When I was down visiting my sister I decided to buy myself some art supplies. I went into one of those giant craft stores brimming with heaps of wicker and scented plant detritus. I navigated past the witches brooms and halloween decorations and managed to find the ink pens in the back buried under a bunch of old wreathes.

Dani uses ink in her sketchbook and I love the way it looks, especially when she washes it out with water to get grayscale shading. Here are some of the trial sketches I did when I got back to my sister’s place:

• Cube
• Robot — Of course.
• Gage & Aaron
• Stern Woman
• Happy Bunny
• Murderer

I used Speedball Super Black India Ink and a Cartooning Pen Set which cost me less than ten bucks. You have to dip to replenish the ink and I find that makes me a little more methodical with my lines. Using a little cup and some water you can create a nice grey which paints in like water color. It’s all pretty simple but I realllllly like the way it looks on paper.

The life drawing classes in the ruby room are going well and it’s giving us a good excuse to keep the doors to the gallery open. Stop by and join us Tuesday nights at 7:00 if you want to do some drawing. The cost is $10 and we usually do about fifteen one minute gesture poses and then several longer poses.

So far I really suck at the short poses but I feel like I’m picking up on the longer ones. I’m also getting a fair amount of doodling done between poses and it comes a lot easier after trying to draw something realistically.

If I found a magic wish fish I wouldn’t use it to turn myself into a mighty centaur.

I just don’t understand the fascination some people have with centaurs.

For this comic I swiped the reflection from something gabe was doing in his work. Also you’ll notice the light bloom effect from yesterday’s color image is something I picked up from there too.

Centaur Comic

We had a moustache party Friday night. I have to give the award for best stash to Alli who knitted hers in about ten minutes before the party started.

The image on this post came from my run through a Photoshop tutorial that uses some simple tricks to convert photos to sketches. There’s a subtle difference between talent and trickery in digital art and I guess it’s good to have a little of both on your palette but it sort of made me feel guilty because it was so easy and I didn’t actually do any real drawing.

Original photo -> B/W Sketch -> Colorized Sketch

Update - Alli posted about the Moustache madness on Knitosaurus.

We’ve started holding life drawing sessions at the Ruby Room on Tuesday nights. I’d never done any life drawing sessions before tonight but now that naked people are prancing around my office I thought I’d give it a try. I started out by doing a couple horrible sketches of Sarah sitting at her desk. I was a little disheartened and almost decided not to go to the session but I forced myself to sit down again and I had better luck with a self portrait.

When the session with the model started I chucked out the pencils and grabbed my tablet pc. I’ve become really comfortable drawing on it and I only wish it had a bigger surface area and rice pudding dispenser. Here are some of the sketches from the session:

Sketch 4, Sketch 5, Sketch 8, Sketch 9, Sketch 13, Sketch 15, Sketch 16, Sketch 17, Sketch 18, Sketch 19

The model turned out to be a friend I camped with when I was in Whitehorse a few weeks back.  Too bad my cartoon of John looks more like him than any of my sketches but I was still pretty proud of my work towards the end… And then I looked around the room and saw what some of the others were drawing. Damn. I have a long way to go.

A few weeks back I ran leg six of the Klondike Road Relay for team Unibrow. I had kickass teammates. The highlight of the trip for me was when Dave missed his handoff because he was busy making trouble in the port-a-pottie. We started hollering for him and he came busting out at full speed while hiking up his drawers. I expected him to show up at the end of the race with some toilet paper stuck to his shoe.

Here are sketches I did of some teammates while on the road: Dave’s portrait, Dave in the shitter, John Leo, Elsbeth tossing the shocker, Seamus at the wheel

Here are my stats for the race:

Distance: 16 Miles
Total Time: 02:08:43
Pace: 00:08:02
MPH: 7.5

I’m heading out to run the Klondike Road Relay tomorrow and then I’m off to Washington and Oregon for a week and a half. Should be some good adventures ahead. I’ll try to keep up on my drawings while I’m gone. It’ll be good to get out and stretch my legs.

Butterfly Comic

I generally like to err on the side of not getting myself killed but airport security is a complete joke and it’s only going to get more absurd. What happens when someone realizes we have all kinds of trains, schools, churches, and football stadiums just waiting to get blown to bits? Do we get to go through the whole process there as well? Won’t it eventually be easier to just strip search us on the way out the door in the morning?

There’s a war going on between security and freedom. We can’t have both unless we compromise.

Airport Security Comic