Brian Moore's Sketchblog

Super Sketchblog Switcheroo

2007-04-28T12:31:00.000-05:00

I've upgraded my blogging technology and changed URLs! Please update your bookmarks to:

http://www.brianmooredraws.com/sketchblog/

The new blog is still under construction at this point, but I hope to have all the archives moved over shortly. My RSS feeds for this Blogger site (and for the old mirror version on theplasticbox.com) will be discontinued, and there will be a brand-new feed for the new blog.

Thanks for visiting, and I hope you visit the new blog!

Sketchblog Updates

2007-04-23T21:39:00.000-05:00

Hi. My apologies for not keeping up with this version of the blog (the mirror of it on my site has additional entries). I'm thinking about consolidating some of the various websites I post content on, and will probably stop using Blogger and stick with my own site. I'll post a notice here, with a link, when and if that happens.

The Real Thing Has A Stylin' Silver Stylus, Too

2007-02-05T18:47:00.000-05:00

This ... cute ... little guy was for a Xmas card I made for my wife, which read "GOOD FOR ONE WACOM TABLET." She finally decided on a small Graphire, which arrived a few weeks ago. It's a sleek, silvery sports car to my circa-2000 model Intuos tablet's Beige Bomber. Apple really has done wonders for computer design.

The painting is gouache on cardstock, cutout, maybe 3" tall.

A Short Vacation

2007-01-29T23:47:00.000-05:00

At least, I'm hoping it was.

A Torrent of Faces

2007-01-22T22:09:00.000-05:00

Well, not a torrent per se, but, you know, some.

"Nose Trouble" (2002)

2007-01-15T23:38:00.000-05:00

Requires the Flash plugin.

The Lupindroids' Picnic

2007-01-08T18:00:00.000-05:00

I kept this under wraps for so long, I sort of forgot that I could post about it now ...

So, here's my contribution to the final strip of Shaenon K. Garrity's epic comic serial Narbonic (of the Mad Scientists, Chimera Gerbils, Malfunctioning Teleporters, Death Rays, Shadowy World-Controlling Cabal of Guys Named Dave, &c.):

Here we see the reclusive Mad Roboticist, Lupin "Wolf" Madblood, at a company picnic with some of his now-independent creations.

It was a wonderful story Shaenon! Thanks for letting me be a small part of it ...

Colloquy 2

2007-01-01T14:20:00.000-05:00

More Doodles given Dialogue.

Apologies for the lack of updates for the last few weeks! The holiday season has been very hectic, with lots of illustration work, work on Smithson, family time, etc. I hope that your holidays went well, and that good things await in A.D. 2007.

Comix, Cyborgs 'N' Coffeee

2006-12-11T18:25:00.000-05:00

It's time for another painted cutout! Gaze at the chilly future that awaits all comic book readers ... or at least ones with comically oversized heads and an interest in robotics and antigravity.

Presumably that's not coffee he's drinking either, but motor oil or some such.

Painted Snack

2006-12-04T18:25:00.000-05:00

Here's another holiday-themed freelance piece; it's supposed to be a metaphor for Open Source (that's why the "Open" spelled out in snacks.)

Not much success with personal artwork this week. Several doodles discarded.

Freelance: Thanksgiving Painting

2006-11-27T22:36:00.000-05:00

Shoot, I almost forgot to update again today. Too much going on.

This is a Photoshop painting I made for guess which recent holiday. It was an experiment: it was for a slideshow presentation, for which I normally make one image per slide. This time I tried to be clever and made one big image, and zoomed in on a different chunk of it for each slide. I don't know if it was any faster than my usual routine, but the final product came out all right. I like the kid with the raygun, and the sullen/quiet teenager setting out the silverware.

Colloquy

2006-11-20T20:22:00.000-05:00

It's been a busy week or so. (I've lost track.)

Hey Micki, etc. etc.

2006-11-13T11:41:00.000-05:00

Just because I like it, here's the last panel from the most recent Smithson.

