I’m realizing I need to get back to basics a bit so this morning I’m doing some figure drawing from pictures.

This week’s images are a quick sketch of a knightly dude kneeling in snow, didn’t come out exactly as it was in my head but alright for a 30 minute doodle, and a set of water elemental weapons for the current Drawing Jam challenge at CGHub. Not sure if I’ll finish the weapons but it’s nice to work on as I don’t draw weapons quite enough.

Not much else to say this week. I have this week off from the day job so I should get lots of art done this week (including some progress on my comic book), starting….now.

I’ve had a bunch of freelance projects rain down upon me in the past week (by a bunch I mean two). It’s a good thing for a few reasons. One it means I’m making money, and two it’s giving me a bit of space from my comic book to get a fresh perspective. I think once I get through this bunch of freelance work I’m going to just jump in and paint. I’m not going to worry about style, polish, time, or anything and just have fun and see what comes from it.

I’ve gotten to the New Generation of the Robotech series and I’m loving it. I will have to try and do a sketch based on this era of the Robotech universe soon. It’s amazing how much watching it inspires me, even though I’ve seen it tons of times, and even with super cheesy dialogue at times. There have been a few lines that come out of nowhere and seem to just be filler; there’s just no context for some of it.

Anyway, this week’s sketch was something that popped into my head this morning. I wanted to mess with painting effects, or FX. I bought Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning yesterday (yeah, I know, another time sink), and I think the effects in that game really made me desire to mess with this this morning.

The top image is a sketch I did based on the current Environment Challenge at ConceptArt.org entitled “Death’s Lobby”. It sounded like a cool idea so I spent a little less than an hour yesterday doodling on it. I won’t have time to do anything else with it though, there’s just too much going on. The bottom part of the image is guns I’ve concepted for my current comic book project. As I started sketching weapons I realized there are hundreds of years of design in guns and swords and such that have come before me, so I drew from a number of guns over the past hundred years or so as bases for what I’ve worked on. I may not even use most of what I’ve done in the comic, but it’s good to have a pool of ideas to grab from.

And now we get to the whole head meeting wall part of my creative life currently. If you’ve been keeping up with my rambling words you know I’ve struggled a bit with the style for my upcoming comic book. I’m still struggling. Part of my problem is I’m trying to skate between lines and shapes. In my head there are two competing voices; one wants to draw lines in a more classic comic book style (similar to how I sketch traditionally), and the other wants a more painted approach similar to concept art for games. This makes for very unproductive art. Without knowing where I’m going I’ve wasted a lot of time.

And I’m still not sure how I want to approach the art style. I got some feedback from a fellow artist and it confirmed what I felt; that I was a bit unfocused in my approach and the results were not solid. So I’m going back to page one and not moving on until I have a style that works and is solid. Looking over the first three pages I thought I had done, I also realized one of them was totally unnecessary, so it’s been nixed. Add my natural impatience in and it’s a frustrating situation. I really wanted to be close to halfway done with issue one by now and I’m still flirting with how to carry this out. Let’s hope the universe smiles upon me this week and something clicks.

Here’s a work in progress for the AO Evolution challenge for the Art Order (the site seems to be down right now but WIPs are being posted at WIPnation). I don’t do enough fantasy themed work on my own so it’s nice to something involving magic. I’m digging it so far, though the only issue is it’s taking from my time for working on my comic book and kept me from working more on the CGhub Conan drawing jam. Sometimes I’m like a cat jumping to the next shiny thing way too easily.

I just finished reading Ghost in the Shell. I always loved the anime movie, I’ve only seen the first one, so I bought a used copy of the first graphic novel. Overall it was pretty good, but really episodic (no long overarching story) and the last issue was way to wordy IMO. I’ve got some other manga on my to read pile but I think I’m going to get back to reading a book for now.

Adding up my weekly art hours since the start of the year is a good reality check. I see that I “reward” myself to easily with breaks and video game time. I’m trying to really focus on my goals, making them very aggressive. I’ve always had goals, but kept them very vague and not broken them down into achievable chunks. Like “Someday I shall finish this project and just make sure I work on it regularly, in whatever time I have available.” That leaves way too much room for me to wiggle in. So my typing word time has expired, now to the drawing things time.

In the back of my mind for some time now I’ve thought it would be sweet to have a stand for my Intuos drawing tablet. For the longest time I worked with it in my lap, so I could still use the keyboard for commands. Recently I’ve been moving my keyboard over a bit and sitting the tablet on my desk. This was OK but still didn’t feel quite right. So on Thursday I quickly sketched some ideas and thought about the cheapest hardware I could get to make this happen. I already had some pieces of masonite that were the perfect size, so I ended up buying a couple of door stops, thumbs screws, and safety hasps. The doorstops give support to the masonite to angle the little platform. The thumb screws act as a lip to keep the tablet on the platform. And the hasps allow me to connect/disconnect it all to my desk when using it; this way the stand doesn’t move. Over the past two days of use it’s worked rather well.

So the top part of this week’s image is of my “workstation” when my tablet stand is in place. The bottom image is a Conan the Barbarian sketch for the current CGhub drawing jam. I’m not sure if I’ll take it to a more finished state, but I’ll probably work on it a bit more during morning warm up times.

I’m continuing on in my re-watching of Robotech. As I move on in the Robotech Masters portion I’m actually digging it and wondering why this middle part I always skipped; and why TV stations always seemed to play these episodes the least. Dana Sterling becomes a bit less of a brat, or maybe she’s less in focus as other characters get a little face time. I’d still say it’s the weakest link in the series, but I’m getting a little respect for it; though it still has a massive dose of cheesiness and inconsistencies.

I’m still struggling with how I want to draw my newest comic book. Sometimes I like how things are turning out and other times it just seems to stiff or just badly drawn. At this point I figure I’ll keep on getting through pages and hopefully something will stick, or catch, or hit me in the forehead and make things clear, but for now I seem to be in one of those “everything I do sucks” phases.