The coarse cardboard at the back of the sketchbook is nice for drawing with certain types of tools. Here I used colour pencils, and also colour ballpoint pens.
Then, a more normal drawing (in execution at least) from the middle of the book, based on one of Big Daddy Roth’s dragster-driving monsters. I used to love these.

Think I’ll colour this one. Of course he needs more popping blood vessels!

Darn. That implies “rotten” in French. I was trying to evoke “pot-pourri” as in variety, a kind of goulash of drawings. Anyhow, above is a haughty dame perfectly dressed in a retro outfit. I was happy to see her the other day. The view from the balcony is getting interesting again. Well, not today, because it’s raining. I think even the cats get SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) if this sort of thing goes on for too long.

Anyhow, below is a random sketchbook page, including Jude Law:

Tough guys, yeahh. (again, from the balcony):

It will be nice when I can reliably produce images i’m happy with. Anyhow, it’s fun to play with, if a little time-consuming.

I’m not a portrait type (that’s why I’m working on these!), but the machine has tools (particularly Photoshop’s “Liquefy”) which allows you to make little adjustments to a picture which would otherwise take lots of uncomfortable erasing and redrawing. I think mine work best when I’m quick and loose, but this medium encourages a lot of tinkering. Certainly don’t want to do photographic likenesses, though it would be cool to have that ability. A couple of these are drawn from photographs, but not traced!

This last one was from a manipulated pencil drawing, while the others were sketched completely on the screen.

I’m afraid I’m going for the simple SEO on the title here. If you’re not aware, that means “Search Engine Optimisation,” and is where people put words in that they think will be used in Google-type searches, to win more views for their article.

Still, cats are pretty popular on the internet (as if you hadn’t guessed!), so this post might get more than the usual number of views. It’s Mr. Boggedy, my senior cat of the three here (or, at least the largest). This is thanks to it being a sunny day the other day. Cats and I like to sit out on the balcony, and I’m with my sketching stuff.

Trying to draw portraits. I’m cozy in pencil (not so cozy drawing likenesses!). I wonder if it’s bastardization to try and colour a drawing this way, but I’m also practicing my digital chops. Not the prettiest image, technically, but it’s part of my artistic self-education, so I’m putting it up here.

I wanted to draw a movie star, because it’s someone recognisable, and you can tell if you’ve hit a likeness or not. But I don’t like identifying them on the web, because frankly, some fans are crazy. Of course, you can’t control who visits your page (not many, I can assure you!), and you can’t even control who links to your image, and where. There are some seamy sides to the web, but I imagine you know that already.