The rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrreee's Jerry!

Sorry for the lack of updates. Been busy, stressed, and working on things that cannot be shown online. Whoops!


Yuki DeKay, a sort of wolfish raccoon thing, for this month's anthrosketchxchnge. She's loud, obnoxious, likes steampunk, and carries a big bloodied bat. What's not to like?


Last sketchbook page for my current sketchbook. Lillian and J5 kinda being...fabulous. Iffin you know what I mean. ;) Why do I torture myself trying to draw J5? I don't knooooooooow. 'Cause drawing complex mechanics is out of my comfort zone and drawing dumb fanart is the only way you can really convince me to do it?


More Dakotaness. Intended to be part of a new LiveJournal userinfo page. INVISIBLE LILLIAN.

Okee mostly the rest of the sketches were done while in St. Louis with my friend Tsunami-Ryuu.

Tsu and I went to the STL Science Center, and they had an exhibit on animatronic movie critters. (ONLY critters, no robits. :( ) We spent the time oohing and awwing and wondering why people would rather do CGI nowadays. Animatronics are SO much cooler. Anyway, they had a werewolf from a movie that apparently died in production, and we got to talking about what would make a good movie werewolf, because while we didn't like the "noble werewolf" furries did, we didn't really like old movie werewolves that looked like bears, or, honestly, really hairy guys. So when heading back to her apartment and I was hanging in her car while she ran an errand, I tried to do my own werewolf. Still very close to a "noble werewolf", but darnit, I like werewolves that look like, well, WOLVES, but I tried to add a more human-like cranium and such.

Don't ask about the pose. Uh...when I draw a werewolf type critter I never know what to do with their "hands". :|





I spent a lot of time at the STL Zoo. Two afternoons, actually. These are obviously ballpoint pen drawings of their birds. Nothing too great, birds are notoriously hard to life draw, but I'll show them anyway. I liked the vulture. He was the only guy who just SAT there for me. Except his head. His head was a typical bird head goin' all around.

(Oh yeah and at the very top those were some cheetahs that were too far away for me to make any real good drawings of.)




Trying to learn what a real wolf looks like. Tsu had a nice coffee table book on wolves so I took it as an opportunity to do some reference sketches. YES THEY ARE PHOTO REFERENCED. And the bottom page of drawings still sucks despite being photo referenced. (Althuogh I like the bottommost study of the wolf face. Trying to learn how the fur lays.) Oh yeah, and there is a coyote in there, GUESS WHICH ONE IT IS.

Lastly:

SHADY! I love that robo-kitty-wolf. Did these back home. She's doin' some Three Stooges stuff 'cause NQN said she learns stuff from watching TV and it reminded me of...another robot. ;)

GAH! That was a pretty huge update. My bad for not updating so often. Enjoy anyway!

'Nother Huge Update

I'm not very good at remembering to update this thing. Maybe because I'm lazy about scanning sketches...and maybe because life is crazy...hrm. :\

Anywho, on to the show:

Hey! It's the originator of the blog's name! I had some fine-liner pens, and for some reason I wanted to see if I could do something uber-detailed and wanted to draw robots...so I ended up doing this. It took daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaays. And between you and me...I'm not really happy with it. I Photoshopped out a lot of errors for the web version.

I don't want to explain Bubble Philosophy again. I explained it dozens of times now. So instead, I'll just substitute that with imagining J5 saying: "Why is a soap bubble round?" Oh, K-PAX.


Quickie All Dogs fanart comic thing. One of my silly daydreams, obviously, now poor Charlie can't wind a digital clock. As for the fashion statement line, it's a reference to how he wears either the pocket watch or the collar during both movies so much he looks weird without something around his neck. That, and he wore the pocket watch so darn well!


This was originally just an ink drawing that I did to send to Pan along with more art and other various things (she's seen it already, I couldn't wait for her to see it) but today I didn't want to do the art I was supposed to and coloured this instead. Naughty.


Kinjahz for AiRGuiTaR, for last month's anthrosketchxchnge. I decided it was time for something completely different. And failed. Oh well.


A point of interest for our followers of my webcomic, AntiSocial Commentary. Development of my Aussie roboticist character, Dr. David Macaulky. He looks so weird without the 'stach, even though it kind of makes him look Scottish or something. Weird. He looks much better in the comic, trust me.


