After returning from an amazing trip to Europe through Paris and London, I'm pretty pumped about creating some new art! I thought I'd start by posting some miscellaneous stuff I've had in my sketchbook from the last couple weeks.

First up is one using a design I've had for a while now. I wanted to try pushing some new shapes, not worrying too much about keeping things rooted in reality, and just having fun. I tend to want to draw things as I see them, but still want to have fantastic elements in them. So I end up with really boring trees etc., while I have these monsters and creatures standing there. This time, I tried to push that fantastic into the buildings, trees, leaves, everything. I'll be exploring this more in the future. I'll almost certainly add colour to this later.

The second one is a few odds and ends, all loosely base on the idea of "Vampires & Motorcycle Gangs". No real thought put into this before hand, just sort of stream of consciousness drawing. I do this a lot more than I show here on the site, but I've always just had this mentality that I needed to finish something to the end, colours and all in order to make it worth posting. I'm going to try and loosen up on this and post more "warts and all" pictures.

Finally, this last piece was an ink drawing I sort of free-handed from the view of our hotel in Paris. It's meant to be very loose; I was more concerned with getting the idea down and being comfortable with the medium (in this case brush pen), rather than creating a pitch perfect drawing. It is certainly not without its flaws, but all in all I like it. I may add some colour to this later.

Labels: gang, motorcycle, Paris, sketches, vampires, village

Part of the challenge of working on comics and art part time is coming up with a workflow that's relatively fast. Given less time (and energy) in the evening, going about things in the traditional roughs/pencils/inks/colors means can be daunting. What I've been trying to do is find ways to cut a few corners without compromising the visions I see in my mind.

These two sketches were done using mechanical pencil, and a few quick Photoshop tricks to simulate an ink pen. I'm going to try to color these soon and see what the end results are. Enjoy!

Labels: pencils, robot, sketches, teddy bear