Saturday, December 31, 2011

Sketches with new pens

Abe gave me some water brush pens for xmas so I filled them with ink. I have two of the same size now, so I filled one with an ink wash to make grays. Oh yes I did. It is awesome.
From a new blog I found through Erika Moen's tumblr. Reading in Skirts
 Of course, from the Sartorialist. Style Profile...Kirk Miller. The edges of the gray-wash pen marks seem a  lot more subtle in the original
Fella in his undies eating fried chicken. Perhaps there needs to be a bucket of fried chicken.
And here is a sketch of the Jawless Wonder for a story idea I have.
Not quite used to the wash pen yet. But it doesn't bleed through the paper, which is great.  I also got a non-photo blue pencil which I have been using to sketch the base under the inks and I am loving it, I think I would prefer a mechanical version instead of the kind you have to sharpen. I would love to do a whole story in this style and I think I have a good idea which one.

Friday, December 30, 2011

Beards!

My Photoshop is not working properly so I can't see where I am cropping. I did the best I could.
From The Sartorialist: On the Street...Kemankes Cd, Istanbul. I should have used my Copic markers to color this one. His gloves where spectacular. And purl-side out, it looks to me.
Practicing beards: Sri Swami Satchidananda, Karl Marx, General Ambrose Burnside, and Charles Darwin. I didn't realize how much a monkey Darwin looked like.
More beards! These were fun: Mark Twain, Rollie Fingers, was going to do Rasputin but he creeped me out too much, and Grizzly Adams. Then a practice one from my head. Not doing as well with that.
This is an old one I forgot to post the other day. Someone tweeted about Vicrotia's Secret needing to putan average woman in her underwear checking email in an ad to get her to buy their stuff. Carly Monardo (@whirringblender), I think.

Reading list from BBC

We Might Fall: Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed...:
Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.
Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (boring prose. Had to stop. But I have it as a book on CD so I will eventually listen to it.)
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy (so long!!!)25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (so many characters I got lost in the first chapter)
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (uh, why is this not part of #33?)37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov (Got too weirded out to finish)63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens72 Dracula – Bram Stoker73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert (didn't enjoy so I quit)86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare (Not part of the complete Shakespeare?)99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
I listened to some of these as book on tape while driving home. That counts I think. 14 started but not finished. 26 actually read and finished. I think I will work through the ones I like on this list that I can find on cd at the library.

Thursday, December 29, 2011

cute animals and such

Whoops. Fell behind again. I also didn't draw much for the last week for some reason.
Cute baby tapir. I believe I read that all baby tapirs are striped like this.
Platypus. Inspired by Abe.
Echidna is also Abe's suggestion.
From a recent Ten Ton Studios Sketch Challenge.
Buddy from Cake Boss which I am inexplicably drawn to.
Watson and Sherlock from the BBC show Sherlock. Great show. But there are only three episodes. Three more are to come out in 2012. Benedict Cumberbatch is a fun Sherlock and the guy who played the main guy in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy plays Watson.
This was one of Abe's xmas presents. He laughed really hard, which made me happy.
A Little Red Riding Hood. With the new brush pens Abe gave me for xmas. Very fun stuff. I actually did this one tonight.

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Air Guitar

From The Sartorialist. Her legs ended up a little short.
He is supposed to be doing air guitar. And I forgot to draw on his eyebrows...

Monday, December 12, 2011

Lazy times

Mod Cloth
Sartorialist. She was just great.
Sleepy undies.
Toe-picking undies.
I just watched Rosemary and Thyme on Netflix streaming and adored it. There were sadly only 6 episodes. It is another BBC crime show but the twist is these are gardeners who have joined forces to accidentally become amateur slueths.

Friday, December 2, 2011

Starting French

FYI, Abe and I started a blog together where we post comics in French as practice. We just started, so they are pretty lame. And I just realized if you don't know French, they might not be funny.

Anyways, here are some drawings.
Self portrait. Seriously. Anytime I am at home, this is probably what I look like. My eyes aren't as messed up as that, but the outfit's right.
Practice bears for an upcoming short comic. Turns out I have no idea ho to draw beards. Everyone just looks like Jesus...

Thursday, December 1, 2011

Red Riding Hood

Based on this lady on the Sartorialist. Of course I had to make her Red Riding Hood.

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Lady sketches.

Fashionable lady from The Sartorialist. I think she's taking her gloves off, not that she has a crazy hand.
Lady in the street from The Sartorialist.

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Comic Review: Octopus Pie


Octopus Pie by Meredith Gran (There are no stars in Brooklyn (2010), and Listen at home (2011))

I got both the Octopus Pie books at the same time, which you saw a while ago if you follow me on Twitter (@lunavalse). I have seen her at a number of cons on panels and found her interesting. She has an interesting take on the web comic. She waits until a whole story line is complete (they aren’t super long) and then posts the whole thing at once. As a reader, I am not a fan of this style but that is because I am a horrible creature of habit and like to check my web comics on a set schedule by day of the week.