Smithson (Earth-G Version)

2006-11-06T20:42:00.000-05:00

This is a new interpretation of a panel from last week's Smithson. (I'm trying to bring the wacky energy I've been getting with the cutout paintings into my comics work, and this was a convenient way to practice.) Micki looks OK here, I think, but Chuck's looking a little too cartoony. After I scanned this in I repainted his eyes somewhat so they're not quite so Little Orphan Annie. Panel border and lettering in Photoshop of course.

Birthday Whatsis

2006-10-30T10:46:00.000-05:00

I painted this last week for my brother's birthday. No, I don't know what I was thinking, except that he lives in the Midwest and there is some corn around there somewhere. Alan, if you're reading, happy (belated) birthday!

It's another cutout painting - made on a card that's about 4" x 6" and then cut out. Here you can see my hand holding it against the scanner glass:

Homework

2006-10-22T21:40:00.000-05:00

Lots of time in the lab this weekend, trying to get the paint to do what I want it to do.

I like the top and the right paintings; they have some nice light. The one on the left looks OK but the technique was way too labor-intensive; it sucked all the freshness out of it. Maybe you heard the noise Sunday night.

The Young and the Zest-Less

2006-10-15T21:52:00.000-05:00

A quick watercolor and ink study of Chuck and Micki from Smithson:

And part of an illustration gig from last week:

It's a little hard to tell without the color, but it's supposed to be a PC shaped like a motorcycle. The guy's probably playing Half-Life 2.

Ink-A-Doodle-Doo

2006-10-09T11:04:00.000-05:00

I'm still having fun with crowquill pens ...

... and with cutout gouache paintings.

Augusta

2006-10-01T22:30:00.000-05:00

This is a detail from another painting I made for the Merrimack Repertory Theatre, for the play Augusta. Created in Photoshop.

More Crowquill Sketches

2006-09-24T21:46:00.000-05:00

Some more sketches with the new crowquill pen.

Crowquill

2006-09-18T22:35:00.000-05:00

On a whim, I picked up a crowquill pen at the art store. (BORING ART-SUPPLY NERD TALK AHOY):

I'd briefly played with one many years ago, but ditched it in favor of the Speedball pen points I was used to. But I'm diggin' it now! It's nice to have that amount of control, and it doesn't take all my concentration like the brush.

Freelance

2006-09-10T22:34:00.000-05:00

A collage of some dinner-eatin' businessman illustrations from last week. I tried to go for an "elegantly loose" style here ... which, of course, was created using a lightbox and digital coloring.

Yep, that's a frog he's hiding inside his coat.

Trying

2006-09-04T21:33:00.000-05:00

This is a detail from "Trying", one of six illustrations I made this summer for the Merrimack Repertory Theatre, one for each play in the current season. The illustrations will be appearing in their season preview book, in print advertising, on some signage, and I believe they're going to project them on the side of a blimp. I may be wrong about that last one.

The thing that surprised me in making the paintings (they were done with a Wacom tablet and Photoshop), is how much they came to resemble my paint-on-canvas painting style. I made a bunch of custom brushes in Photoshop to get the brush-like textures I wanted.

I guess when you're really in the heat of trying to get something to look right, your consciousness of the tools being used disappears anyway. (I remember a quote, maybe from Philip Guston, to the effect that when you start a painting, all your friends and critics are in the studio with you; then after awhile the critics leave; following that, your friends leave; and if you're lucky, finally you leave.)

Freelance

2006-08-28T22:35:00.000-05:00

Here's what I did last week. Mostly business, not much time to work on personal stuff (beyond Smithson).

Most fun to draw: Einstein. Hardest to draw: tie between Max Headroom (tough to do a caricature of a caricature, and indicate that it's a computer-generated character) and Steve Jobs (facial hair is tough to render in vector art.)

Oh, OK. The "Dell Dude" is also sort of fun to draw.

Comics Are So Gouache

2006-08-20T23:14:00.000-05:00

In art school I had no idea how to pronounce "gouache" (gwash); I always thought it was "gauche", like when the Admiral invites you to dinner and you use the wrong fork.

