Okay, this Blog will follow the previous two others as everything written in them happened in the span of one day. The point of talking about and showing my successes and failures of that particular day is to show that despite how the day started with a less than ideal piece of artwork, I didn't give up but continued to push my limits of patience,concentration and skill. The Black Cat drawing gave me just enough of a boost that I decided to do a quickie Baroness pinup. Keep it simple and don't put too many lines on the page and see what happens.

For drawing women,less is the ideal way to go. Granted this version of The Baroness is slightly different than the one most people are accustomed to seeing but I still think doing this drawing was well worth the effort. If I try a type of artwork that I've never attempted before the most important thing is to learn from the experience. It doesn't hurt either if the artwork exceeds your expectation either.

The Baroness piece took about an hour and fifteen minutes, a new personal best for me. The tools I used were Sakura 01,03,05 and 1 Calligraphy pens, they are acid free, dry very fast and are very easy to work with. They are also very cheap to buy,last a long time and are disposable. I also used a B5 Speedball nib to fill in any large black areas. Speedball Super Black India Ink is my favorite Ink out there right now. I mix this type of ink with a cheap chinese no name brand of India Ink and this has worked great for me over the past few years. I know some artists might think this is sacrilege mixing two different inks together but I just follow my instincts when it comes to drawing. So far they have never been wrong.

This was a great day of creating for me, despite being heavily drugged with painkillers and anti-immflamatory pills. I also tried very hard to allow myself a certain amount of creative freedom and not forcing any one subject over the other but just going with whatever I felt like drawing at the time.

Rich.

Experiments part 2

Okay, so continuing directly from the last Blog.

Once I had finished the coloring of Indiana Jones and saw that I hadn't completely lost my feel for using watercolors, I took a small break and had a quick bite to eat, let the colors dry and try and see how the final image would look.

Once I finished eating and saw the final image, I continued drawing and took a longshot and drew a female character. Drawing women can be very tricky, too much detail and you age the woman, not enough can also have a negative effect. To a lot of people Adam Hughes is one of the best at drawing the female form so I grabbed a few covers that he did and tried to get a feel for what he was doing. After about 30 minutes of brushing up on cheesecake pinups I grabbed a Playboy too. I figured it couldn't hurt. I wanted to draw Black Cat from the Spiderman comics and wanted to make her as sexy as possible, maybe derobe her a bit. Make her sexy but not too over the top and make her crass. What I ended up with was more or less some cheesecake pinup work with a slight edge but the background seemed a bit bare...

Taking a few minute to let the ink dry, I walked away to drink some water and wash my face. Checked my e-mails for a few minutes and then came back and took another look at what I had done. I think I did a decent job but something was still missing. I put the image aside and went to work on another, working on the template for a Baroness image, which I'll show the completed image another time.

Now it's a few weeks later and I'm glad I stopped working on the Black Cat image because now I can go back and add in some color with a few adjustments to the background and overall image and yes I'm doing it on the original and not in Photoshop. Once I've completed the final image with the colors and reworked background I'll be showing it. Following my hunches I don't think this will be a failed experiment but the final image will be something completely new for me. Trying new things is good for your growth as an artist.

Rich.