I can spend on it, so I've gotten that priority out of the way.
The next priority was the kids and Hubster. Everybody needs clean laundry. So I got up, got dressed, and sorted through all the laundry and put a load into the washer. I'll probably wash and dry 3 loads today. Will I fold those loads? I'm betting not, because what everyone needs is clean laundry, so folding is optional as long as the laundry is clean and dry. If it doesn't make it into a drawer or closet, my peeps know they can dig it out of the hampers in my room.
Next priority is breakfast, which is happening right now as I blog. I gots to eat. And when I eat, I usually think, and it occurs to me that those thoughts could just as easily go on the blog so I have at least SOMETHING new up. I'll finish this up in a few minutes and post it, then finish my coffee and run out the door for the next priority, which is exercise.
I'll spend an hour today at the gym, and another hour getting cleaned up. It'll be noon by then. I'll grab a quick lunch and move on to cleaning Pixie's bedroom, because my folks are sleeping in it. The room doesn't have to be springtime fresh, but I should remove all the tripping hazards from the floor and put clean sheets on the bed. Also, I should probably check for any cat puke that may be hiding up there.
After that, I need to get a new shower curtain rod for the guest bathroom, since the old one broke. Guests need a nice guest bathroom. I'll wait to clean the guest bathroom until tomorrow though, because I've got to switch gears again and move back into “me” stuff. I've got an almost finished webcomic that seriously needs to be a finished webcomic posted on the website. Once that's done, it'll be time to fix dinner so the kids don't start chewing off my legs. And when dinner is done, then it's time to put together the plan for the bridging ceremony. I started on that last week, so there's only an hour or so of work left. Once that's done, I'm going the fuck to bed because it'll have been a damned busy day!
Yep, busy. And you'll notice that I only just barely made a dent in the ever-growing to-do heap. BUT I got the important stuff done. Everything else can wait until tomorrow.
I'm stopping here now and getting a move on my day. Enjoy yours, and while you're at it, enjoy this work-in-progress that I managed to spend an hour on this morning, because I made it a priority.
So this is the animated version of the Bryce scene I was working on today. The material for the water and the sphere and the clouds in the sky have been animated. This one turned out rather pretty, I think.
I’ve been indulging myself in old hobbies the last couple weeks. This week I dusted off some of my 3D software and started playing with it. Here’s a render I did today using Bryce 7. Bryce 7 is an environment creation program. I’ve become more and more interested in landscapes lately, so playing with this program really suits my mood.
Bryce 7 render
Of course, I can never leave anything alone, so after I rendered this in Bryce, I took it over to Photoshop to play with a bit. Mainly just to prove to myself that I still know how to use both Bryce and Photoshop together…
Bryce 7 render with some post-work done in Photoshop
I’m rendering an animated version of this now, so when that’s done, I’ll post it as well. Enjoy the artwork!
Here is this morning's work on the current drawing. This particular robot is going to be in pieces, scattered throughout the waves. I wanted this one to have a very modern, sleek look, as opposed to the thrown-together, more organic look of the other robots I've drawn. You'll see why as this goes on.
To make the head, I drew a sketch of it in Sketchclub, which I then imported into InkPad. I drew one half the head in InkPad and gave all the pieces the same gradient. I adjusted the angle on a few pieces to show some shading. Then I grouped all those pieces together, duplicated them, flipped them, and lined them up with the first half of the head. I also flipped some of the gradients to give the impression of light coming from a particular direction (upper right corner of the image).
I'll add more organic shadows and other elements to this robot head to get it to fit more into the style of the overall image, but I very much want to show two different kinds of robots in this drawing.
There's also a layer of gradient yellow overtop the whole image. This does two things. First, it ties together the color scheme of the whole image. No matter what colors I use, they all have that same yellow tint. Second, I think it gives the overall image a feeling of vintage warmth, that sort of “Olden, Golden Days” atmosphere.
So, let me know what you think! I'll keep working on this and posting the results here.
So I've gotten a bit farther on this piece today. I'm starting to put in the foam of the waves, but the shore itself and other items in the water haven't been added yet. I switched over from Inkpad to SketchClub to start work on one of the robots in the scene…
I really wanted something that had the look of a fancy mech or transformer. A more detailed, but obviously still mechanical, face. It'll get clearer what I'll be doing with this as I go on.
We Have Always Been Here by Helen E. H. Madden (in progress)
I started a new drawing today, this time in InkPad, my favorite vector app for the iPad. I've been wanting to do a landscape drawing, especially after seeing the images in the Gaze HD apps (I've been using the beach version for morning meditation (yes, I meditate. Anything to bring my blood pressure down)). So this morning I searched through some very old Time-Life books I have, a collection called “The American Wilderness.” I found my reference image in the volume on the Caribbean Isles. It's a nice, peaceful scene, though I'm modifying the colors a bit. This book was published in 1973, and I'm not crazy about the colors in the photography. The photos definitely have that 70s look.
There will be a couple of robots in this image. I like drawing robots, so I'm going to keep doing that.
And yes, just like the previous drawing, I did this one in bed this morning. I honestly see no reason to work any place else. It is the perfect place for me to focus on my work and actually get stuff done.
Hell, it worked for Mark Twain.
I've been working on this drawing for a few weeks now. This week, I decided I was going to stay in bed an extra hour so I could just draw, and that's how this piece got finished. “Tree Lighter” was drawn in Sketchclub on my iPad, using the vector tool for most of the work. I suppose I'll have to start a new drawing tomorrow morning. I'll have to see if I want to keep spending that extra hour in bed just so I can draw robots. What do you think? Wise investment of my time, ultimate form of laziness, or both?
Tree Lighter by Helen E. H. Madden
Pixie likes to draw pictures of the Doctor in her school agenda. Here's the latest one.
In addition to the Tenth Doctor, you can see Donna, Rose, Martha, a Dalek, a Weeping Angel, a Slyveen, and a Cyberman. Also, Pixie, as the Doctor's favorite companion. And some very crucial Doctor Who quotes.
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