Oaktown Randomness

These are some ink sketches I did yesterday at the Oakland Zoo and the Port of Oakland. I haven't drawn at the zoo in over a year!

Meet Jacqueline

I just realized that I've never posted Jack! She's the thing I draw most and she isn't even on here yet! "Jack" is short for Jacqueline... Jacqueline deVincenzi. She's the main character of the comic I used to write/illustrate, "Of Rogues and Robbers". I was forced to put the project on hiatus for my final year of college but now that I've graduated, I'm free to tackle ORAR again! Except this time, I'll be drawing it for print so I'm starting it from scratch. Over the summer, I'll be reworking the story and also developing a set look for the comic. Hopefully I can start redrawing it by the end of the summer so the first issue will be done by winter.

In case any ORAR readers are reading this now: No, the characters and basic story will not be undergoing any severe changes. I'm just focusing everything more now that I actually know what I'm doing (where both story and art are concerned). For anyone not familiar with ORAR: it's a story about some pickpockets who get in way over their heads. Jack is our main protagonist and she's basically a natural master thief. She is a crafty lass. ;) Everyone tells me Jack looks like me and I suppose that's true. Whatever. She's not me, for the last time!

I'll probably post a bunch of random Jack sketches next week or something. Maybe. I love drawing Jack's facial expressions. Hey, is her right arm too short? I drew it from a wierd angle so I think it's kinda hard to tell that it's foreshortened in a wierd way. Oh well. You know who Jack is now.

First Pastels EVER

Wow, my first post since graduation! I wish I had something more substantial to post to mark the occasion. I decided to learn how to use oil pastels over the summer. I guess it's like painting with crayons. So I tried it out in San Juan Bautista yesterday and, well, I'm learning. I've been painting since I was 12 years old and that helped me to some degree but I know I'm really going to be struggling with the media until I get past the learning curve here. Color issues aside for a moment, I'm having a lot of trouble just controlling value and learning how to mix pastels. I'll have to visit the library this week to do some reading on the basics and then I can just learn the rest on the job. If I get one or two good pieces out of this entire summer, I'll be happy. The first of the pastels was done in San Juan Baustista and the second was done in Fremont, CA. I have no idea what I'm doing.


Below: Recent sketchbook work.

The Shopkeeper's Abode

This is the entrance to the shop for my shopkeeper character I posted a few weeks ago. The shopkeeper also lives upstairs so I wanted to make the shop entrance double as a home entrance. It's a music shop /slash/ home.

I tried to find a balance between flat and volumetric... I still wanted it to have a vector-ish cutout feel but with a little more space so it's in keeping with the style of my character designs. I opted to get rid of obvious cast shadows to keep it more designy. I messed around with it a bit in Curves and these are two color variations. I think I'm leaning toward the top version. These are pretty much final versions, pending any significant feedback.

Another installment of "BART's People"

I went to San Francisco today and this is the resulting page from my sketchbook. Some cafe drawings, some traffic lights, and some people I drew on the BART train. It was 97 degrees in the city today! Whuh?!

Gold is just a trick of the light

This was done for an assignment in my illustration class. It was done using gridded photo reference. I warped the grid to emphasize his mouth. Oh yeah, this is one of my favorite artists, musician Ted Leo, formerly of Chisel and currently of Ted Leo & The Pharmacists. I used a photo I found on Flickr and this was done for personal use so... please don't kill me, photographer! I don't think this piece is quite finished... it could use some more color and finesse, I think, but for now I'm calling it done. Media: Ink and acrylic on illustration board.

Random Sketch Work

Once again, I find myself right in the middle of all projects. Why can't I stagger their start/finish times so they don't all drag for weeks and finish at once? Here are some random doodles to tie me over for another week or two.

A sketchbook drawing I did of my friend, Candace, at a figure drawing session when I should have been drawing the model. I don't know why this is, but all my drawings of Candace always come out great. I guess you're just sketch-o-genic, Candace!

This sketchbook page is, like, over a month old. Steve Hickner came to lecture at SJSU a few weeks back and I did a totally overworked drawing of him in the upper left corner of this page.

We did a quick in-class exercise this evening using grids and I actually liked how mine came out. It's really wierd and warped like the movement inside a lava lamp. I included the photo I worked from... it came from some random magazine. I don't know. I have to do a portrait using this method this weekend for my final project. The subject? I picked one of my heroes: Ted Leo.

Little Jo & The Shopkeeper

These are the final versions for 2 characters I posted earlier. The revisions on the shopkeeper were pretty minor but on Josephine, I changed the shape of her head, added some highlights on her face and hair, deepened the overall value contrast, and added a pattern to the dress. Originally, I wanted to stay away from highlights to keep her really flat and cutout-looking but in the end I wound up compromising and just putting them on her head to make her look a bit more lively. I just did turnarounds for these two and I'm about to start my 2nd pass on those. I'll post the those when they're done along with facial expressions. I've had so much fun on these characters and learned a lot (most of all from Devin Crane who gave me amazing advice on 3 rounds on these). Over the summer, I'm making a maquette of the shopkeeper, too.