Giftart of Vinci from Vinci and Arty. Bottom one is slightly derivative of one of her own drawings, but only not because I drew these during an electrical outage. I just had that picture in mind. In my pictures Vinci tends to look older than Candy makes him look. o.O


Also done during the electrical shortage, Techno the robocoon. She may just be no more as a character, though, which makes me sad. I like her.


May's anthrosketchxchnge drawing, which was a sketch-only round this month, hence the plain pencils. This adorable little fox is called Oha, and she loves the rain. So do I! Let's splash in rain puddles!

Yeah, those are "Come and Follow Me" lyrics in there. :P Bite me.

[Strong Bad]IT'S OVER!!![/Strong Bad]

Updating for the heck of it

Um...I've been putting off updating because I haven't felt like I've had anything really good to show...then an entire month went by. Um. Oops. So I'll show you what I do have. It's um...um...
arty?

I did a guest strip for the wonderful comic Count Your Sheep which can be viewed here. (No, not my best drawing or inking ever.) I really love that strip, I really do, and I ended up doodling Lillian and Ship having a little run-in in which Lillian can't resist quoting her favourite fellow living robot. And Ship isn't pleased. As to why Lillian can see Ship...uh...she's alive by mage-magic and CYS has hinted Ship's existence has to do with something fantastic (just what, we don't know) and Lillian should be able to see other magically created beings. Or something. Yeah, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.


Commissioned sketch for Kixota and her sweetheart, who have really awesome designs and were really fun to draw. Not much else more to say about it than I miss having the physical sketch already.


You can't keep a good geek down
No, you can't keep a good geek down
I've been bullied around
Shoved to the ground
I tried a life of coolness
But preferred my Trekkie friends

Art for a possible icon of me and Pan, 'cause Pan has Lillian+Pan=BFF icons and I don't. :( I don't know how well this will translate to 100 x 100, but I'll have a cute picture, anyway, if it doesn't finish.

Speaking of ADGTH...

Guess what character I like.


I mean, really, really like.
These are all really loose and not all that good, but they have character and I think they have a charm to them. Since they're not directly referenced (in fact, the second page was drawn while waiting in a McDonald's in Wal-Mart!) they're a bizarre love child of Bluth and my style, and to be honest I rather wish I can get it perfect, but I suppose I should be happy I'm keeping my style and am keeping Charlie more on-model than the people who did ADGTH2 did. (When buying my ADGTH2 cel, I was VERY picky. I got the one I felt captured the original style most, but I still miss those "moles" on his cheeks and the wrinkles on his nose.)


And my own German Shepherd, Josh, who thankfully can not be mistaken for a Charlie clone. (Although Jerry, my coyote, if drawn in the right style, can, hee.) I think people misinterpret Josh in ASC a lot. He really is a good guy, and even kind of simple. He was thrust into his "landlord" role by his parents who are kind of pushing him into a career of business that he never really showed interest in. Not that he showed interest in any career, he was one of those well-to-do kids who just did whatever mommy and daddy told him was good for him. Who knows what he would've done if he was allowed to pursue whatever interests he wanted to. For some reason I imagine him being the school's quarterback.

Also, I'd like to note that my comic is probably the comic with the most characters that are not a perfect body shape. Ron is dumpy, Josh has a paunch, Dr. David Macaulky, who we'll see soon, is a rather tubby Australian roboticist, Lillian is as Dakota made her (and THAT is rather round) and Syd, who is at a healthy weight, still has quite the figure. Mainly because I like my females to have HIPS, darnit!

Okay that was a weird ramble, but it's been on my mind.

That's all for now. Remember folks: Be excellent to each other.

Another Overdue Update

I got a handful of pictures here, so let's get down to the brass tracks, eh?

My picture for Thrivis for this month's anthrosketchxchnge. Another one? Yep. I'm fond of this one, myself. Much less busy and such. And the colours are nice. I'm reading for spring, yus.


My finished Flash-only commission for C Eagle. Sweet and simple also. And also full of purplish-blue. Huzzah.


Ickle baaaaaaaaaaaby Dakota. Awwwwww. I started this last year, but never finished until now, for some reason only known to ancient astronauts, because I love this drawing very much.


I dunno if my bestester friend Ly watches my art blog, but the majority of these drawings are of him/for him. More stealing Bluth style, but this time because All Dogs Go To Heaven is his favourite movie, and when we used to talk, every time I'd mention pizza he'd yell "UNCLE CHARLIE, PIZZA!" He's been wanting some sort of icon for a while, but couldn't think of what, and I ended up deciding a pizza icon would rock. I also did some other doodles of him in Bluth style (the sadfaced one sucks) and an actual Charlie snuck in at the bottom. I actually really like that little doodle.

