Cartoonist, Artist, Geek, Evil Crafter, Girl Scout Troop Leader and Writer. Also, a zombie. I haven't slept in I don't know how long.

November Drawing – Day 13, A-Maze-ing Hair and a Bottle

 

Mermaid hair!

Can you find your way through all this hair?

 
I had not intended to add this much detail to her hair, but things kind of got away from me. I expect it will take me the rest of this month to finish the hair and maybe add some details to the dress. I have no idea what I’m doing with the dress yet, but I’ll figure it out!

Meanwhile, I’ve exported the Pirate Queen as an SVG file so I can open it up and tweak it in Corel Draw. And while I do that in the background, I’ve started sketching out something new…

 

Creepy bottle!

No, it’s not a dead plant!

 
This is something inspired by a tweet that came up in a conversation about Lovecraft. I’ve been reading an anthology of Lovecraft at bedtime, and I made a comment about how I find Lovecraft to be the perfect bedtime read because his stories are both creepy and soothing at the same time, and a friend of mine mentioned that would be the perfect description of a very evil bottle of wine. So that’s what I’m drawing, an evil Lovecraftian bottle of wine. Enjoy!

ACW Episode 282 – Run, Princess, Run!!

Webcomic!

Click on the image above to see it bigger.

Yes, it took me forever to get this one done. I apologize. I started this at the beginning of October, which turned out to be one of the busiest months I’ve had to deal with in a loooooooong time. It was so busy and so hectic, in fact, that I look forward to the peace and quiet of Girl Scout cookie season.

Yes, I actually said that. And now I’ve put it in writing.

What kept me so busy? Well, Girl Scouts was one part of it. In addition to our troop meetings, we also had an archery trip and a murder mystery party. Then there was Halloween and All Saints Day. The girls attend Catholic school, and this year Pixie’s class held a “Courtyard of Saints,” where all the students dressed up as different saints and gave a sort of living history presentation. Pixie was Mother Teresa, so I spent a week sewing that costume for her. And then, since we can’t visit one end of the spectrum without seeing the other, I also had to sew her a Kylo Ren costume for Halloween. Princess wanted to be a Jedi, so there was that to sew. And of course, I was busy working on the October Crochet challenge. But what kept me busiest of all in October was…

Cross Country.

Princess was encouraged by her friends to join, and I’m very glad she did, because it was a great experience for her. She went from barely being able to run a mile to running 3 miles, and over the course of the month shaved 4 minutes off her mile run time. Thankfully, though, the Cross Country season ended before Halloween, because practice was 3 days a week with a race on top of that, so just about every day after school, we were running somewhere for 2 hours at a time. Well, Princess was running. I opted to do lawn work at the school (we do school service hours every year), or drive kids to races and chaperon at events. It was time-consuming, to say the least.

But now Cross Country is over, and November’s challenge is drawing, so I’m going to get back to regular work on the webcomic. I can’t promise weekly updates, but I certainly think I can do better than once a month!

Enjoy the webcomic! Later today, I’ll post another update for the November drawing challenge.

November Drawing – Day 11, Details, Details

I’ve gotten all the line art and base colors done on both the Pirate Queen and the Mermaid drawings, so now I’m working on the details. Lots and lots of details.

First, the Pirate Queen…

 

Pirate Queen!

Her tentacles need spots!!

 
Again, this one is drawn in Concepts on my iPad. I’ve mainly used the pen tool and the filled stroke tool. I’ve been trying to stick to a limited color palette, and I think this one works pretty well.

Now for the Mermaid!

 

Mermaid haid!

I love drawing flowing hair in water.

 
The Mermaid is being drawn in InkPad for the iPad. Again, InkPad is a free app, and one of the best vector apps around. I’m using the brush tool to draw the ink lines and the shapes of the shading, similar to the way I use the filled stroke tool in Concepts. The difference here is that I can adjust each point on the curves of the shapes to get exactly what I want.

So there are two different vector drawings in two different vector apps that are still rather similar but different. Differently similar. You know what I mean. Whatever.

November Drawing – Day 10, the Pirate Queen, plus a robot for coloring!

 

Color me!

If you like robots, here’s one you can color!

 
So the above robot is based on a doodle I did a few years ago. I love drawing robots, especially rusty, broken ones. With this guy, I included some of the highlights and shading, but you can add your ownif you like.

Anyway, once I got this guy done, I did more work on the pirate queen.

 

Pirate Queen!

Tentacles!!

 
I love how this is turning out, especially since Concepts has done yet another update, and now I finally know how to set up custom colors. I still have a lot more work to do on this one, but when it’s done, I think I’ll upload it to Society 6 as a print and maybe as a throw pillow or mug or something else.

Anyway, I hope you like both pictures, and let me know if you color the robot!

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 06, the Mermaid and her Sailor

So I finished up the “inking” on the mermaid drawing, and here’s a view of what I got done today!

 

Mermaid inks!

Look! The mermaid has a friend!

 
I like my mermaids to be creepy and sort of predatory, and this one definitely fits the bill! I started doing more work on the colors as well, playing around with a color scheme. I’m not entirely happy with the colors of the dress yet, but I’ll get there.

No mushroom today, but I may do more drawing tonight in Concepts and post that tomorrow 🙂

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?