I Love to Draw! Featured Sketch #3

Green Lantern in Water color - Step by step

You always save the best for last, right? The last character of the 10 character challenge I was doing. Green Lantern. I wanted to do Hal Jordan, because I did see the movie, and I felt most familiar with that character... But I also wanted to do something non conventional for American comics. I wanted to do a watercolor, that much I knew for sure, but I wasn't sure who's art style I wanted to mimic for this piece. Then it dawned on me... Yoshitaka Amano. He would make a perfect subject for me to try his style. So without further interuption, I'll  get onto the pictures...

Rough draft sketch using 9H graphite pencil.

Once the pencil work was finalized, I set to work Inking the lines with a Sakura Pigma Micron .005.

Then I switched to my Brush and Inks, starting with my finest point brush and "cutting in" all the edges.

Then I switched up to a larger brush to fill all the empty spaces.

This particular piece is on 9" x 12" drawing paper, which almost fits on my scanner bed, so I went ahead and scanned it in black and white. I really like how clean it looks.

Then I set to work painting with water color. I underpainter using Prismacolor watercolor pencils, then switched over to a wash of yellow, then a dry brushing, then the same for orange, then black, then green until finished.

With the piece completed I went ahead and scanned it into the computer, then uploaded it to photshop, did just a couple little minor adjustments, and this is the final result.

I Love to Draw! Featured Sketch #2

"Hellcat and Friends" - Step by step.

As part of the 10 Character Fan Art challenge I have been doing, I had a character named Hellcat on the list. Once I realized I would be doing a catgirl from an American comic book, I thought it would be cool to do a bunch of American comic book Catgirls, but done up in the anime/manga style. After doing some research online I found my inspiration, Hogeru Baruma's "Kitty Kitty Fancia" and decided I would mimic his work in order to complete my task. I had set to work on the sketch and after several hours of research and image grafting I came up with this:

 

Since my phone takes such lousy pictures, I loaded up the image snapshot into Photoshop and applied some filters to make it easir for viewing online.

Then I began editing each character,  and inking, adding in underpainting, and cleaning up my pencil lines.

Starting with the character most in the foreground, Wildcat, from DC Comics was the first to get inked, and because she is mostly solid black there wasn't any underpainting to do, also her mask has lenses instead of cut outs, hence, no pupils...

Here, I have erased the pencil lines, which gives a much cleaner look to the image, and helps get it ready for scanning. 

Then I started on the next character...

Which happens to be Hellcat, the person whom this drawing was to be about.

Underpainting of primary costume color was done in a light application of spanish orange prismacolor marker.

And then a break was needed... as you can see by my wall, I had printed out pictures from the site where I got the ideas for my poses. There is also a print out of all the actual Comic characters in thier costumes that I wanted to replicate, so that I could get every last detail right. The tin there on the right holds the majority of my various inking pens. I predominantly use the Sakura Pigma Brush tip... but on occasion will switch to a different pen, or an actuall brush.

Next up, and probably the most well known female cat character ever... Catwoman!

 

Underpainting was done with Prismacolor lavender pencil applied very lightly.

 Still a very long way to go... 3 out of 11 characters, inked and underpainted...

On to character number 4...

The magnificent, and obscurely known, She Cat from FemForce!

Underpainting was done with a Berol V5 Red rollerball ink pen.

Next up was the beloved, Shadowcat...

I really wanted to give her kitty ears, but the only time she ever had them was in Mojo world... that and when they made the X Men manga... Her mask has a white lens that conceals her eyes, so, that is why she is pupilless.

5 out of 11, almost halfway done!

My favorite of the bunch, Black Cat! I loved this pose, and it really worked out very well for her. I think it really lent to her "I'm innocent, no, really...!" type of demeanor.

Officially over halfway done!

Tigra really came out awesome too, I think by this time, I was really getting into stride with the art style and feeling more and more comfortable with adapting it to my own.

Underpainting was done with Prismacolor marker, Summer Orange.

Getting into the home stretch, and eager to finish up...

At first, I wasn't really sure I was liking how Feral was going to turn out.

But after underpainting, I was really pleased.

A character I found in my research of Cat girls was named Bad Kitty, and I simply couldn't resist the notion of adding her to this piece.

