Rizzoli and Isles, and a Random Warrior Woman

Yeah... so I've been mainlining femslash fic like biotics mainline EEZO, and I got sucked into the Rizzoli and Isles fandom without watching a damn episode.  In fact, I pre-ordered the first season "sight unseen," as it were.  Then I cruised dA, where I saw many hilarious takes on Kate Beaton's brilliant fanfiction/comic, "Ooh Mister Darcy."  I ended up drawing this:

What.

I also drew this, before I "wrote" "Ooh Detective Rizzoli."

It was a lunch break doodle.

Anyway, I'm off to forage for food!

Some doodles

I've been drawing a bit more often than usual, but I'm lazy and don't like scanning my studies.  However, I did take my lunch break to draw the last three pages I worked on in my sketchbook.

The first pic is a poor sketch of Hellboy.  I used almost no ref (and it shows), but the main purpose of this was to put my anatomy studies to use.

The second pic is a random superhero-type flying in the air.  I used a picture of a diver for the pose and threw on the anatomy (the diver was all kitted out in diving gear). I want to get back into drawing superheroes, like I did when I was in high school.

This last pic is a piece of fanart for Dragon Age 2 - it's the end of the duel between the Arishok and F!Hawke (who happens to be a rogue in this picture) in Act 2.  I used ref for the Arishok's armor and F!Hawke's armor, but the rest was from imagination.  Hooray!  This took me about 2 hours total to draw.

And that about wraps up my lunch break today... I hope to post more soon!

I hate being sick. So. MUCH.

It was my turn to give a challenge for my art exchanges with Bryant, so I decided on women warriors.  It should have been easy-peasy - I like women, I like armor, and I like women.  I should have had this in the bag, right?

Right?

Well, between Dragon Age 2 coming out, beating that once and starting a second playthrough, getting the influenza and being down and out for 5+ days, and trying to recover from that and/or a secondary cold/sinus infection/whatever that hitchhiked its way into my body, it ended up taking a lot longer than I thought.  Like, 2 weeks longer.

First off, here's the final version:

 

I used ref for the armor, as the goal (for me, at least) was to draw a female warrior with armor that looked solid, useful, able to protect, etc etc.  The pose and face and stuff was from my imagination, as was the sword and the lazy shield.  As ridiculous as this sounds, the part I'm most proud of is that I added her head after I drew the rest of the body... and it looks decent.  I usually have to start drawing the head first, or it gets all messed up later.  I started using 2H lead to lay stuff out, and then solidify the lines I want with H lead.

This was my first pass:

Boring, huh?  I used ref for the armor, but I didn't like pretty much anything about it.  So I tried again.

I liked this one a lot more, but my lines were so heavy and dark that I got frustrated from lead smearing all over the place, so I thought I'd just start over again.  I think that worked out in the end.

I did some other sketches while working on this - here's some Dragon Age 2 fanart I did while sick:

Random faces - there's the Arishok, Isabela (twice!), an elf, and a shitty dwarf face, along with some other random crap ('sup Frank Castle?).  Also, there's a mini-Qunari-Blanka fusion.

This second batch of faces includes Sebastian Vael, a Desire Demon, F!Hawke, Loki from Thor (kinda), and some other random people.

We have an elf, a dwarf, two F!Hawkes, an alien thing, and some other faces.  Oh, and a torso.  Hawt.

I also have two sketches of F!Hawke (I picked the mage class for my second playthrough).  I love her default face.  LOVE IT.

Anyway, this first sketch is F!Hawke resting after a hard day.  Yes, that is lipstick on her cheek :3 (I romanced Isabela ASAP because she's just so much fun)

This is a sketch of F!Hawke getting ready to fireball the darkness.  Pew pew!

I have some other sketches too, but they're all studies (and two of them are kind of NSFW), so they'll stay in my sketchbook for now.

BLAM BLAM BLAM

It's round 3 of Random Assignments with Bryant, and I picked guns this time around.  He pushed me for more details (we wanted to avoid the vagueness of "trees"), so I picked 19th century hand guns :3  So, without further ado...

This is the "final" version - I didn't spend much time on it because I was getting sleepy (was doing laundry at Mom's house, and I actually just got home a short time ago).  I did the values for the wood stock in grayscale, and slapped an overlay layer above it to lay down the colors ('sup, cheater?), but I did the rest of the coloring with a normal hard, round brush.

Next up, the pencils:

I kept the background color when I saved this so it wasn't just a glaring white picture.

My drafts/practice drawings:

'Sup, Zangief?? >_>

And finally, random shit and feet!

I was doing some studies, so I thought I'd just include them on this post.

And now I'm really tired, and I'm having company over tomorrow, and I still need to clean, so I should probably hit the hay.  Good night!

Eff you, trees!

And eff me for being impatient!

I'm going to try and redo the color tomorrow night...see if I can get them to look okay.

In the meantime, I'm going to clean up my Wacom. I just sneezed over it like a moron.

(Curse you, Bryant!)

First impressions of Sketchbook Pro 2010

I've been kicking around the idea of trying Sketchbook Pro 2010 for a while.  I even downloaded the trial for my Macbook, which I almost never use (except to play WoW at a friend's house every once in a while).  I was trying to use it on the Macbook, but with the small screen (13.3" or whatever vs my 19" desktop monitor) and my small Intuos3 tablet (lolwat), it felt clumsy to me.

Also, I didn't bother to read anything about how to use it.

In the end, I defaulted to CS3 on both machines.

Fast forward to now - I have a new tablet, dual monitors, and I'm still learning/re-learning how to use digital media again.  I'm looking for a program that I can sketch in, without having to mess with the brush settings in Photoshop (I'm sure it's not that hard, but I'm impatient, dammit!).  So I'm reading up, and lo, Sketchbook Pro 2010 crosses my path again!

It's roughly $100 USD, though, and I'm trying to tighten ye old money pouch again.  I figured I'd download the 15 day trial and see if it I like it enough - if so, I'd buy it when I get my next paycheck.

...

Yeah, after messing with it for an hour, I'm ready to put the money down right now.

I didn't sketch anything freehand in it yet, just did a rough "ink" on a study I did at lunch today (I grabbed some dude's picture off the internet in between manual editing).  Here's the progression from scan to "finished product":

 

  

  

It's not the best thing EVER, but it was a lot easier to work in Sketchbook Pro 2010 than in Photoshop.  It runs light, it's easy to use (I had no problem setting up the straight edge tool!), I love the little tool lagoon... Yeah.

I'll try to use it for various things besides just "inking," just to make sure I still want to buy it at the end of the trial period, but so far I'm sold.

Small update

First things first: I worked on my Elissa Cousland sketch a little bit this week... centered her body some, and refined the armor a bit.

Then we have some concept exploration fail, done with Copic Cool Grey markers on copier paper:

... which lead to the fail sketch below:

There ARE some things I like about it... I just wish I didn't have such a heavy hand.  No matter how hard or lightly I press, my lead smears ALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL over the place like WHAT.  Maybe I need new lead?  Anyway, I'm going to see if I can clean it up/refine it in Photoshop, with my small-arsed Wacom Intuos 3.

Hopefully the WoW raid will be starting up soon, so I'll cut this short.  Later!

What's up, cast study?

This is a cast study I worked on for about 2 ~ 3 hours (total) on Christmas Eve.  The colors and values are off (I have very yellow lights in the basement... which doesn't explain the values being off, lolz), but it's all a learning experience... I hope!