Anyway.

Here's a mashup of a panel from a recent Smithson and one of the cut-out painted guys I've been making lately. I actually taped the cut-out onto the original art, which is sort of stupid in retrospect. But luckily I was able to peel it off again without any damage to the strip. Whew.

Cutouts #1

2006-08-14T13:37:00.000-05:00

Painted with gouache on card stock and cut out, each around 5" tall. I'm trying to do one of these guys a day.

Background Check

2006-08-07T10:38:00.000-05:00

I'm back from vacation, with some more stuff from the archives.

In 2003 I created a short animation called "Commuters", for the One Minute Video Festival, a local film fest. All the submitted videos had to be one minute long or less. This was both a challenge and a relief - a challenge to get some kind of story done within that running time, and a relief at the end of the project, because it took me a month just to put together 50+ seconds of footage.

The animation was done in Flash and Photoshop and then output to video. The sound effects were created using my handy Yamaha DJX keyboard, sadly gathering dust in the closet now.

The images below constitute a sort of "spoiler", so if you want to pop over to theplasticbox.com and watch the short first, go ahead. Otherwise, scroll on down.

((SPOILER SPACING))

Anyway, here is one of the backgrounds used, and a detail from it.

Pen-Cell

2006-07-17T20:02:00.000-05:00

Here's one of the pencil sketches I made for my current illustration project (six paintings for a theater company.) Right now I'm working on the painted version in Photoshop. It's a little different from the sketch, in which it seems to be raining jellybeans.

The Best Laid Plans

2006-07-09T23:43:00.000-05:00

Picked up some gouache paints today and played with those, as a (brief) break from the illustration gig.

This is an old to-do list that got used as a brush pointing page and now has this little man lying down on it. (The text at left says "3. Take a shot at New Yorker - come up with 10 ideas for cartoons." By March, I think it was. Oh well.)

BusyBusyBusyBusyBusy

2006-07-03T16:00:00.000-05:00

Posting to the blog as a break from a marathon painting session (which started about a week ago ...)

If I were a clever man, I'd have made a cute illustration of a bee for this situation; but instead you get this.

Hope to have new stuff to show next week ...

Today's Experiments

2006-06-26T14:06:00.000-05:00

I got to sit around and cut out paper dolls for a few hours today. This experiment came out better than previous ones - these cutouts cast a nice shadow in a few places, which usually isn't the case when the pieces of paper are sandwiched in the scanner. I'm groping my way toward some kind of effect here ...

Smithson: Darryl O'Doyle Sketches

2006-06-19T11:32:00.000-05:00

This page from earlier in the year shows my attempts to get a fix on the design of the mysterious Darryl O'Doyle, a character in Smithson. Fortunately for me, the chief architect of O'Doyle's look is Roger Langridge, who is very, very good at boiling a character down to his comic essentials. I was able to follow his lead for my rendition.

O'Doyle appears in two versions in Smithson, as a lively child prodigy and as a washed-up, distinctly non-talented-looking adult (who nevertheless seems to get a second act in life by means of automatic writing.)

Spirit Salad, With A Side of Weing

2006-06-12T13:01:00.000-05:00

A little bit of a image salad today ...

Occasionally I break out my Kitchen Sink Press reprints of Will Eisner's The Spirit comics and marvel at the artwork. I love the Spirit's "superhero costume": a baggy 1940's suit, a tied-on mask, and gloves that don't really look big enough to cover his huge mitts.

The ink studies below are from the 1949 story "Slow Boat to Shanghai". Lookit all those crazy wrinkles. Of course, this is my cruddy copy; the original art is much more lively and solid. The character to the right is Bulkhead, a Popeye-esque thug that appeared in the story.

To the right is a study from the wonderful work of Drew Weing, who often works in a classic "bigfoot"-influenced cartoon style. Check out his main site and his beautifully drawn series Set to Sea.

And the bottom two characters are strictly my doodles. Ho hum.

