The Book Bin #2

This installment isn’t from a book I personally own. About a year and a half ago, I checked out “Pen Drawings of Florence” by Herbert Railton from the library and was so taken with the inkwork that I scanned the entire thing at high resolution. It was published in 1890 and would’ve cost a small fortune to buy. I used to do a lot of high-detail ink renderings myself (though they weren’t nearly as well-executed as these) before I started working with washes and doing more economical drawings to record an impression.

Detail of above:

Detail of above:

Since this book was originally published almost 120 years ago and I haven’t found any recent publications of it, I’m going to assume I’m not stepping on any legal toes by sharing it. If I am, let me know and I'll remove it. For a limited time only, you can download the hi-res scans from my server so you can study the detail of the inkwork or print it out for reference or whatever. I doubt this'll burst my bandwidth limit. The file size is 144MB. If anyone knows of a place where I can put the large zip file permanently, I’d appreciate a point in the right direction. Thanks and enjoy!

"Pen Drawings of Florence" by Herbert Railton

Sketchcrawl 21

These are a couple of pages from my first Sketchcrawl last Saturday in San Francisco. I feel really good about that motorcycle. I don't think I've ever been in the company of so many artists at once. It was overwhelming in the most awesome way. I'm totally looking forward to attending future crawls!

Sketchbook Shenanigans

Above: I love this page with the exception of the lower right drawing. Keeps the page humble, I guess. Below: I was going to edit out that abandoned bit of drawing at the top but for some reason, I like what it does for the overall composition of the page. Also wanted to stay honest. It's a taco truck, by the way.
Below: This was the only drawing I liked on a page I did last month. Done late at night on BART on the way back from San Francisco.

Teashop Finale

Here's the tail-end of the teashop piece. There are still things that I want to do to it, including adding one of the characters. I'm temporarily calling this a finished piece however because I want to go on to other facets of the project and this is pretty done anyway. I haven't designed any of the characters yet so I'll revisit this piece when I've got something more to add. That way I can also get a look at it with fresh eyes and fix everything I just can't see anymore.

Unlike most of my environment pieces, this did not start off from a drawing. I did a load of thumbnails to get a feel for what I wanted but then I realized that since I already pretty much knew what I wanted the layout of the room to be, it would be easier and faster just to model it and choose a camera angle I really liked. So I did a simple model in Maya, captured the wireframe, and just painted over that:

More sketchbookery:

I actually like this page a lot despite the fact that a few of the figures have waaay tiny heads. Most of these drawings were done at Borders.