Only 3 more to go!!!

One of Marvels many mutants, but also another obscured character, Catseye.

Her outfit really clashed with the rest of the picture, even compared to Feral's, but in the end, it came out alright.

Another vharacter from FemForce... Kitten! The pose is fitting, because it is like, YAY! I am done!

After I finished the image, I had to align it onto some larger paper, 2 sheets to be exact, so that I could start scanning, I wanted to be absolutely certain that there would be no errors, and I had to be possitive that the alignment wouldn't shift. I had to scan the image in 7 sections, My scanner bed is 9" x 12" and I was working on 18" x 24". After scanning, I had to personally, "stitch" the individual pieces togther in Paint...

Then I ported it over to photoshop to clean it up and print it out. The final result was 8 1/2" x 11" and made coloring that much easier.

After coloring, I scanned it back into Paint, because paint likes to work with my scanner, and photshop does not. 

Then I ported it back over to Photoshop, and did some final editing, and applied some filters.

The characters themselves are, from top to bottom, left to right;

Kitten from FemForce,
Catseye from Marvel's X Universe,
Bad Kitty from an Independent,
Tigra from Marvel Universe,
Feral from Marvel's X Universe,
Black Cat from Marvel's Spiderman,
Catwoman From DC's Batman,
She Cat from FemForce,
Shadowcat from Marvel's X Universe,
Hellcat from the Marvel Universe,
Wild Cat from the DC Universe.

All in all, I am very pleased with this picture. I really had a lot of fun with it. It is available for purchase, as a multitude of things on my Deviant ART page here: http://waruijanai.deviantart.com/ There are also a couple of alternate versions.

Materials:

18"x 24" drawing paper, 9H Pencil, Pen and Ink, Prismacolor Pencils, Markers, and Colorless blenders, CPU Scanner, Printing paper, Printer, MS Paint, Photshop7.

This has taken me about 6 days and about 70 hours to complete. 11 Characters, all relating to American Comic Catgirls, done in Manga style adapted from Hogeru Baruma's Kitty Kitty Fancia.

I Love to Draw! Featured Sketch #1

Today is August 13, 2011, and I have spent almost the entire day drawing... well, first I did a little creative writing which I will post another day. (I have more I want to write on it.) Lately I have been drawing a lot more, it seems that I am finding my love for art all over again. It really feels good. My last "Post" was talking about how I felt that I may have lost something valuable that made me want to do art... Well, whatever it was, (perhaps my passion for it?) It seems as though I may have found it again. I have been sketching pretty much daily, as you can see by the Page link over there >>>>>> (Daily Sketches) >>>>>> (I'm not going to bother generating a link to that page on this one, when there is clearly one already there...) Since I have a "Featured Recipe" Blog segment, I though perhaps I should have a "Featured Sketch" Segment... so here it is...

Now, about today's image... I have been hearing alot about "Fursonalities"... Personified creatures to represent a person, or a character. Upon learnig that there is a huge following for this concept, I was intrigued. I have come to find out that there is a whole subculture of people devoted to this idea, with people having thier Fursonas become thier profile pictures, or avatars, and then joining clans, tribes, or some other sort of social group. So far as I have learned, there are no stories to be told, no cohesive plotlines that have been developed, even though there are quite literally hundreds of thousands of characters. For me, the idea of an endless stream of possible art combinations are brewing within my brain. But for today's drawing I chose a Wolf.

I have applied the idea of "Fursonality" to my character, "Death" from my comic series, "Four from the End" .

(It has to do with the apocolypse... in a light hearted and humorous way... or something)

I really had a lot of fun with this image. I used 18" x 24" standard drawing paper, Pen, Brush and Ink, Prismacolor Pencils, Prismacolor Markers, and of course, Pencils. Of the images, My favorite was the Chibi (bottom left on the group image) done in just pen and ink. But I also really like the colored more natural image on the right. I am not too keen on my third image, which is more my traditional style... but... nobody is perfect. I spent about 11 hours today working on these, and stopped to take a few breaks in between to do things around the house, and eat meals. I hope you enjoy these at least half as much as I enjoyed making them.

As I said before, If you want to see more of my artwork, please scroll up to the top of this page, and click the "Daily Sketches" link, and thank you for stopping by my blog page!