Anyways, I saw a comic of hers that someone linked to, Sarah Beacon on Sauceome if I remember right – I think it was a comic about peeing on a bike or something, but that sounds gross and not quite right. Anyways, I saw the comic and laughed really hard and went home and bought the books.
Octopus Pie is about a post college girl, Eve Ning, and her friends. Eve is so snarky so I quite enjoy her. Actually, she story style reminds me a lot of Questionable Content. Eve even reminds me of Faye a bit. So we follow them through their lives and they are about where I am now, or actually a few years ago, so it is really relatable for me. Hannah, an acquaintance from preschool, ends up moving in with her and they become friends. She is quite active and an instigator of lots of the commotion in the stories. Eve seems like she would quietly sit about her apartment at all times without the hyper Hannah to get her off her butt (like me). Hannah’s beau, Marek, is a great counter piece to Hanah, help provide a ground point for her. Hannah appears to still be in college, but it doesn’t come up.

The first book was more like a long meandering story even though they both have chapters. I think I noticed the chapter sections more in book 2 because she also included text describing the story: her forethoughts and afterthoughts. This included answer some questions and responding to comments that readers had when the story was originally published online. Nothing specific, but just general responses to trends she noticed, like explaining confusing points and characters.

Over the course of the first book – the art style changes. It starts out very smooth and exact. I am assuming this is digital inking. It looks great. Then towards the end, there is a story that changes to a reedy style, perhaps a nib pen. The lines are jagged and less precise. Then the next story switched to a thicker more varied line. I would guess a brush. These are probably horrible guesses but they have the looks I associated with each of those tools. I prefer the original style, but the final style she seems to have ended on is still nice.
Regardless of her line style, her character design is fun and varied. The characters have a wide range of sizes and genders and backgrounds and it is really fun to watch them all interact and piss each other off and have fun together.

I pounded through these two books in about 4 days (I did other stuff too). I adored them and I am so sad they are over. I can’t wait for the next one, whenever that will be. I want more even months later. More!! I definitely recommend these. You can even read them for free on her website, but if you like them, you should buy something from her because they are so great. She’s also got posters and shirts.

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Ysolda

 
Ysolda is a great knitting designer. This is a picture of her from this post on her blog. Isn't she adorable? She has a great looking knitting book out, Little Red in the City, and I WANT IT.   >:D
This is an adorable outfit from this collection on ModCloth (last one). So fun to draw these. ModCloth has such colorful clothes!

Monday, November 21, 2011

Ladies

 This one was so fun. From ModCloth, 7th in this list. And I used my fun Copic markers. Yay! I think I need more colors.
I accidentally made this lady from the first image in this Sartorialist post look more like a child than I had intended. I think her head is just too big.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Undies and more!

So I haven't posted, but I kept drawing. Abe was working for the last two days so my scanner was unavailable. Because I am lazy and make Abe scan everything.
Lovely dress from ModCloth.
And of course sketches from Sartorialist.
 Not sure how this happened but I majorly elongated her.
And I was watching Psych, so I drew Shawn Spencer. Whenever I see him, I ogle his nostrils. Man, that show cracks me up.
Strong undies.
Dancing, romantic undies.
Dancing undies
Muscular undies.

And we are all caught up. Just thought I would mention I have the inks finished for my current comic in process A (CCIPA). Abe is scanning it as I write this. Then it needs to be printed so I can color it. Or I will color the originals. I don't know what is the best or most common method. Copic Markers. I am also working on a poem for CCIPB. It is rhymed and metered and I keep sending it to my mom and she says to make it better. She is a poet, so I trust her judgement. So keep working I shall.

Saturday, November 12, 2011

Yawns

I think you got it...
Natural progression, I think. Animal yawns.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Lady Pinup

I wanted to do a color test of the lady and the car, so I thought what sort of picture could I do with a lady and a car. Well, the lady/car pinup is pretty standard. So here she is!

I am so not sure what to do about the color problems though. The colors from the Copic markers just won't come through right. Abe has a few more tests to do to see if he can get the colors right, but I might have to color the story on the computer which I am not as excited about. Copics are really fun.
I love Julia Louis-Dreyfus. She cracks me up. And I have so much fun watching The New Adventures of Old Christine. I am bummed it was canceled. I think I made her face to long in that drawing though. Doesn't really look like her.

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Practice drawings of unnamed character

Same fella sitting at a fireplace drinking some lovely tea. Comfy looking slippers, no?
The color in this looks a billion times better in person, but apparently my favorite Copic markers to use are the ones that come through the worst.
Sartorialist archives for this one. A bit exaggerated.
And this one I tried to make her elongated and cartoony and then forgot and just made her elongated.

Monday, November 7, 2011

Puss in Boots

 Abe and I saw Puss in Boots this weekend and it was delightful. I was feeling a bit blue and it was a nice reprieve. I think I laughed more than anyone else in the theater, but it always feels like that.

Here I was trying to really go for the blacks - inspired by Mike Mignola's stunning work. From The Sartorialist.
 
And here, as I watched Kitchen Nightmares, I was trying to go for a more cartoony style. From The Sartorialist.