Remember last entry I said I tried to do a full-body picture of Oly RRR's Shamy, and failed? Well I tried again, and was fairly successful this time! Yay.


After finishing the ickle hatchling Dakota, I wanted something to draw the rest of the night, and I had the thought, "What if Dakota was a lanky teen before he filled out into the big fluffy gryphon he was today?" And so I started this drawing. The only major difference I see in this is that he really needs to grow into his crest and he doesn't have the rather robust neck and chest that he has as an adult, but I had second thoughts about the "lanky" thing when I considered the build of cougars (Dakota's feline half.) I figure his wings would also have to be a bit bigger, or at least the primaries, as sort of "trainer's feathers" like in real raptors. (Why does Firefox spellcheck tell me "raptors" isn't a word?)

I like drawing feathers.

WOOO. Long post. Until we meet again, wave your freak flag high!

Overdue Update

Eeek! Sorry I didn't update last week! I kinda was hoping I'd do a lot more pictures last week and I ended up kinda putting off posting until I thought I had a nice "batch" of pictures to post. Eh. Well, I only have three to show for the two weeks I haven't posted, but I also did a lot of comics at AntiSocial Commentary as well.

On to the doodles!

I love this one! I did this for the anthrosketchxchnge on ElJays, and we had to include a frog this month for a conservation project. I got a tiger chimera character that enjoyed exploring the woods and creeks...and then this Calvin and Hobbes-ish idea popped into my head. :D I didn't get the style perfect, I got carried away with the background (my brushpen died soon after I did this) and didn't leave as much white as Watterson would've, but I guess it's good I let some of my own artistic tendencies shine through. :) Oh, and since so many people got confused, the colours are digital media (Photoshop.) I used a paper texture on on top of the colours to make it look organic. :)


Ratties! Mostly for Olly R, but I actually do have quite a love for rodents, especially mice and rats. Blame it on a childhood spent reading books like Poppy, The Witches, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, etc. The top sketches were done based off of photos to get a feel for a REAL rat's facial shape, and I realized in the process that the people who designed Remy in Ratatouille weren't veering too far off into stylization when you're considering he's a blue rat. :D (I love that movie, too.) Down at the bottom are doodles of Olly's character Shamy, also just to get a feel for him. I tried a full-body yesterday and kinda failed. :(

Vinci and Arty fanart done during this Sunday's "Ask Arty" show for the artjam. So I did this probably in like, a half hour or so, shading and all, so don't crit too hard. Anyway, a piece of pretty acoustic guitar music was played and we had to draw what came up in our heads. There were no words, and so my mind defaulted to what I usually think of when I think of pretty acoustic guitar music: nature, forests, fall, and lurve. I didn't have to draw Vinci and Arty, but I drew them because at the time I was taking a break from drawing a bunch of my own comics and as I said at the Cakepieces community: "I'm sick of drawing my own stinkburgers."

Lotsa treeeeees in this update. Okay, two pictures with trees. Bite me. :b

I shall return!

Fanart. Why is it always fanart?

Well okay only some of this page is fanart, but bleeeeeeeeeeeh, shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

But I'm having so much fun trying to draw Charlie on-model without refrences!

Basically I said tonight "I don't want to draw a comic, I have new comics showing up on TWO websites today, (besides a comic on AntiSocial Commentary my guest strip for Skin Deep went up! Checkitoutcheckitoutcheckitoutcheckitout!) So I goofed off on a page of my sketchbook. Lacey, my dog, really does NOT like me drawing her. At ALL. Every time she saw my eyes on her she got up from lying down. The drawing I got was while she was sitting in front of the couch I was lazing around on and she was watchin' my mom eat peanuts, hopin' for scraps. The drawing of my lovebird, Gypsy barely counts as lifeart because he stayed in that pose for a couple seconds and then I filled in the rest with what I already knew. :b

Then we have some Charlies from All Dogs Go To Heaven because I love rouge conmen (dogs) (I totally crushed on Han Solo as a kid) and then I remembered I wanted to draw some Ethiopian wolves for Oly RRR so I doodled Epik for her. In Bluth style. It's okay, she likes that style. But I dunno if it still looks like Epik. I tried to make him look insane, honest!

Maybe I'll come back with some interesting drawings.

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!

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!

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!

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
Say 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!