Posts tagged with keywords "pencil"
When I uploaded the photos from my five-year-old daughter’s digital camera, I found some shots that managed to capture unexpected looks and expressions on people. I was so taken by at least one I decided to work up an image.
I was also partly inspired by the character “Meave” that I created in my mind for this little piece of fiction for my Lost Heroes RPG project. Here’s the relevant two paragraphs:
The young emo-goth Meave sits by herself in the school cafeteria. She numbly rubs at the healed scars on her wrists. The other kids just ignore her today. This is a good day for her. …
Meave will see her father, the god Dagda, in the distance watching her. She will run from him, run as hard as a princess of worlds that don’t exist can run. And the crows will screech through the sky after her.
During the process I ended up branching and producing a second more creepy character (which I’ve been referring to as “deadeyes”). Anyway, here are the two completed images:
(Which one works best do you think?)
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I spent 60 euros on refilling my art stuff and I was itching to do some drawing. This was the result. Enjoy:
I also had the title “An Adventures in Graphic design and Typography!” in my mind when I started putting together this post, but I think that might be a bit melodramatic. If you’re following me on twitter, you’d have seen this image before, but for those that don’t, what do you think? Does it look like an RPG you’d play?
Lost Heroes RPG: Front and Back Covers
Don’t mind the text on the back cover. It’s just a space filler for when I really write something.
I took a short break from working on Lost Heroes RPG and end up working on Lost Heroes RPG! Swinging from writing to graphics and layout. I just started playing around with ideas on paper for the front cover of Lost Heroes as a book and ended up taking it to the end.
I don’t think my efforts are professional, but they look good, good enough to fool you from a distance! 
I’m working with my “limits” here, using what I can do well, to produce something that looks good. The above image was generated using Inkscape, Gimp and original artwork by myself. The little icons I’ve been working on all along (just check out the “drawings” tag to see more about them).
I have to say, I’m loving Inkscape as a tool more and more. I can easily move around and edit elements of the above image. And the images are all scalar vector graphics scalable vector graphics so I can print them out at any resolution and they look good. I’m not sure how they’ll fit into a Desktop Publishing Tool when I finally start to think about layout of the PDFs later for Lost Heroes.
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Inital Concept (pencil)
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Fleshing it out (pencil)
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Fleshing it out #2 (pencil and ink)
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Final Ink of Figure
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Working with the Figure on Computer
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Lost Heroes RPG: Front and Back Covers
Here you can see the process in a little more detail. I used pencil, ink and charcoal while playing around with it. My original idea was the abstract “angel” with the floating symbols and a rope tided around his legs pulling him back down to a graphic-inspired city scape. I imagined the logo for Lost Heroes sort of exploding from the top of the image.
I’m not particularly happy with the Lost Heroes logo. It works but its static and a little boring. Doing a little search on “typography” found me getting quite inspired, realising that the text is as much part of the picture composition as anything else. Playing around with it, I wasn’t getting convincing or pleasing results though. I ended up just laying it out and modifying the other elements to work with it.
It seems so much easier to blog about my drawings than anything else, it’s certainly not for lack of topics to write about. Probably because I have something tangible to show and talk about. So I picked up my pencils and started doing some work on Sunday. I started drawing this female Satyr, based on a signature character from Lost Heroes RPG. This is my second attempt, but it’s not perfect. The character I imagined is older and more womanly, but I like it and planned to colour it using the technique I was practising in my last post. My wife described it as a “Britney Satyr”! However, as I was taking my pencil sketch and colouring it using markers, my light box gave out all I’ve got right now is the ink image, which loses a lot of the detail.
Female Satyr (in ink)
Once the lightbox broke, I then reverted it to pencil and started attacking a subject I’d like to take on. It’s the story of Freyja and the Brisingman necklace. Because I’m knee deep in Norse mythology at the moment writing for Lost Heroes, I’m thinking a lot about the Norse gods and Freyja, Goddess of love and to a much greater extent than the Greek Goddess of Love Aphrodite, she is also the Goddess of lust. I’m going to try it in watercolours, just because I have the itching to do so.
(The picture contains nudity… so follow the more link to see it) Read More…
If only it was true. My nephew introduced me to his cousins by announcing I could draw anything. I wish. However I did, over the Christmas period, drew for him Spiderman, the Hulk and Batman that he could colour in. Certainly nothing exceptional, but fun to do.
I’ve also taken to doing lots of really quick sketchs these days. I carry a sketch book, a pencil, pen and eraser in my bag now. Sadly I don’t really get the chance to sketch everything I’d like to sketch, its simply not possible with small kids. You can’t tell them to sit and wait for five minutes while I do some scribbles on a pad. So in some cases I’ve taken to snapping a picture on my phone and then when I have a quiet moment, sketching from the image on the screen. Not particularly great, but the best I can do.
So I gathered up some of my best sketchs:
I find it’s fun and liberating trying to rush the sketch and just get something down on paper and at the same time trying to find the right details to capture what made you pick up the pencil. Something like the way to beat procrastinating about writing: just write something, anything, as quickly as possible. I’m finding more and more that I’m not just sketching the object, but whats around, beside and behind it.
