48: Noodling from the Summer

...Oops, I appear to have fallen off of the blog-o-sphere.  Apologies, followers!  I have a slew of posts queued for the next couple days; this one focuses on sketchbook fun.

Aardvarks are made of endlessly fun shapes to play with.

 Fiddling with gargoyles yet again- I quite like the face on the bottom-right, and I hope to do more with that character.

 Turtle hands.  Not much to say here!

Most of my summer seems to have been spent waiting for appointments, and these guys were a direct result of one of those waits.

More of my little alien guys who never seem to have a finished piece to their names...someday!

Silly dinosaur scribbles from the sketchbook- brush pens are excellent.

Three watercolors drawn from life at the Shoal Creek Living History Museum-  these were all created before Missouri was blessed with almost a month and a half of 100+ degree weather.  I can't wait to do more studies in this vein!

39: A few More Floating Things

My art has become the Menagerie of Floating Animals, so my next post will be filled with environments and backgrounds and all sorts of fun stuff. Hopefully. 8|

38: trail mix

Mixed media headshot commissions.

Corrected the wheel/pod anatomy on some sketches from a while back- P. Pullman's Mulefa species. Really rough background was slapped on there with no rhyme or reason, but I'm looking forward to playing around with it.

Doodles of a deity of peace, trying to figure out the head shape. (I love African masks, aahh)

...and a few more marker and pen doodles!

37: Two Side Views

All of my artistic culmination is side-views of whimsical antelope creatures. :'c

35: Summer Blues

Over a month since my last update? I'm ashamed of myself! Although...my art has been sadly lacking lately, and it's been amazingly frustrating. Here are some recent scribblings in any case.

Silly requests from my tween-aged sister and her friend. Bling giraffes. :|

Marker experiement with one of my Insuti guys.

The One Who Cannot Concentrate on Baseball Games. In all seriousness, I'm loving the various stances of the pitchers.

Something from this year's Artslam which I quite like. Artslam is a Livejournal-centric drawing challenge focusing on world and idea building, and I partake every year. Here's last year's blog post on my Artslam work! This year, I'm out of my comfort zone as I'm not focusing on my Insuti world OR animal people, and it SHOWS with some of the drivel I've drawn thus far. Hopefully I'll uh...loosen up.

I will draw Pokemon until the day I die.

29: A Smidge of Productivity

Finally, some finalized lithographs! First up is the pterodactyl plate, the acetate painting on the left and one of the prints on the right, and second is an edition I'm calling "Baumsaurs", star-crossed lovers of the Deciduous and Conifer houses.

This...this poor plate. I murdered the thing- I...ouch. But it was a great learning tool, I'll give it that.

The orignial for this piece was drawn digitally in Painter, with a few resolution issues while I made the transparency for the photo-plate. The actual printing for this edition went nigh-flawlessly, and I'm eager to make even more plates now.


In Electronic Illustration, we were assigned a very open-ended project, given only the theme "Transformation" with which to work. Clunking around various mythology sites on the internet waiting for something to click, I discovered a Slavic forest spirit called Leshy, who shapeshifts and changes size to befuddle wanderers in his woods. Forests and guys with glowing eyes? I can do this. So now I need to design the man! Above are some initial concepts out of my head, working with strictly the theme of the spirit. Tonight I'm going to do some proper research about historic Slavic people, what they looked like, and what their spirits would look like.


Also for Electronic Illustration, we made pen-and-ink drawings of landscapes based upon our own photos and colored them with Painter's transparent tools (watercolors, markers, anything on the 'gel' layer setting). Not sure I like how this turned out, but as far as landscapes go, it's something, right? The photo was taken on Mt. Pilatus in Switzerland a few years ago.

...and this is more personal nonsense from the sketchbook, but I quite enjoy how it turned out. Her name is Lli, and she kills little runners For Religion. :c

28: No Rhyme or Reason

I don't post enough anymore, do I? Here's a mishmash of (more) school project concepts and some personal doodles. I'm working on a fairly ambitious sculpture project for my illustration methods class, for which I'll make a separate process post once it's complete.

The lowdown on my printmaking situation: As much as I love looking at woodcut prints, turns out I'm kind of awful at the process. And 18 credit hours overloaded me like woah, so I bid an unfortunate goodbye to relief printmaking. Thankfully, I recently managed a solid grasp on the lithographic printing process, and just in time for mid-terms next week! I need to have another photographic transfer plate and a traditional lithograph stone drawing completed fairly soon, so here's the concepts I've been noodling around with for those:
Trees and reptiles are the thing now.

A silhouette of this guy was another option, but it still seems strange to make numbered editions of a personal character no one cares about.







And on an ending note, here's an experiment from illustration methods; a traditional and digital collage. The end product is a bit...garish, and is another example of a project I wish I'd had more time with, but the process was very rewarding. I definitely need to try something of the sort with more personal projects.

26: Products of Break

Howdy from the last few days of break! Only in the past week have I seemed to regain any artistic mojo, and just in time for the new semester. My goals for break were to work on human faces and scenery. I only worked on one of those. Can you guess which? :|

Poldi the vagrant, one of my guys. I looked at far too many animation concept art books over break and got all inspired to do some character sketches.
Finished up that Lapras from a while back. Pretty fond of how this turned out. Oughta' try this technique with some fully composed scenes.

A tree kangaroo for a friend's conservation website. Painter 11's pencil tools are just GODLY.

Didn't work on my Swidden story as much as I would've liked to over break...but there's this, at least! In short, Swidden is an angel who is given creative freedom to conjure anything into existence...save for other angels. In frustration, he creates humans and birds, two parts of a whole, and his father is quite angered by this. All of the busts above are ideas for Swidden himself as both an angelic and human being.

Face scribbles from the sketchbook.

Drawing video game fanart to get better at faces. Stay classy, Katie.

And lastly some silly sharpie scribbles of my Runner people.

21: Scribbledump

Had to toss something up here before disappearing for turkey break! Here's scribbles and blather from the past few weeks. They're in no particular order, but the derpier the hands are, the more recent the scribble probably is. School's sapping my brains, you see.

Dynamic dinoguys! The most fun thing to draw.

From those long bus rides to friends' apartments...

Gonna turn this into a watercolor painting for an online buddy. c:



These two pages are compilations from my planner. I really need to get into drawing my Insuti guys more often; I miss them.

19: Get on ze Point

A bout of gaming has limited my personal art time even further! -snigger- However, I am working on a short story of sorts, which I may attempt to turn into a graphic novel script at some point. To make it look like I'm not dead, here's some of the stuff floating around my computer.

A trade with a friend. There were a lot of firsts for me in this picture. Like buildings. And actual perspective. Corel Painter 10.

This has been sitting around since summer. I may just make the thing into a traditional piece, as I can never make time for digital anymore.

A grody little digital scribble. I STILL DRAW WOLVES SOMETIMES.

An example of how digital art is a constant whirl of 'I don't know what the hell I'm doing'. :[