Artwork, writing and special projects in progress.
So I decided to post my current works in progress on Fridays. This year I'm doing a series of robot drawings, one for each month. The eventual goal is to publish a calendar for next year. This is the robot for either March or April. I'm adding another broken egg-bot at the bottom of the page. With cookie sales wrapping up in the next week, we'll have to see how far I get by Friday.
Click on the thumbnail above to view the full-sized image!
I drew this comic on Saturday. I spent all day Sunday working on a commission for a client. I finished this morning at 4AM. My house is a disaster. My office looks like someone vomited computer graphics magazines all over the place. I have email coming out the wazoo because my inbox can no longer contain it. And then there’s the actual physical mail which, combined with the unwashed laundry, is probably going to topple on me and kill me the moment I open the office door to resume the rest of my life.
Oh well! I’m taking a day just to sleep because I’ve been up 24 hours straight. I’ll deal with all that stuff when I wake up. Sometime on Tuesday, I think.
Current Work-In-Progress by Helen E. H. Madden
Photoshop, 30 April 2012
“Cynical Woman (with Pookie)” by Helen E. H. Madden, Sharpie pen on sketch paper, July 28, 1993
Long before Cynical Woman became me with horns, I drew her like this. And I think when I’m older, this is exactly how I’m going to look, so consider this a prescient self-portrait. The bug in the picture, Pookie, is a Madagascar hissing cockroach, a nod to the original Cynical Woman, Joelle. Joelle studied entomology and wrote her master’s thesis on cockroaches. I remember sitting through her presentation. I didn’t understand any of what she said, but she did mention the word “ootheca” an awful lot.
Anyway, sorry for posting this late today. I’ve been busting ass on my current commission, a book cover for a publisher I work with. I’ve been posting screen shots of the work-in-progress on Twitter and on Facebook, so if you follow me on either of those, you may have seen what I’ve been slaving over the last couple weeks. (If you don’t follow me on either Twitter or Facebook, why not?! I’m a perfectly nice social media person, and I haven’t bitten anyone on Twitter in days, and the guy on Facebook that I did bite did NOT contract rabies, contrary to popular belief. He was already rabid to begin with.)
But I’ve been working very hard on this digital painting and staying up way too late too many nights and today it really caught up with me. After the Hubster left to take the girls to school, I went back to bed and had nightmares for the next few hours about Hubster switching out our phone for a complicated media center remote that I couldn’t operate to save my life (don’t laugh, he does this to me in real life all the damned time!) and it was very important that I call 911 because an undead Anne Romney might or might not have invaded our home and I was not putting up with that.
Needless to say I woke up in a cold sweat and all the coffee in the world cannot help me feel normal and fully functional today. Oh well. Back to the digital painting.
Work-In-Progress by Helen E. H. Madden, Photoshop, 26 April, 2012
This is a screen capture of my current commission. It’s far from finished yet, and I can only see now, after having spent a couple hours slaving over it today, how badly I need to fix this guy’s chin. Seriously, did he just have a root canal?
Anyway, this piece is a bit of a departure from me. In the past, I used DAZ Studio or Poser to set up 3d models of people, which I then rendered and Photoshopped to make this kind of artwork. Since both DAZ Studio and Poser work like crap on my system these days (no, I don’t know why, but I suspect it’s because they’re both bloated all to hell with features I don’t need), I am making the move to straight up digital painting. It’s a slower process, but I think the results will be better.
I’ll post more updates as I go. This piece has been interesting to work on.
Whoops! This was supposed to run last week, but somehow didn’t make it out of the “Draft” box of my blogging program. Anyway, I’ve got two things to talk about on WIP Wednesday today.
The first is “La Isla,” the NaNoWriMo project I did last month. I made it through 60K words by November 30th on a story based on a dream I had the month before. It was a weird, freaky dream, and the book looks like it’s going to be a weird freaky book. At this stage of the game, “La Isla” is really more outline than first draft of a novel. I hadn’t planned to do NaNoWriMo this year, so just jumped in with whatever idea I had on hand when November 1st came around. I do believe there’s a very interesting story in there. The novel will be, however, very experimental. Here’s a small sample of what I’ve written, unedited so far:
What is Flora’s first memory? That ought to be the first thing she talks about, the first thing she opens with. The beginning of chapter one. Most people can recall a time early on in their lives when they were children, like the day their mothers made them wear a horrible scratchy suit to church, or the time they wet their pants at Grandma Bingley’s funeral, right during the minister’s sermon, and it wasn’t their fault because no one would pick them up and take them to the bathroom even though they pleaded that they really, really had to go, and besides Grandma Bingley wouldn’t have minded, she would have taken the kid to the bathroom for Pete’s sake, just got up in the middle of the funeral and said, “Excuse me, but those of us still living have needs that must be attended to.” Whatever that meant. When you were only two or maybe three and still toilet training, you never really did get what adults were saying.
Like I said, at this point, it’s all notes and bits of dialog and occassional outright scenes, but mostly notes of what the story should look like. I’m well over 70K words, right now, and once I get the story settled in my mind, I’ll pull out the relevant parts of that very rough pre-first draft and begin the actual writing part of the process. But this pre-writing process is actually very important to me, and I’m happy with how it’s going.
In addition to “La Isla,” I’ve also been working with author Mark Jackman on a potential new web comic. We’re going to have to do a lot of prepatory work, figuring out the format, the story, the art, etc. But I spent all last week working on drawing a sample page based on a short script he sent me. Here’s a quick look at one of the panels.
