Anger

When I was in high school, I started doing this thing where I would draw a beastly embodiment of ugly emotions - frustration, misery, rage ... those kinds of things. I only did two or three of them, but it was something I liked because it gave me a chance to really think about some of the symbolism of the details I put into the monsters.

Well, today I did another one. Meet Anger, the nasty, hot little demon that smolders somewhere beneath your other emotions when you've had too little sleep or someone is really giving you a hard time on a rotten day.

So let's talk creature features for a minute: I wanted to give this guy an over all burning kind of look. Cracking lava was the first thing that appealed to me, and I think this came out pretty well. I know I had fun when it got to that point! I also gave him some nasty claws and big obsidian/cinder spikes jutting out of his back, by which I was trying to portray that you wouldn't want to get close to him because it might hurt. The horns and tusks are my representation of power - I don't know about you, but sometimes anger is a bully that is hard to kick out of the picture. I tried to make him look a little more on the ripped side, since sometimes when you're feeling angry, it can give you an illusion of strength. Oh yeah, the tail - three little whips on the end that snap and sting and drive anger on and on. Big nasty.

This image was different for me for one very big reason - no ink lines. I'm accustomed to having some form of lines to color inside of whenever I do drawings, so I'm used to relying on them to tell where my lights and darks fall. I've always held some respect for digital artists who paint things all the time without the use of ink lines and create astounding pictures. I'll have to watch more of them whenever I get the chance to see how they figure out where everything goes. I had to leave the rough sketch lines up while I did most of the details in this so that I could see what went where!

That thingy again!

So you may remember this. Yes, I got some very helpful pointers on it.......but let's be honest. I was not happy with it. The pose of the creature felt too flat to me, like some giant shoe had come and stomped it into the page.

Yeah. Not what I wanted when I started working on it. But I'm not about to just flush it down the toilet without getting what I want! Hence, this new thumbnail. May I say this is MUCH more what I had in mind. I think I'd like to take it to the next critique group and see what kinds of suggestions I can get from others before moving to the inking stage. Not that I think it's horrible at this stage. Like I said, I am a lot happier with my newest try.

Alright, so I went and found me a nice ref pic of gold, then shrank it down to get a pixel palette out of it. Boy, let me tell you, I was way off on the whole gold thing. I was a little shocked at just how much orange is actually up in your face when viewing gold. It looked too vibrant when I started painting it into this picture, but once I got a few different shades down, I realized just how much better it looked than my previous brassy-hued attempts. Kudos again to Nasan for suggesting that method of picking colors.

Sea dragons

Sea dragons. Sea dragons run. Sorry, I'm tired. It was bound to happen...

Here's another little fun thing I grabbed off Nasan Hardcastle's blog. You find a picture, whether a painting or photo, your own or something that inspires you, and if it has a good value range, you shrink it down until all you have is a few pixels, then paste it into a new image to use as a color palette.

I went through some of my photos to find candidates for this, since I don't feel that confident in the values of my digital paintings. I put the corresponding photo next to the head that I took the colors from. I was going to draw different kinds of dragons with features that aren't standard for me, but I ended up only liking one of the thumbnails I did and then ran with the whole sea monster theme. I think these guys turned out well, though they pale in comparison to the color the photos have. And I'm really not sure if that green one looks enough like a dragon, or just some big, weird seahorse. I tried, I really did. You be the judge of how well they turned out.

Anyhow, let me know what you think! I'd like to slap some of my art like this on stuff that I can actually sell at places like Zazzle or Imagekind (just as examples) but I'm still trying to decide if there'd even be a market for it. There are so many dragon-y things clogging the art media anymore, I don't know how much my stuff would actually stand out. I don't harbor any illusions that my art could be a cash cow. I've seen plenty of artists who have far more training and much higher quality work that are struggling for income. But that's fine - I would only be after a small amount of income to supplement my daytime job, anyway. Ah, I'm rambling because it's late, so I'm going to stop there.....

