September is at an end...

...as is this month-long experiment. Originally, I was going to stop on September 29th, but I'd figure I would round out the month and make today the last day of daily blog updates. Hopefully, from this point onward, I will update my blog with new drawings and such at least once a week. More importantly, I hope this 30-day commitment had the positive impact for which I was hoping. I'll know in the coming weeks if it did.

To close out this experiment and this month, I thought I would try to get get some practice drawing with a pen and tablet so I decided to produce something completely on the computer. For all of my previous pieces, I had worked them out on paper, scanned them and cleaned them up; not so with this one. It was done entirely in Photoshop form start to finish.

I didn't want to make the task of drawing on the tablet too difficult so I chose a subject that I've drawn before and one with which I am reasonably familiar: myself. All in all, it's a pretty decent likeness.

Mythological scourge of the skies

I was originally going to draw a cowboy today but, at some point in the day, the idea of sketching a harpy snuck into my consciousness and stuck.  The outfit is a tad derivative (or at least it seems so, as I feel like I've seen that ensemble on other harpies before) but, overall, I'm moderately satisfied with this rough sketch.

Do you fear death?

I always intended to post a drawing of Davy Jones, who is one of my favorite characters from "The Pirates of the Caribbean" film series, so today is as good a day as any. Bill Nighy turned in such a wonderful, often over-the-top performance and the the visual effects are still astounding to this day. Such a delightful character to watch!

I will admit that I did not plan this piece very well. Jones's body is a bit too large and, obviously, I cropped the image in a rather odd way. Perhaps I will return to this drawing (I will at least revisit the subject) at a later time and see if I can correct its mistakes.

Defying expectations

This is Dr. Carl Hart, an Associate Professor of Psychology at Colombia University who appeared on today's episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, primarily to promote his book "High Price" (there's more to the title but there's just too much to type). I wanted to draw him because 1.) I found his hair utterly fascinating and I just wanted to draw that and 2.) his appearance flew in the face of my expectations. When I heard his name, I would have never expected him to look like this. Despite some gray in his hair, he has a fairly youthful appearance which, combined with his earrings and a robust head of locks, give him a laid-back sense of coolness one normally wouldn't associate with someone who uses the title "doctor." 

Did I mention I find his hair unreal?

The Basic Trinity

Earlier this year, I took a class taught by Stephen Silver and one thing he had us do a few times (primarily during the first few weeks of the course) was starting our drawings with an arrangement of three basic shapes: the circle, the the quadrilateral (most people would just say "the square") and the triangle. By varying the proportions and placement of these three shapes, you can come up with many different characters.

That is what I have done today. I have created three characters, each made up of each of the three basic shapes. Each shape varies in size in relation to the other two (e.g. the triangle will be noticeably smaller or larger than the square and circle), not only within the same drawing but in relation to the other two drawings as well. I admit the quadrilaterals in the drawings for the muscle man and short fellow are a bit too similar in size and shape for my taste, but at least I had the sense to orient them differently (vertically in the drawing on the left and horizontally in the middle one).

The placement of the shapes is different in each drawing as well.

The following image provides an overlay that shows the simple shapes I used when first constructing these characters.

Thar be dragons in these parts

I've wanted to draw a dragon during this month-long experiment for a while now and today I finally acted upon that impulse. The idea was to make it look somewhat realistic (at least more than my usual work) but it didn't quite pan out. The head was a good start but it quickly went downhill from there and things become less detailed and more cartoony. I also shamefully admit to phoning in those rocks. 

Overall, this piece did not turn out how I wanted (this seems be a recurring sentiment) but, to paraphrase what others have said, you need to get the thousands of crappy drawings out of you before you get to the good stuff. 

A semblance of sensuality in a scribble?

Here's another squiggle drawing, like the one I posted on September 5th. Here's what I started with:

After a staring at this scribble for a bit and a couple unsatisfactory attempts, I decided to turn it upside down.

Then, I saw the loose image of a woman's head, in profile. Thus, we have the following image:

Here's an overlay of the scribble to get an idea of how I arrived at the final image.