Thursday, January 31, 2008

More blue kitties

Not drawing that much. I did manage to get a quick little colour picture done, tho.

I love Don Bluth's style. So. Much. I watched All Dogs Go To Heaven last night and I wanted to fiddle around with the style again. I love fiddling around with styles. Pan, once again, became my victim.

Anatomy is really kinda weird, but I like his faaace.

And tonight, it ended up with me drawing this, which was an idea I had for a week or so now. Pan and the Lillian:

Pan is kinda a combo of some of the lifeart based drawings I did and the top drawing. I don't think people realize Lillian's size. She's pretty much 20 inches tall, 10 inches for the head, the body is ten inches high and 20 inches long. Her proportions are pretty intuitive. Since Pan herself (the person is actually a she) said Pan is about two feet tall at the shoulder, Lillian would fall only four inches short of his shoulder. I tried to get the proportions right, but right now I'm wondering if Lillian looks huge. 8|

Inked by Sakura brushpen and my favourite brand of liquid gel ink pen. Same stuff I do my comics with. Still trying to figure out how to get the style to look the way I want it.

That's all for now! Hopefully more later!

Monday, January 28, 2008

They may be right, I may be crazy, but it just may be a lunatic you're looking for

Sorry for the lack of updates, I haven't forgotten about this thing! You'll have to understand that when I don't update this thing, I am still drawing- I have comics to draw and commissioners to please! A lot of them, in fact. o.O

Anyway, a lot of these are going to be commission concepts and sketches, I hope the respective commissioners don't mind.

But first:

Done for Cat B. in LiveJournal's anthrosketchxchnge or however they managed to shorten it. I meant to post it in the kitteh post but I forgot to. Thomas Santclair is a very well-to-do tabby, and while generally good natured, is known to act very much as his social status often dictates. Poor frog.

Done with my older type of brushpen, trying to achieve a certain "sketchy brush" look, and failed. I used Kory Bingaham's tutorial on colouring for this, too.


Flea, the only other sapient robot portrayed in my pet project "Legacy", who is going through a rather awkward re-design. These were done actually back when I was doing my NaNoWriMo novel with him, in fact...I think I did these before the final write-in meeting for my city. (I won, by the way- at least in the fact that I finished 50,000 words. I have not, on the other hand, finish the actual story yet.)

I haven't planned to show these at all, hence why they're a couple months old. But I figure I should show them to demonstrate how hard it is for me to redesign my mechanical characters, especially the old ones I'm attached to. It's hard for me to redesign this guy because he's kinda the robot character that started my whole series of different stories: first he was the forerunner of the characters, long before Lillian came along; after all this was back when I was in third grade. Once I started "Anxiety Cafe", my first webcomic and therefore the "Legacy" storyline he was kind of forgotten and his design stagnated in the poorly-designed for it was. I still don't like what I have, it just doesn't have that sharpness that I associate with my Brooklyn-accented robot, but oh well.



I'm uploading these mostly to show one of my commissioners. Not my usual style, but oh well. These were original concept sketches I did back on Christmas for his character Gargamel, when I didn't know I should've been doing another character. Now I'm being assigned to draw him with the rest of his family, and I'm uploading these to see if I'm getting the right idea with this guy, although now I've learned that he prefers more "exaggerated muscular style" and they need eyes more like humans in that they have irises and are not a solid colour like I usually give gryphs. Anyway, I feel kinda weird drawing this style, but oh well. Pays for schtuff.


Most everyone's seen this, but I just wanted to post it. Get it? POST IT? HAHAHAHAHAH. Ahem. Yeah. Julian P. Wilbury telling it like it is. (Don't know what The Traveling Wilburys are? Your poor thing, you're missing out on one of the best supergroups formed. Wiki them.)


WIP sketch of C Eagle's Flash commission. I mainly just need to get some refrence pictures of record players, and figure out how I want to draw an anthro cartoon eagle sitting. :\ Anthro birds are hard. :\

And again, we must part for the time being. Now, if you folks have a LiveJournal, I figured out how to make an RSS feed. Check it out: Aesthetic Input's LJ Syndicate.

Toodles!

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Heeeeeeeeere, kitty kitty kitty!

Making doodles for this thing is an excellent way to put off drawing my comic. In all honesty, I'm finding it more fun to draw things that may stretch the boundaries of my "style" than just things like my comic where I have a certain formula that makes things all quick-like to draw. After months of drawing it, it's gotten boring. :(

Anyway, I'm going back in time a little bit with the first one:


Proper cat was originally supposed to be a Threadless candidate, but the idea of a LOLCat parody didn't seem to fly. They seemed to want to get rid of the whole LOLCat refrence...which kinda just makes it a vector drawing of a cat with a tophat and monocle and where does that leave us? Confusion, that's what. But I like the design of the cat and the experiment with "offcenter" colours. Rather fun, must do it again.


"I'm like a baby and he's like a cat, when we are happy we both get fat!"
Been talking to my good friend Pan waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too late at night the past coupla nights and decided to make doodles of her spacekitty avatar. I referenced real cats for the most part but then added my own silly little cartoony bits to them.

