Medley Magazine

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Kaoru Abe/Max Roach

I'm still alive

Here some stuff I've been working on lately. The 2 brush drawings are of Kaoru Abe and Max Roach. Two awesome musicians I highly recommend. The Illustrations are for this idea I've been sitting on for awhile for jazz trading cards, more on that soon hopefully. The rest is just some life drawing in ballpoint on newsprint.

Figure drawing from the imagination

I've been focusing on my figure work lately and I thought I'd take this post to offer some tips that were helpful to me. The first few are obvious but those are often the most overlooked

1. Draw often: If you want to get good at anything you need to do it alot. Also keep in mind it's better to draw a little each day than a lot sporadically but ideally you'd be drawing a lot everyday.

2.Make it fun: Get creative with it if your enjoying your studies you're more likely to be motivated and the session will be more effective.

3. Results: Remember the whole point of your studies it to get good at invinting figures. If you are not seeing improvement you need to do something different. Don't just blindly do what you see everybody else doing.

4. Gesture is key: I've heard this over and over again and I think just now I'm beginning to understand it. The gesture is what makes your figures, people. It's the storytelling aspect of figure drawing. Acting in a way.

5. Learn your cylinders and cubes: I mean it. I though I knew them and I did'nt. You need to be able to draw them accurately in perspective freehand.

6. Focus on your weaknesses that are holding back your strengths: Mainly for the sake of efficiency. But consider this, Mike Mignola hates to draw feet and for that reason he almost never does. I don't know about you but I never notticed until I read that in an interview. My point is if you have a weakness thats not holding back your overall message then maybe its not a weakness, maybe its style. Just a thought.

7. Draw in your mind: I know this makes me sound like a nut job but when your out look around make observations. A game I like to play is I'll look at a person and then try to draw them when I'm back at home. Try it.

8. Check out as many anatomy books as possible: What harm could it do. You never know when one authors interpretation of the figure may light a bulb in your head.

9.Your going to need to do a lot of drawing before you get confident: By alot I mean hudreds of thousands. The majority of those drawings will probably be quick ones. The internet is good for finding reference material though ideally you do as much from life as possible.

10. Good drawing is about the control of clarity: keep that in mind when your presented with a complex lighting situation, weird angle, tricky muscle group etc.

Hope that helps.

Luc update and sketchbook

These are the first three B&W pages of the aforementioned Luc story. If you look closely you can see I changed the background in an attempt to make it more specific. Someone out there can probably still find inaccuracy in the setting. The story takes place in Cordoba Spain so this is my attempt at Moorish architecture. The two other images are random sketchbook pages.

Bike guy and Nakaruru

The Bike guy is a work in progress that needs colors. The drawing of Nakaruru from Samurai Showdown is just a sketch from my sketchbook.

tony salmons

In my opinion this guy is one of the most under appreciated people working in comics. I've never seen anyone draw like this guy, it's so dynamic, almost to the point of ridiculousness.