She in color

Not much to say, really, except maybe: Who said I wasn't motivated?! Pah!

She

Well, another one! Lol, they keep coming, don't they? She's simply dubbed 'she' because I don't have a name for her yet. Who knows, maybe I'll stick to 'she,' I kinda like it anyway.

But oh well, I saw her in a dream last night. It was very weird, because the dream was all about drawing and animation (I get those a lot lately). And so I saw her on a piece of paper, drawn in red. I thought I could give it a shot and voila! Not exactly like the one from my dream, but close enough. I tried to go for a Disney type of feel/look, and think I succeeded in a way. Also, I'm getting the hang of my tablet and digital drawing. That's a good thing! Although I will never put my paper and pencil away, never.

So, enjoy! (I certainly did).


Oh, and I kept the texture of the paper and (some of) the red pencil lines for the mood of the drawing. I thought they made it look quite nice.

Colored Gabby

A colored version of the Gabby girl I posted earlier. A friend of mine told me that maybe she didn't need color so much, that the red line of blood was enough. And well, he was right in that she looked o.k. when she was b/w, but I like her better now! I'm glad I colored her anyway. Hope you like her, too!

Digitally colored comic

Hah! I actually finished that little digital project I posted earlier. I colored the whole comic scene digitally. Whoohoo! Didn't know I had it in me... Anyway, it's far from perfect. There's way too much smudging and, for this style, I found out along the way that no smudging (vector) looks better, but oh well. I discovered that half-way through and was too lazy to start over. Maybe I'll redo it, or maybe I'll try it on another scene... We'll see.

Character

A random character I made, after I stole parts of the pose from a drawing book I have. She's inspired by Abby, but isn't Abby exactly, so I dubbed her Gabby, just for the fun of it (and no, it has nothing to with the Gibbs/Abby shipper...). I may color her later, but I'm not sure yet.

Digital!

Whahaaaa! Seriously! The miracles keep coming! First a painting and now... A digital coloring! Wow! Lol, sorry, I just never use Photoshop other than tweaking and adjusting the colors on scanned images. So it's pretty amazing. And it didn't even turn out that bad either!

Anyway, as you can see these are the guys from the comic scene in my previous post. And who knows, if I have time enough I might practice my digital skills on the whole scene...

Panels

An update! Yay! I finally made something worthwile your time.

Actually, it's an assignment for myself, to practice panels in comics. Something that's really hard, as it turns out. Of one scene (made up, mind you) I made three short comics, all with different kinds of panels and different points of view. Personally, I like the first one (top to bottom) the least (which isn't a surprise, since that one is really the practicing part), and of the last two I think I favor the last one, but I'm not entirely sure... Lol. It would make sense, though, improving as you go along and the last one being the best. But I dunno, oh well.

Anyway, the scene is about a girl being saved from a burning building. All she could do was go up, to the roof. But how do you get down from there? Right, by helicopter. However, the thing couldn't land on the burning building, due to danger of the whole thing collapsing, so she had to go by rope (and no, that's not the regular emergency heli, like Medicopter... It's a helicopter they could get there the fastest, but unequipped for this sort of thing). Since the chopper couldn't land in the middle of the city either, she had to drop herself, from a considerable height... brrrr.

Boy

I felt a little down, the last couple of days, which made me draw a very sad boy. However, that kind of helped (sorry, kid). I liked the boy enough to create a character out of him. I just finished the book Prepare to Board! by Nancy Beiman, which is all about preproduction on animation and, thus, on character design. I loved it! And so this kid was created. I don't have a name or story yet, though, but who knows, maybe that'll come later. So far, I like him!



Not too happy with the lower left face; the outline is off. I like the upper left and lower right ones, though, since I was never that good with eyes and mouths.

Cat 'n Rabbit

A painting! Wow! Miracles do exist!

I'm sorry, I'm just more a pencil-and-paper kind of person, not so much a painter on big canvasses. So this is quite an achievement for me, hurray!

These are our cat and rabbit, the rabbit being chased, but not letting itself get caught. In real life, though, she kind of slumps down into a little heap of black fur and lets the cat do what it wants. Which is to play, at the moment, since the cat is still very young.

Hope you like it!



And another miracle! I figured out how to make a vid. Kind of... It's made with the drawing from Ducky's Realm and it kind of follows the first shots of the NCIS episode Bete Noir. The music isn't mine, they're files I found on the computer, so I guess it's standard Windows stuff. So yeah, my first attempt. I'm going to try to do some animation, but wanted to try this first, just to see how everything works and all.

The quality deteriorates as the short vid progresses, because I zoomed in on the drawing digitally (instead of making new drawings), so that's why. If I wanted to do this right, I would have to make new drawings for each shot. Maybe I will, someday...

But I was a little exited about me figuring this out, so that's why I posted it, even though the vid itself is pretty sucky. Sorry about that. Hopefully, (much!) better ones will follow.

Blue

Well, here it is then, my first attempt at Ducky's realm. It's rather blue, but that's the whole point. Too bad scanners aren't that good with blue, so a lot of the lighter hues have disappeared, making the total picture look pale. But oh well, it's just a practice sketch anyway. There are also some missing details and added other ones, which really don't belong there, but I'll call that artistic freedom... Please keep in mind, though, that this was drawn from a film still, so the framing and all is fine, but there's no direction (yet), just so you know.

But I'll tell a bit more about the episode I'm trying to 'comicize.' It's Bete Noir, from season one (hence Gerald and Kate). Why? Because it's a pretty important ep from the first season (and, as I said before, the only season I've got so far). It introduces Ari, who will have an important role in season two. So yeah, that's why.

