Sketching at Porto’s

Question:  What’s the best way to ruin a good sketchbook?

Answer:  By not drawing in it everyday.

I went to Porto’s Bakery in Burbank yesterday to do some sketching with some friends: Mike Moloney, Grif Kimmins, Maha Tabikh & Angelo Di Nallo.  Funny thing about drawing from life: if you don’t practice it enough, you forgot a whole bunch of stuff.  There are quite a few pages in my sketchbook that have fallen victim to that reality.

If you’re looking for a great place to do some people sketching, Porto’s is great because it’s very busy with people.  You get a wide array of people to sketch whenever you go there.  Anyhoo, a lot of the time spent was trying to remember the approach to people sketching.   After a few hours, I was able to muster up some decent pages.  Hopefully, I can get back into the habit of doing more sketching from life.  It challenges your observational skills and it’s sometimes fun too.  Cheers.

Arabian Nights? Gesture Drawing

Last night was my first life drawing class in a long time.  Being on hiatus from work makes it so much easier to attend classes.  However, you start to realize how rusty you are at life drawing when you haven’t done it in a few months.  Last night’s drawing session was a lot of trial and error plus a bit of anguish.  Anyhoo, these drawings were the survivors as I tried to shake out the rust for 3 hours.  Cheers.

Kung Fu Elvis Remix

Kung Fu Elvis has returned and will play an integral part in a story I’m developing.  Since I’m on currently on hiatus from Titmouse, my buddy Grif suggested that I use the downtime for my own projects.   I came up Kung Fu Elvis a while ago but wasn’t too happy with the results.  At the time, he just looked like a dragon ball z character with a pompadour.  Now that I’ve had some distance from the initial idea, I came up with a better way to incorporate Elvis into a martial arts character.

He’s the arrogant pretty boy that you want to stomp a mudhole into and also the perfect villain for my story.  Anyhoo, look for more characters as I further develop my story.

omega-9

Another tokusatsu hero design I came up with during breaks at work.  Wanted to go for a more classic look hence the presence of a popped collar.    Took a lot longer to resolve the design than I would have liked, but I like how it ended up.

Anyhoo, lunch break is over.  Cheers

Quick Case of the Updates

Didn’t realize that it’s been a while since my last blog post. A quick recap of what I’ve been up to since then: helped character designer David Colman put together his DVD on the basics of character design, took some classes at the animation guild, went to comic-con, started working at Titmouse as a clean-up animator the day after comic-con. It’s been an interesting few months.

For those who are interested, I still draw and on toned paper too.