Not Running With Scissors

2006-06-05T08:01:00.000-05:00

I'm still finishing up my new art site, BrianMooreDraws.com. One of the things missing was a silly little caricature of myself, to go on the Contact page. It took a few tries (and some last-minute digital work on the head), but I think it came out pretty well.

Here are the first version, and the final version for the site (with digital background). The original paintings are watercolor on hot-pressed Arches paper.

Port - Rah - Tchuah

2006-05-28T23:01:00.000-05:00

This is a quickie portrait, based on a photo of singer Dinah Washington. Not a terrific likeness, but it was fun to paint. More work on cardstock.

The Tidiest Corner

2006-05-22T08:38:00.000-05:00

This is a corner of a collage/watercolor/pencil piece I made. I was having trouble sitting down to work - trying to select what to draw or paint, from the many projects that I could be tackling - so I just kind of scribbled some lines, put down some washes, etc. It's good practice, I guess, and I got some interesting effects and textures. Note editorial comment in the lower right.

Hand Wringing

2006-05-15T14:19:00.000-05:00

After six months (!) of drawing Smithson, I've come to the conclusion that I need to work on my rendering of hands (and arms, and the head/neck intersection, and backgrounds, and the panel lines could be a little straighter, etc. etc. etc.) Fortunately I am gifted with as large and bony a pair of paws as a student artist could want, so practicing is fairly convenient.

Landscape Studies

2006-05-07T23:03:00.000-05:00

A few quick paintings (I think the bottom one took about an hour; the shadows moved quite a bit, anyway.) Working on color, rendering light and shadow, etc. It's tough to keep the shadow colors saturated and un-muddied; I'm using mostly transparent pigments here so I end up going over the darkest parts a few times.

Watercolor Doodle-Doo

2006-05-01T13:17:00.000-05:00

It's nice to paint on paper not made especially for watercolors; these are on card stock, which is a lot cheaper and good for experiments. It sucks the color right in, though; the originals aren't quite this saturated. But that's what computers are for. These are various noir-esque doodles put into the same page. He's not just glowery, he's caught up in events beyond his control!

Hopefully Not A Dollar Short

2006-04-25T20:04:00.000-05:00

Well, I got caught up in drawing the next Smithson strip, and forgot to update the blog. The next advance in computers has to be some kind of script that automatically pulls some random artwork from your hard drive and posts it, preferably with a synthesized quote from Gary Groth or Robert Hughes saying how great it is.

Here's a silly painting I made this weekend.

He's going to have an interesting summer at camp, I guess ...

The New Guy

2006-04-17T13:15:00.000-05:00

This week was a little less hectic ... I had time to do some paintings for a website I'm working on.

More on this later.

Cut N' Paste

2006-04-10T09:04:00.000-05:00

It was a tough week, so no new painting for today. Instead, here is a collage piece I put together for my Drawing II students. It was kinda fun ...

Those Darned Cats Redux

2006-04-03T19:25:00.000-05:00

It's been a crazy week, with not enough time to do a new painting. So here are some older ones - my second and third tries at the girl and cat painting from March.

By the third try, the colors were better, but the original sketch had been traced too many times - the drawing got a little squishy.

Hope to get some more painting done this week!

Downtown Snack Time - The Revenge

2006-03-27T00:15:00.000-05:00

Here's the painting from last week's sketch. I'd say about 80% of what I was aiming for.

I read a Walt Kelly quote once, to the effect that he went for 80% satisfaction with a drawing. Other artists might want to expend the additional effort (and this is a logarithmic thing, in my experience - not "just another couple hours" but "just another couple dozen hours") to get to 100%, and possibly flub it, but Walt would rather start a new drawing and go for another 80%. I have probably egregiously misinterpreted the quote, but what do you want, it's 12:30 am.

Downtown Snack Time

2006-03-20T09:49:00.000-05:00

Here's a preparatory sketch for a painting I hope to finish this week.

Those Darned Cats

2006-03-13T00:01:00.000-05:00

A couple of portfolio pieces. The first one came out more or less according to plan; the second started to crash and burn about midway through. The pencils were a last-minute attempt to fix some of the color problems. I'd call it an interesting failure - I like how the pencil textures came out.

