Last night was amusing.

My friend Chris’ boss Jean-Pierre was in town and he invited us down to his room at the Renaissance Hotel (which is connected to the Sky Dome) to watch the Jays play the Tigers. I’m not normally a sports fan in any way, but it actually turned out quite cool.

Jean’s room was facing inwards towards the ball diamond with a giant bay window we could open up to hear the game and the crowd. From a perfect 2nd deck view out in left field we watched the game while sitting on comfy chairs with tons of space, making it better than even a private box seat. We turned on the room TV to the same game so we could hear the stats and play-by-play as we watched. Every time a strong play happened there was an awesome roar of the crowd that echoed into the hotel room.

Although the Jays were losing 5-2 for most of the game, they kicked ass in the eighth inning bringing in 8 runs and winning it 10-5. It was awesome eating pizza and drinking in comfort while we watched them bring in run after run right before our eyes. Very nifty.

Afterwards we met up with my friend Sarah for her birthday celebration. Althought we relaxed at Jeremiah Bullfrog’s for a while, we eventually ended up at a lounge I’d never heard of before called Laide. Inside was a classy bar layout with a giant screen off to one side showing turn of the century porno. Needless to say, our great-grandparents were just as sex crazed, dirty and depraved as we are in the 21st century – they just hid it a bit better.

We drank some martinis, hung out and eventually called it a night around 3am.

Today’s mini-painting is all done. I really attacked this one with gusto, sketching fast and picking colors almost at random until I felt I had something working and fun. In the end it turned out as a freckley goblin kid, heh.

The whole piece took about 45-50 minutes from initial drawing to posting here. I like his eyes and sheepish grin.

– The under sketch where I figured out proportion and stuff was done lightly with non-photo blue Col-Erase. You can actually still see it in the scan. Sometimes I’ll erase it, but this time I left it in for the heck of it.
– The sketch line art was then done over top with a red Col-Erase.
– Scanned in at 300 dpi.
– Base tones and colors slammed down in Painter 6.1 with the Simple Watercolor brush.
– Highlights and fine blending done on a layer above the base tones with the Smeary Round brush.
– Color correction and sig added in Photoshop.

Long day at the school, but a good one. I did a bunch of drawing examples for Character Design and Layout class and then went to the weekly Life Drawing session this evening. Now I’m home and tired, but pleased with amount of drawing stuff I did.

Okay, less talk and more drawings. Here goes:

Click here to see my best drawings of the evening.

More loose gesture just and playing around this time. Enjoy:

Woke up this morning and figured I should color that previous pic. Here’s how it turned out:

I used all Photoshop this time out. It doesn’t have as much loose energy as the painted stuff, but the clean lines and overall feel of it turned out nicely I think.

My internal clock is now officially messed up. Crazy late nights flopped last night as I tossed and turned solidly from 4am through to 5:30. I know exhaustion will hit me midday and I’m dreading it.

Since I was awake anyways, I figured I’d do some sketching and see if I could get some line art together I could paint later on. Not sure when I’ll have time to color this one up, but in the meantime here’s the line art:

For those of you who do digital coloring/painting, here’s a link to the high resolution line art:
http://www.makeshiftmiracle.com/Artwork/SketchBlog009LineArt.zip

Feel free to download it and color away. 🙂

Another Life Drawing day. The session went pretty well. Even just from last week’s session to this one I can see myself getting warmed up a bit faster and getting a bit more energy into my poses. Here’s hoping it translates into better illustration material later this week.

The 30 second gestures are hard to scan in since they’re so whispy light on the page, so keep that in mind as you look at the darkened versions posted here.

Click here to see my best drawings of the evening.

The latest One Step comic portfolio article is now up:

One Step 11: Web Workings

This one is all about social networking on the web and includes links to this journal (as well as one to Warren Ellis’ excellent journal), so it’ll be interesting to see how much traffic swings by here and/or adds me to their LJ Friends list.

In any case, for those who are new – welcome! 🙂

Tonight, more figure drawing.