Behold! Ducky's realm.

Behind eyelids

Bought new colored pencils! Yay! Highlight of the week! They're blue ones, a whole range of them. With the ones I already have, I should now have enough to start my comic idea. Thing is, I decided to make it with a limited color palette. Marine blue is of course the perfect color for a comic about the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), so there! Blue it is!

Haven't really started, though. I just thought I'd post something to keep up posting. I will add an old computer drawing though. Or old... It's not that old, but it's not very new either. Anyway, hope you like it!

I saw this girl in a flash once. I have those regularly, you know, when you close your eyes and some image just pops up behind your eyelids...

Comic

You know, as a fan, you always want more of the stuff you're a fan of. I had it with Stargate and now I have it with NCIS. My whole Stargate DVD collection is complete, including a book about Stargate SG-1 with everything in it, which is pretty cool. And I've got a novel of Stargate Atlantis (with more to come). All I'm missing now is a comic book. Turns out they actually have those, so I'm afraid I'll have to go to the States at one point and buy one or more.

Made me wonder about NCIS, though. Couldn't really find anything except for the DVD boxes, and certainly not comic books. So! Easy conclusion from this is that I'll make my own... It will be a lot (!) of work and I don't have an original story (which would be even more work, what with all the research and everything), so I will try to make a comic out of an existing episode. I will tell about that later on, when posting my first page (which will take a while...), but I did practice the faces of some of the people involved. The ep is from season one (I don't have my NCIS DVD collection complete yet, I'm saving for season two at the moment) and the character are, from left to right, Gerald, Gibbs, Kate, and Ducky. I'm not too happy with Gibbs, so I'll be working on him some more, but I thought I'd post it anyway.

So, enjoy!



(click on the image to enlarge)

Artist first and foremost

Yeah, well, a little personal self-pic. I'm studying American Studies/Translation English-Dutch/Dutch-English at the moment. Tried art college, but unfortunately that didn't work out. Thing is, I can't stop drawing (as you will have seen, if you read/saw the other posts). I love it so much, it almost hurts. And yes, that's a cliché, and I never thought it possible with something other than a person or pet, but apparently it is. I simply love doing it.

I just finished drawing this one and added the other drawing (which can be found elsewhere in my blog) in Photoshop.

Some oldies

Here are a few older drawings of mine. Black and white first, followed by the colored ones.


This is a little something I thought of ones. I thought it was funny. It's a James Bond meets Neo kind of thing. In these particular frames they're already hooked up and 007 barges into the room Neo is in. Must be funny, walking into a room where someone's floating in mid-air.





Now this is an angry farmer (obviously). The story behind him is that he's attacking a magician who hasn't been entirely honest with the crowd. Of course, the werewolf helping the magician totally saw this coming...



A drawing based on Hari Seldon from Isaac Asimov's Foundation. I couldn't quite figure out whether he was good or bad when I read the book, so that's why the drawing is a little vague on that matter.


And here we have Bo. Bo is a teenage girl I came up with once. I use my imagination a lot and I can often be found in one of my own imaginary worlds. I was wondering what would happen if I got stuck there. That's what's happening to Bo. Her parents are in the middle of a divorce, fighting all the time, and she can't take it anymore. And so she flees into her own world, where she's a hero and fights crime and unhappy children. At one point, though, she can't get out anymore...



This drawing is based on Colonel Cameron Mitchell, from Stargate SG-1. In one episode Mitchell is hooked up to a machine on another planet to find whether he's the killer of a woman from that planet. I thought it looked cool with the blue lighting, so I drew it.

Fanfiction

I'll have to admit, it's a sad topic again. Can't help it, really, there's no drama in happiness...

Another confession, this is a sort of fanfiction thing have in my head. I'm trying to put it into pictures and words, instead of words alone. Again, it's NCIS related.


This girl is sixteen years old and has just lost her father, a captain in the navy. He died in the war in Iraq, apparently under no suspicious circumstances. At first. And so, since his death seemed unsuspicious, no autopsy was conducted. At first.



The girl, who lost her mother to cancer when she was six years old, is now an underaged orphan. She is placed into a foster home. However, she does not feel like doing so and flees.


Yeah, well, not so much yet and definitely not researched or anything, so go easy on me. I just needed a subject to draw.

Balance

Okay, since my last post a few hours ago, I decided to balance it out. I've got one cheerful drawing now and one action drawing (which is, more often than not, not so cheerful).


This drawing is inspired by a Dutch holiday, Queen's Day. It's the day our queen celebrates her birthday (though her birthday isn't on that day, April 30th, but her mother's birthday was). Anyway, tried to make it all happy, and inserted an American flag, instead of an orange or Dutch one. Suppose that would make it a 4th of July kind of thing.



A comic-like approach to someone being caught (and trying to catch in return). FREEZE! would be the right term here. Tried a limited palette on this one; greys, black, and browns, and leaving the skin the color of the paper, which is an off-white.

Pain

Somehow, pain and misery are often topics of my drawings. I've been asked why my drawings are always so depressive, but couldn't really find an answer to that. I have no idea, I'm not really a depressive type of person, only my drawings are. Maybe to be cheerful in real life I draw away all the non-cheerful stuff. Who knows...

Anyway, this one's derived from NCIS. A little thing I thought of, don't know why. The team's chasing the bad guy, but find an innocent girl who's in pain (there you have it) on the scene. She's got nothing to do with it all, just a matter of wrong time, wrong place.



A military guy running away from... Well, from the bullet that finally finds him, I guess. It's a discrimination issue. Not so much race, though. In fact, the guy who shoots him is of the same ethnicity as he is. It's about sexual preference...