Skate Duh

2006-03-06T23:06:00.000-05:00

Pretty much what he says. I have no idea what I was going for here (a monster-truck skateboard?) Some days, the muse just flicks her cigarette stub at you and vanishes.

Three Ladies and A Goof

2006-02-27T00:12:00.000-05:00

Some new watercolor sketches. I'm trying to make the first few brushstrokes do as much work as possible - making big shapes - then going back and tightening up with some ink.

And here are some sketches for a comic I've got in production ...

Trouble Alley

2006-02-20T20:07:00.000-05:00

These guys just won't go away ... I guess I'll have to finish that comic with them, then.

Smithson Sketches #3

2006-02-13T12:09:00.000-05:00

Here's another pic of Gemma from Smithson. Why that pedestal has a lamp and a glass on it, I have no idea. This was a test painting on some new watercolor paper I'm trying out - Arches hot-pressed.

And here's a painting of Gemma's roommate Micki, another test painting on Canson watercolor paper. I think I like the smoother paper better.

Clouds

2006-02-06T00:07:00.000-05:00

Man, I feel like I've really improved the color in my paintings with these new paints. If you paint in watercolors and would like a decent explanation of why various colors behave as they do, I recommend checking out the book Transparent Watercolor Wheel by Jim Kosvanec. It separates the paints into transparent, staining, semi-transparent and semi-opaque colors, gives paint mixing recommendations, and so on.

Here are some fluffy clouds, to go with my fluffy brain at this hour ...

Watercolor Under My Thumbnails

2006-01-16T00:14:00.000-05:00

I've added to my palette of watercolors, and I'm trying to get a handle on how to best use what I've got. These are small studies on a piece of 18 x 24 inch Bristol board. The scribbles are notes about various color combinations, washes, etc.

Guy N' ... Uh, Dolls

2006-01-09T12:08:00.000-05:00

Brushes are fun!

It's January, so it's time for some cute n' ghoulish drawings. (Hey, if Xmas can take up 7 months of the year ...)

Post-Apocalyptic Rocker

2006-01-02T21:09:00.000-05:00

This was a birthday card I drew for my friend Lee, who is a guitar player and all-around rock n' roll star. Um, I drew him surrounded by rock. Yeah.

I flirted with the idea of having him cudgeling attacking dinosaurs with the guitar, but thought that was a little too much rock.

Smithson Sketches #2

2005-12-31T12:23:00.000-05:00

Another sketch from Smithson, this one a "kiddie" version of one of the characters (the self-styled campus superhero, Chumucka Man.)

Shaenon has a very simple philosophy for superhero character design: "I believe that all superheroes should wear either mining hats or goggles. Mostly goggles." The ring is my addition, based on a dimly-remembered ring-based candy. The "sour apple" flavor came on a plastic green ring, perfect for pretending to be Green Lantern.

Smithson Sketches #1

2005-12-29T13:27:00.000-05:00

I draw a weekly webcomic called Smithson, which follows the strange goings-on at fictional Smithson College. I took over art duties on the strip from Bob Stevenson and I'm still practicing drawing most of the characters. Here are some "getting to know you" sketches.

Gemma is the punky, troublemaking type. She also probably has an unmeasurably high IQ.

Jael is the RA on the dorm hall on which several characters live. She's a soft, comforting presence, who happens to be synthesizing human skin on fish as part of her degree project. She likes tea.

2005-12-28T21:19:00.000-05:00

As an experiment, I'm mirroring my Sketchblog here, to see which setup I like better. Sadly I think I've finally reached the stage where tinkering with the underlying technology isn't as interesting as it used to be ...

Here are the latest sketches, in which I try on a few different hats.

Edit: Looks like I need to play with the template to accomodate the larger images ...

2005-08-24T13:23:00.000-05:00

This blog exists to allow me to post comments to other Blogger users' blogs. Although I may grow to love it and use it more often.

The stogie is purely ornamental.