Little sketches

Physio on my shoulder is going well, the nerves are less pinched, which means I am doing silly little sketches again as rehab.

Nothing spectacular, seriously, it still hurts to hold a pen/pencil longer than 10-20 minutes, but here are a few little sketches I spun out and gave a quick colouring job in Photoshop.

I don't know why, but when I'm doodling, it's usually odd little critters/beasts that come out... I think the fire dog-thingy is kinda cute :) He reminds me a bit of a French Bulldog. No idea what the dragon-morphing thing coming out of the cloud is, I was just randomly making curling shapes at the end of the wave that turned into a cloud that turned into... rain that turned into... a beastie. Yeah, no thought at all behind that one ;)

The green & yellow floral thing was a fast/simple design that I may want to put on baby-gift-related something-or-other in the future.

The green singer/castle/wave was sketched after I wrote this little bit of flash fiction and considered (for 5 minutes) of making a short graphic comic/story out of it. I still might, one day.

The mouse... yeah, y'know when I was playing around with creating designs for (potentially) an interactive/app-type kids book? I've got a rough script for a mouse story in my head as well, essentially two mice 'fighting' each other with imagination.

Anyways, nothing I spent a lot of time on, but it's nice to hold a pencil again (for short spurts), even if my control still sucks too much to even consider picking up a paint brush :)

...good thing this old soccer injury/pinched-nerve thing doesn't affect typing skills or I would be absolutely insane by now with zero creative outlets...

New scribble

Since I'm trying to re-strengthen my hand now that the nerves are less restricted, I've been sketching a few little cartoons/drawings.

Here's one I'm pretty pleased with :) ...even the 10 minute Photoshop job to throw in some colour...

And no, I didn't draw the Seahawks logo... I just edited one I found online.

I've said before, when I've posted little self-sketches on my writing site, that this is my default drawing style. Yes, from all the years of life-drawing and animation classes, I can draw in many different styles, but this is the one I developed as 'mine'.

Sure, it's not super wow-worthy/impressive, but I like it. It's simple, focuses on shape, the silhouette against the white-space is interesting (if you delete the green framing oval), and it gives a light/laid-back feeling.

I inked over the sketch with a micron pen before scanning it into Photoshop, but I really do prefer my original pencil lines... they give more of a sense of movement/emotion. I find the Micron pens make sketches a little more stilted/cold because you're tracing an original drawing.

One day I'd love to play with a WACOM tablet... but for now, it's pretty low-tech ;)

...and I love sketching. The mechanical pencil I use I've had since my animation-school days. The lead is thick, about 1/8", so you can get a really diverse variety of line thicknesses, and it comes in different hardnesses. I usually use B or B2. B for cleaner/thin lines, B2 if I want more range in thickness and a sketchier feeling.

Piggy banks stage 1, roughing out the designs

When I started out making these gifts, I had no previous plan or even a rough visual in mind.

All I knew was the personality/preferences of the two mothers-to-be, and the gender of one baby.

There were two major design 'problems' to work with:

1) The shape of the pig is in no way symmetrical. Even the location of the coin slot isn't centred in any meaningful position. Because of this, there were a lot of things I wanted to do that seemed great in theory, but just didn't look good when you actually laid it out on the piece.

2) Almost any design on the back of the pig... ended up looking comically like a piggy anus. While this was... amusing, it also resulted in discarding many ideas.


I spent a full two days looking through books and roughing out sketches (using a black micron pen) on the surface of the porcelain pigs before I finally decided on a lotus design for the girl baby (hereafter known as Lotus Pig), and a gender-neutral Chinese influenced design for the baby I didn't know the gender of (hereafter known as Sleepy Pig).

I didn't take many pictures because most of the designs were wiped clean before they looked even remotely usable.

You can see I was playing with both pig designs in this, one sleepy eye and one cute/feminine eye, and I was toying around with more of an Arabesque look on the top, and a sharper design on the bottom.

One thing I also played around with was either creating a band-like design that wrapped around the whole piece (which I ended up with), or more of a point of interest design, like this, which is more traditional for European porcelain painting.

The tops of this one was where I started meandering from Arabic into Chinese influences, and decided it worked better overall, even if this particular design was scrapped.

The Lotus Pig was the one that came together first, and in the initial design stage proved more difficult than the Sleepy Pig, but Sleepy Pig ended up more problematic in other ways. You can see I was already partially roughing out a template at this stage, but you'll notice I still had a 8-point lotus instead of the 10-point lotus which was the final design. The 8-point just really didn't look as good, but I was hesitant to 'do the math' required to make a 10-point lotus.

Here was the semi-final roughed-out Lotus Pig design just before I started making templates. I really liked the cute eyes.