New Painting & Comparison

So I found a good digital painting tutorial on the web and I decided to test it out.
I had to practice anyway and I came up with this.



Compare it with something I did of the same character 5 months ago.



and hopefully I will only continue to improve!

New Character

2 more characters to add to my increasing list. They're mercenaries.


I'm thinking of painting these on Photoshop. I found a tutorial and I'm eager to try it out.

New Sketches

Two sketches of my characters out of boredom.
Who says you can't draw and shade with a mechanical pencil?

How I Learned to Draw

I started to draw when I was about 4 years old. I mostly drew things that I'd watch on T.V., The Simpsons was a big inspiration for me. I remember one of the first things that I drew consistently was a circle dog. Which basically is a dog composed of circles, loops, and lines.

I then began to branch out and started to draw my own versions of various Sesame Street characters. Many people say that practice makes perfect and I suppose that after doing this for so many years they are correct in a sense, but I'm far from perfect.

New Pen Drawings

Here are the two main characters of the series featured in my animation. The drawings were done yesterday with a ball point pen.

I would say that ballpoints are my preferred medium. They're cheap and they can make fairly fine lines. I like the pen I used because it was a little runny so that it sometimes left ink blots. Sometimes, the little imperfections can add an effect that greatly benefits the mood of a piece.

Western Comics

I'm aware that a large share of Japanese manga lovers have some sort of beef with American comics and would never pick one up. But I would say that they are missing out.

I'm not a huge fan of the classic costumed superhero, and pretty much the only franchise I like is X-Men, but there are other things out there beside Batman, Superman, the Fantastic Four, and all the other big-name series.

I recently went to a local comic book store with my friend (It was my first time going into such an establishment)and discovered limited series. For people who don't want to catch up on an on-going story line that have say spanned two decades, limited series are for you. They're like any other comic book except they have a set number of installments, so you know how much you're buying or will buy. I picked up one limited series (5 issues in total) called Immortal Weapons from Marvel. It's a separate story for each issue, (save for an ending bit where it's a totally separate story that's stretched between all five issues) and each contains contributions from multiple artists. I initially bought them as reference art, but when I began to look at them though I thought to myself, these stories are actually pretty good. Needless to say I was happy with my purchase.

So I suppose this post has turned into a defense of American comics from the crazy rabid Japanophiles who care for nothing except manga and possibly a few Korean manwha. If you can't find any western comic that you like then perhaps you are not looking hard enough. I would say that their is some variety to choose from, the store I went to had Archie, Halo, Stephen King adaptations, and freakin' X-Babies; and there's always some abstruse little book out there that won't follow the comic format as strictly (Shaun Tan's The Arrival for instance). Western comics can be just as varied in plot, art, length, and format as Japanese comics; it's just probably harder to dig through the big-names to find the obscure gem.

Other Old Things

Oh yeah, I do watercolors too.


This one is my interpretation of dawn and dusk. I suppose I was inspired by Alphonse Mucha for this.


This is another of my characters from another one of my story ideas. She's a part of a tribe of indigenous peoples who lives in a canyon. Their particular tribe suspends their dead from the lofty ridges; that's why you can see coffins in the distance. This practice was inspired by something I saw on the Discovery channel about a group of ancient people who left the deceased on ledges in China.

I like how anything that piques my interest can end up in one of my stories or even inspire a new one sometimes.

Little Red Riding Hood

Here's a pic I did last year that was inspired by one of my friends. She had a class that discussed the origins of fairy tales and other children's stories. One day she told me about the different interpretations various cultures had of the Red Riding Hood story. Supposedly the wolf represented the bad men who would prey upon little girls according to one story (from France I think it was).

I like how there are multiple versions of stories we hear all the time. I suppose what version we hear depends on our environment and the people we are around.