Kareel bookmark

Several days ago, I made a wonderful discovery: inside a box stashed in our art closet, I found a set of brush tip pens in pristine condition! I have been wanting to begin learning how to color with markers, but have been lacking the money to go out and buy some, so this was a very happy surprise. And it just so happened that I was able to find a project to try them out on!

This is a character belonging to a friend of mine. She's a black phoenix with blue highlights named Kareel. I find her coloring intriguing, since it's such an opposite of the traditionally bright, warm colors you'd think of for a fire bird. I had a lot of fun drawing this bookmark for my friend, though I did learn a couple of things along the way. First, card stock and ink do not always function well together. Second, any paper that intense of a blue hue is going to obliterate bright colors placed on it. Third, never use tiny scissors with a metal handle when cutting out that much detail. Ouch.

Done in micron pen, brush tip pen, and colored pencil on card stock. Kareel is copyright Aubrey Jensen.

Wayside Tales cover

Here's a cover image I completed a while ago. It's for the collection of anthologies I've been working on now and then, though right now the project is on hiatus for a bit. I've been more concerned with getting Nethbane completed before I focus so much on this, though some of the short stories in the collection are already finished.

The background in this is composed of two photographs, both taken by me and then spliced together. After that I just threw in some gradients to make the sky look all lovely and blue. The little figures were sketched out on paper and then scanned in and done digitally. I like how it came out.

Woha badge

Badge done for the April round at the conbadge community. I got someone this time who's character is a wolf, which made me excited because I have been into drawing wolves lately. I've never drawn them much before and just decided within the last half year or so that I wanted to learn how to sketch and shape them better. The person I got specifically requested a fairy theme, which made it all the more fun.

Scanner killed some of the color, but this was done in micron pen and colored pencil on computer paper and cardstock, with a little bit of gold and silver gel pen thrown in for the name and fairies.

If you'd like to know what kind of colored pencils I use, the answer is lots :) I have a big box of leftover pencils from school years and the like that have been gathered up, so I use a mix of Crayola, Enre, Templar, Berol, Four Seasons, and some others that have no brand stamp or are ones you've probably never heard of. I think the Enre's are my favorite. I tend to layer my colors, so really just about anything I color is going to be a good mix of the "herd".

What's gray and orange and messy?

Cat fight! Cat fight!..... Sorry, but this part was really fun to write and I'm looking forward to completing the image :)

Progress on a picture that has been sitting in limbo for probably close to half a year now. I initially lost steam for it part way through inking, mostly because I have been battling with the positioning/pose of the far figure and the fire dragon. I went in today and just scrapped both of them, then started anew. Hopefully that helps! The dragon is going to get scaled down so that it's smaller than the figure in the foreground, but I am still playing with both it and the far figure it is charging at.

The green lines going across the picture are some guides I grabbed over at Nasan Hardcastle's blog in order to try them out. It really has been helpful in setting up things in this picture, especially since I had more of an illustration kind of look in mind when I started it.

Powermonger

Hurray for achieving something that I'm happy about! Changed a few things on here from the thumbnail, but I ended up leaving the vertical alignment where it was. I did add a touch of yellow to that flame, though, which I'm particularly proud of. Laugh if you want. It still makes me happy.

Phew, what a relief to have at least one of these done. I do still plan on finishing some of the other thumbs I've put here. It's just a matter of finding the time and willpower to sit down and work on them.

On something of a personal note, I've really been struggling for the last while with some emotional conflict and a lot of internal chaos and depression. It sounds bad, and I guess it could be worse, but I'm still not happy about it. It has been such a struggle to be able to work on creative endeavors and that lack of progress just heaps on my frustrations. I'm hoping that at some point here I'll be able to exit all of this garbage I'm dealing with and come out that much of a better person. There are so many things I'm upset or frustrated about that I'm not going to waste any time listing them here. I'd just come back and delete them later for shame of having spammed my art blog with them. Anyway, I guess I'll cut the rambling short so that my life doesn't seem like a horrific soap opera. Just needed to vent a little.