No Daily Sketches, and my brother

Sorry there hasn't been any frequent daily sketches this week. I have been drawing a little, but my mind has been preoccupied lately. My brother had surgery yesterday to remove bone spurs from his neck. That all went fine, but last night his heart went into Atrial Fibrillation. For those who don't know, basically it means he's having irregular fibrillations between heart beats. Here's an example:


Wow.. I've worked way too long in a hospital... I worked five years in the kitchen, and three months as a transporter, and I know all this info from dealing with patients and staff, that's sad!

Anyway.. Tomorrow, the doctor is going to stop his heart and start it back up again to hopefully reset it back to a normal sinus rhythm. Again with the stupid nurse jargon, I sound geeky. So, that's what is holding me up from doing a lot of work. I have some pages I'm going to be doing as daily sketches for sequential art practice coming up. I'm also doing two paintings, those should be done soon enough and up in the gallery and here. I'm going to take a shower now, I've been at work all day, and spent all my breaks and a lot of time after work in my brother's room at the hospital.

Shouting into the void known as the Internet

Sometimes I feel like my blog is me just talking to a wall. Anyone out there? First three people to respond with an idea (some restrictions apply), I'll sketch it up for a daily sketch.

Dark Knight and THREE Daily Sketches

I saw The Dark Knight today, it was the best movie this summer! I was kind of grumpy that people were suspecting Heath Ledger to be receiving awards for his role before the movie was released, but now I say he deserves everything he can obtain for that role. I feel bad for his passing because he deserves the hype. The film was phenomenal, the movie is like a great crime drama plus Batman... Amazing, watch it again and again!

Secondly, at work I put together a couple daily sketches. First two about 30 minutes each, the last about an hour and a half.


This is some crazy dude staring in the sky while smoking. I was thinking of awful office jobs while drawing this.



Someone said something about Dead Pool, so I drew a shaved headed zombie with goggles and a gun.. makes sense, right?


Lastly, I tried imitating Mystique's pose from an X-Men cover by Humberto Ramos, from memory. I did pretty well if i do say so myself. The arms are slightly funky, but the overall piece contains a sense of attitude.

Its hard to put together daily sketches, since some days I don't sketch at work or home due to just being busy. So I feel these three made up for some missed days. Also, I'm trying to work my way up to longer sketches. Its just hard, because most of my free time is only during my breaks at work, so I'm just drawing on my little pocket sketchbook which is hard to render details on.

Hellboy 2 & Daily Sketch

First off, the daily sketch. I spent about a half hour tops on this. Its in my pocket sized sketch book, I sketched it at work:




I've been having problems recently drawing decent profile faces, so I did this to get back into the swing of it. I might have a few more of these as daily sketches for practice.

Okay, now onto more movie talk. I saw Hellboy 2 last night, it was a lot of fun. I like how the sequel got into the world and lives of the non-humans, and we saw the bonds between all the characters since time wasn't wasted in having to introduce each character.
As always, Selma Blair is gorgeous as ever. I think the Princess in the movie may have been Gweneth Paltrow, she looked an awful lot like her, but she was heavily covered in elf makeup... or at least I assume her race was elvish. If you want a silly action movie, Hellboy 2 might be for you.

Second Daily Sketch in one day?!

I felt since I skipped a day or two, trying to keep the daily sketch going, I'd double up for today. This took about 45 minutes as well, again, its a friend's character, but my own take on it. My friend, Heather, draws with a heavy manga influence, I thought I might try to introduce that a bit more this time.

Daily Sketch, and some thoughts

So I sat myself down at a local cafe for close to an hour today to draw a friend's character my own way. By actually noting start and end times for the drawing session, I realized I am the sloth of illustration. This is what I came up with:



I think a lot of it has to do with confidence with pencil strokes and the capability to move on.. I spend a lot of time loosely sketching, erasing, redrawing, erasing, redrawing.. I also noticed certain things I hate to draw, namely foreshortened limbs (the hand and arm coming up front), bars of a bird cage (I think in part because I had no reference to a bird cage), and female clothing. I think I grew too comfortable with comic book women who just wear lycra.

How does one speed up their drawing? Is it by just drawing religiously, or forcing to move faster?

Daily Doodle for Tuesday July 15

So, to honor my word about trying to do daily sketches, I have uploaded my first sketch for the blog project. I did this while on break at work. Its no 90 minute sketch, but it is a start!

Tried to draw someone, I did it from memory, so likeness went out the window, in my opinion!!