I have no idea when we would be posting this on a regular basis. Right now Mark and I are just figuring out if we can even do this. We’ve both got very busy schedules. But Mark’s a very funny writer and I would be very happy to work on any project with him, so we’re going to see if we can make this work.
And that’s it for WIPs today, kids. If you have any comments or questions, let me know!
“Zombie Goth Mermaid – WIP, 4 December 2011” by Helen E. H. Madden
You might recognize this beautifully bizarre lady from this PerCaDraMo post. She’s one of the characters I drew by hand over Thanksgiving week. I thought she turned out so nicely, I decided to take her into Illustrator and see what I could do with her. So far, I’ve converted her into a Live Paint object and have been playing with color. Eventually, there will be brush strokes added, and maybe some fun text, like “Red sea at night, Mermaids delight…” We’ll see how this works out.
I’ve got other gothy, creepy-cool drawings in the works, and they will be making an appearance here as I put them together. Hubster has promised me an “art binge” weekend next week, meaning I’ll get to lock myself into the office and just go nuts putting together fun artwork for myself. I’m allowed to pull as many all-nighters as I want in 3-4 days, so I’m hoping to have some stuff put together for t-shirts and prints by the end of it. If there’s something you’ve seen on the site that you’re very in love with, let me know. I might be inclined to set that up for an art-binge weekend to make a nice, finished product you can have for yourself 😉
*****Don’t forget, the Cynical Woman Zazzle shop is open.*****
I’ve got a few products in there now, and obviously am planning on adding more as time goes by. Take a gander now though. I’ve got a couple holiday cards and postage available, plus t-shirts, a print, and other delightful items you can purchase. Remember, support your local Cynical Woman and help her conquer the world! RARRRRRRRR!!
Steampunk Holiday Card WIP
Do you like it? It’s still a work in progress and I’m starting to think I will never get this done. It seemed like such a simple project to do when I came up with the idea, but at every step of the process, something had gone wrong. I’ve had major software problems, the biggest of which was my prefered 3D package, DAZ Studio, going completely berserk on me. (Actually, I have a far more colorful phrase to describe what DAZ Studio did on my computer, but I’m not going to use it here. However, if you ever catch me in person and really want to hear a rant, ask me about DAZ Studio 4 and how poorly it performed on my computer.) After losing three days to software problems, I finally broke down and bought a copy of Poser Debut, which worked as advertised and did exactly what I needed. Unfortunately, after installing Poser Debut, my computer slowed down to a crawl, to the point where even opening email caused a warning to pop up on my screen saying, “Outlook is using an excessive amount of CPU resources!!” Or something like that.
Anyway, this was supposed to be done the last weekend of October, which turned out to be the weekend I spent pulling three all-nighters to create a race t-shirt for my daughters’ school. That t-shirt design got a lot of nice comments back, which makes me happy, but I’ve been suffering from the time loss ever since. Hopefully, I will finish off this design before December. I will make it available as cards, even though it’s a bit late for that, but I will also make it available as an iPad case, an iPod Touch and iPhone case, and t-shirt design, and maybe a few other products. It’s going to look very nice by the time I’m done, I swear it, with a lovely swirling combination of cogwheels and snowflakes falling down onto the woman’s hair and face, and a steampunk border to go with it. You’ll love it. You’ll want to own it! You’ll demand I make prints of it available for sale. If I can, I will do exactly that. And you’ll buy it because you love me and support me and all that other crap.
Or not. You can simply just look at the smaller images I post here and leave me a loving comment saying, “Nice artwork!” I would be enjoy any feedback you care to give, monetary or otherwise 😉
By the way, if you do like the steampunk artwork, let me know. I’m working more and more on developing themes for products in the Zazzle shop, and if there’s something in particular you’d like me to draw more of – more steampunk, more zombies, more robots, etc. – I’d be happy to accomodate you.
Enjoy your Thanksgiving, people!
Normally I post a work still in progress on WIP Wednesday, but today I wanted to show an end result and talk about how it happened. Plus, you know, promote my awesome Zombie Santa Christmas card which you can buy at http://www.zazzle.com/cynical_woman.
This is a perfect example of how the iPad has changed how I work. The card was drawn in Sketchbook Pro on the iPad. This was something I worked on whenever I was on the go with the kids. When they had karate lessons or swimming lessons, or when I was sitting in the carpool lane at school waiting to pick them up, I turned on the iPad and worked on this baby. It was a piece put together during whatever spare time I had, then assembled into the finished product on my desktop before being uploaded to Zazzle.com.
I love that the iPad gives me the freedom to work on the go like this. It expands what I can do as a digital artist a thousand-fold. I hate that I have to work on projects in dribs and drabs of time though, because it shows just how full my schedule is.
However, the end result is what matters.
In addition to the very fine cartoon I drew for the front, on the inside the card reads…
“Give a little of yourself this holiday season.”
I think that’s a zombie sentiment we can all get behind, right? If you like the cards, please do stop by my Zazzle store and buy some, or pass along the word to your friends and loved ones so they can purchase these fine holiday cards. I will love you for it and so will Zombie Santa.
The above snippet is just a small taste of the current project I’m working on. I hope to have the final piece done by the end of the week. Feel free to guess what this might be! It’s being drawn on my iPad, using Sketchbook Pro, and I’m having waaaaaaaaaaaay too much fun with it 😉
Mich very kindly gave me a book on “Kodomo” or Japanese children’s art. I’ve been browsing through it and was inspired to start this piece of art…
It’s not finished yet, but when it is, you’ll see this image is actually a little bit twisted. Hope you like this WIP!
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