I particularly like drawing the buildings in Paris. You just keep adding details and the picture gets more and more elaborate, the longer you’re at it.
The great thing about sketch books is that they are not just practice, not just reference, but also inspiration to yourself. In fact I’ve ditched my electronic PDA as my note taker and reverted back to an ordinary notebook and pen for those reasons. I can do little sketches, draw lines and arrows beside my text and the notes themselves become inspirations for my writing. And now that I’ve finally got my desktop back at home, I can finally get back to doing some serious writing again.
Unfortunantly I haven’t been able to write much these few weeks. The main reason is our desktop PC at home is waiting to be repaired and my laptop has become the only computer left in our house – so to keep myself and my wife sane, we’re sharing it in the evening. This forced me off the sofa and digging into my art stuff again.
(Hopefully this post comes out alright on LJ, I can never be quite certain how my WordPress posts translate to LiveJournal style anymore)
Demon Icon
This picture is one that I did a while ago. I find creating and designing these little graphical symbols quite engrossing. My little sketchpad is full of the previous design iterations for theses. I should really scan in some to show of the thought processes. This one is mean to represent the “Demonic Legions of Hell” for my Lost Heroes RPG project. I know it doesn’t have any traditional iconography of demons, but that is in part intentionally as the design is more subtle that way.
Olympians Icon #3 (Colour)
Olympians Icon #2 (Black Background)
Olympians Icon
The second image I’ve only barely finished. This again was intended to be part of my Lost Heroes RPG project. It’s meant to represent the Olympian and associated Gods. I did quite a variety of designs, finally settling this one. But I’m still not completely happy with it. In fact I did two further varianets of it, which you can see below. The first one I wanted to highlight the rose more so I used solid black for the background and tried to add texture with some hatching lines. The second one, I used colour to highlight the rose, a big departure from the previous icons I’ve done. I’d rather keep to the black and white motif (easier to print) but the colour would does look quite nice. Perhaps I should play around with using greys as well as black?
(More new art and a poll after the “link”)
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(Hopefully I’ve manage to lick that thumbnail cropping issue). Anyway, I did some more drawings over the weekend. I re-did the design of one of the ones I did for this post, so that it’s not so phallic:
I also did some new ones, continuing to base them on my “secret” project L___ H_____:
I also pulled out my charcoal and pencil again, concentrating on contrast, making sure my pencil lines are right (kind of taking my tips from my ink work). I like what I produced, though I feel should have placed it in a background. I’m also getting a bit annoyed about the scanning process, it always seems to take from my pencil work. I should really look into improving it.
So over the holiday I got to some drawing. The big thing really was that I started to use charcoal, not a major step but something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. But I started with a simple tonal study, to get my eye and hands back into the swing of it (for some reason WordPress has cropped the thumbnail so to have a proper look at it, click on it):
So my first effort with charcoal was this (click on it to see the bigger version):
It was done as quick experiment on my sketchbook (across two pages) of a twig. I did the outline in ink. However you can see where the charcoal smudged accidentally. I liked it, it was much easier and faster to pull out the change in tones using the charcoal than with pencil like in the tonal study I did first. But a lot messier and prone to accidents.
I then went out and found something to really try the charcoal out on. In Chargey, where we were on holidays, there is lots of really old lovely things. There was this “saint” statue on the side of the old house, worn by weather, it had long lost its head. I love the fact that it was just a lump of rock but somehow you were able to perceive that it was once a detailed statue (again WordPress has cropped the thumbnail, I’ll have to find a fix for that):
The first one was done with pencil and charcoal. I didn’t do any of the background which I think distracts from the picture, loses it’s context, but I also found the final work messy and, well, a bit random. The second study, I outlined in ink first, including the background and then tried to capture the tone of the stone statue with charcoal. I think the second one is better but loses the feel of the statue. Everyone who saw the actual drawings preferred the first one, because the contrast between ink and charcoal was much more noticeable than the digital copies here.
There was a second statue, much bigger than this one but also very similar. This time I tried toned paper (i.e. not white):
The first thing that hit was the effect of the grade of paper. My light pencil marks were not working, so I dove straight in with the charcoal but I couldn’t make any tone… just black and a tiny smudge. The effort was a bit, well shite. If you knew the statue in the house, you’d recognise it, but I think it failed to capture anything else.
What this highlighted for me was the effect of the type of paper on my drawing, in particular with charcoal. On my notebook (the twig) I was able to get a really good strength and contrast of tone, but on my A4 sketch pad, the paper is thinner. It has a different effect, harder to generate really deep tones. But the coloured paper was the thickest of them all but it’s texture made it impossible to create contrast in tones at all. I’ve always known that paper makes a difference, but it was always negligible for me. With ink, I would place a spare page underneath thin paper so it’d soak up ink that leaked through. Also the way my coloured markers’ ink spread, was really affected by the thickness of the paper.
So my first thoughts on charcoal is that it’s cool. I like what I can produce with it, but it does require further playing with it. And I love its messiness.
