Davey Jones' Locker, I Swear

Okay, these are the last "Widow Ching" Chinese pirate drawings, I swear! The project wrapped today (well, maybe), and these are my final drawings. Hope you enjoy :-). I guess you can pretty much see how the whole project, start to finish, went, with ideations for ships, to little composition and color keys, and the finals. There's always a lot of research and thumbnails involved in just one of these drawings, but John Clapp is right: it makes your stuff so much better than if you did not put all that time into researching. So enjoy these final bits of piratey goodness! --L

A Little Trickle...

I know I haven't posted anything in awhile, and you're probably pretty sick of that "Sketch of the Week," but I've been hard at work on the 30-second short film "RODEO," which doesn't afford me much time to draw aside from it. I have been working on "The Widow Ching-Pirate" for quite some time, and the final drawings are due this coming week. I'm excited about them and will post when they're finished. Also on the Widow Ching, here are some more color keys. I'm feeling much more confident with Photoshop painting now, and I can see that the more one does it, the better one gets--true of everything, of course, but I'm amazed at how quickly one acheives that greater skill. Also, a page of figure drawings, just for your viewing pleasure. Ciao!

Color Key #2

Here is another photoshop painting for the same project, "Marcovaldo." I keep having to tell myself that these are just color studies, just little color keys, and it's about color, not rendering out a gorgeous piece. I tried to do that with the first painting, and I failed...but I do like the color in that little experiment. This re-realization that these drawings are just color studies has allowed me more freedom to really just bust out with a big, soft brush, and make bolder strokes. I like this sketch much better...hopefully the next will improve as much as this did from the first. --L

A Photoshop Painting, Sortof

I'm not sure what I think of this little color study I did in Photoshop. The subject matter is from a short story called "Marcovaldo," and I chose to illustrate a moment when several working-class folks gather the mushrooms that are growing in the patch of grass by their tram stop. (They put the mushrooms in their umbrellas--cool visual possibilities.) As for the drawing itself, I don't like it, but I'll post it up here for you to critique. I think I will do this again, when I have time. I'm not sure if it's my drawing skills or my technique in Photoshop (er, both!)...I had a bit of fun doing it, though, so if nothing else it can go in the "experience" file! --L