One line Chuck Jones said about cats always stuck with me: they "sit fat and walk thin." And their limbs have an amazing ability to disappear underneath their bodies while lying down.


Late night conversations on dreams about our characters can lead to silly things. Joke shamelessly stolen from Short Circuit, but that's okay, Lillian plays the "really naive and good natured but sometimes simple robot" part well. (After this I got to wondering: Where does all her intelligence go when I write my comic and things like that? It's just more fun to write her as a little simple.)


I know Lyosha's having a tough time right now, and probably won't see this for a while, but I've been wanting to draw her Tibrus for a while now. He's such a dirty old man dragon, I love him. If somebody didn't do it already I would draw him in a fez, it fits him so well. But here's one of those "Whatchyoo talkin' 'bout, foo?" faces I love so much.


Skin Deep is an awesome fantasy comic that I've recently discovered and soon after the end of the current chapter they're doing a guest week. I just found out today and well, I already doodled this. We have Jim, the wonderfully British maned gryphon, Merial the nixie (mermaid-ish creature, except with more bite- lookit her teeth!) and Michelle, who just found out she was really a sphinx with all sorts of nasty critters after her so she's really confused and rivals the Skywalker family in whining sometimes. THAT'S OUR HERO, FOLKS.

I'll hopefully have this inked and coloured up with readable computer-typed words in time for guest week. :D Again, I'm neglecting my own comic.

That's what I have for now, folks!

Monday, January 21, 2008

Intoductory post

Hello! Happy to see you! I, SA Ferrell, have penned a few doodles for your amusement. It's about the star of today's movie-

Okay enough with the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 references.

I re-hauled this old blog of mine that used to be for serious essays and junk and decided to make a generic sketchblog. Why? Everybody else was doing it, I just wanted to be popular!

Actually, I'm just growing more and more fond of the look of sketchblogs as opposed to sketchposts on my LiveJournal.

Anyway, here's some sketches. Some are going to overlap what folks have seen on ElJays- sorry 'bout that.


These are two pages of sketches commissioned the lovely C Eagle. It's been a while since I've done sketch pages like this, hence everything got a bit crowded- I'm used to drawing everything all big and such. That and I tend to draw bigger when I'm figuring out how to draw a character, and balancing C Eagle's characteristic features and my style was hard.

Scans aren't the best, they're stitched together. :b

This one is actually comparatively old- FROM LAST YEAR OH NOES! It started out as a Dakota doodle but then his crest got even more wild than Dakota's crest is supposed to be. I kind of like this style of crest feathers, but it's definitely not for my personal gryphs! I named him the "Road Warrior" gryph because it looks like a mohawk. "Look! Gryphonic porcupines!" (Yes, that's a obscure reference, for those of you who don't normally talk to me, you're going to have to get used to those in my posts and edcuate yourself in the finer points of pop culture references. Especially ones that were featured in Mystery Science Theatre 3000 or relate to my favourite movies.)


Blue canary in the outlet by the light switch
Who watches over you
Make a little birdhouse in your soul
Not to put too fine a point on it
S
ay I'm the only bee in your bonnet
Make a little birdhouse in your soul

I have a secret to tell
From my electrical well
It's a simple message and I'm leaving out the whistles and bells
So the room must listen to me
Filibuster vigilantly

My name is blue canary one note* spelled l-i-t-e


My story's infinite

Like the Longines Symphonette
it doesn't rest


Blue canary in the outlet by the light switch
Who watches over you
Make a little birdhouse in your soul

Even if Lillian didn't kill Jason and all those countless screaming Argonauts, the song fits her so well. OpenCanvas doodleage.


Ew. It's me. Trying to get myself to draw humans more, along with getting my caricactures of myself more accurate. Tonight when I did these I was basically just sitting on the couch holding a mirror in front of me while watching TV. XD I notice that I keep on drawing either my nose, my lips, or both too big. Huh. I like the one with the shaded hair best out of the "direct drawing from the mirror" pictures, and I like the bottom one of me going "D:" out of the cartoony ones. The one on the bottom right just looks kind of duuuuumb.


Tonight when I was drawing the portrait doodles my dad found that the HD forgien and and independent film channel was playing this film that documented the lives of two mated kestrels (European kestrels, nowhere in the movie or the credits does it say where it is filmed, in fact, as far as I know, there is no human speech that is truly audible in the movie) that lived in a church steeple who raised a brood of five chicks. AWWWWW. Unfortunately, even if it's just on TV, birds move around too much to make good drawing subjects (I've tried to life-draw a red-tailed hawk once! HARD!) Honestly these don't look up to par with my usual birdie stuff, or maybe I'm using symbols too much on these, or SOMETHING. But I do like the lone life drawing of my dog, Lacey sleeping with her face smushed on the carpet. It was ADORABLE. Unfortunatly she got up almost right after I got what I have on the page. You can faintly see a second attempt of her sleeping in the opposite direction, but she got up after that, too. "NO DRAWING ME WHILE 'AM SLEEPIN'!"

That's what I got folks! Enjoy, Intertubes space cruisers!