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.

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 Pullman10 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 Grahame31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (so many characters I got lost in the first chapter)
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens33 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 Brown43 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 Toole96 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.

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.

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...

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.

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...

Red Riding Hood

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