Inktober 2015

Last year I participated in the "Inktober" drawing challenge for the first time, and while I didn't get to fulfill the drawing-a-day goal, I did manage to generate a number of images that I liked. Here are my favorites (originally posted to my Instagram account):

Pit Stop

Joyride

Air Patrol

Mechanized Parkour Racing League

Arrivals and Departures

All of these pieces were drawn in a toned paper sketchbook, using a combination of pens, grayscale markers, and colored pencils. With each illustration, I tried focusing on worldbuilding and narrative, giving a glimpse of a larger story, which is something I feel these examples best exemplify.

Glare

Haven't done a painterly robot in a while, decided to revisit an old doodle in Sketchbook on the Galaxy Note 8, playing around with the smudge tool and layer blending modes. Lots of happy accidents with this one, I learned a few things about manipulating pixels, so all in all I'd say it was a successful exercise.

Mira's Bear in a Tutu

My daughter Mira asked me to cut out a crayon drawing that she did of "a pink teddy bear wearing a tutu" which I thought was fantastic:

I loved it so much that I had the urge to embellish the drawing, with Mira's permission, along the lines of "The Monster Engine" illustrations by Dave DeVries. I painted it up in Autodesk Sketchbook for Android on the Galaxy Note II with a Wacom Bamboo Stylus feel, and I'm pleased with how it turned out:

It was a fun exercise, one that I'll have to do again in the future.

Urban Cyborg

Whenever I take the bus home from work, I get the urge to doodle these urban cyborgs. This guy looks like he's in need of an upgrade...

Sketchbook Mobile app on the Galaxy Note II with a Wacom Bamboo stylus feel

With Mischief in mind...

So lately I've been messing around with a vector drawing/painting program called Mischief, and it's really interesting. Because the program is vector-based as opposed to raster, filesizes are small, and you can work within what they term an "infinite canvas". Mind you, even though the artwork is vector information, it's a proprietary technology (which is referred to as Adaptively Sampled Distance Fields a.k.a. ADF) that isn't handled the same way as Adobe Illustrator with splines and bezier curves, and as such can't output files useable by Illustrator. What you can do, however, is output layered Photoshop files at just about any size and resolution you want, up to a max width and height of 20000 pixels-- at 300dpi, that would translate to about 67 inches! I did notice that outputting a piece of art really small, say an inch high at 72dpi, introduces some odd artifacts, but I'm more likely to output a file bigger than smaller so I don't consider it an issue.

I've never really been comfortable drawing lineart with Photoshop, because I had problems with the quality of the linework. Mischief offers a freehand curve smoothing feature that takes care of that rather handily; I find that I genuinely enjoy drawing within the program, especially on a large Cintiq with multi-touch. It feels natural, it's just a really smooth experience overall.

Painting with Mischief, on the other hand, is still something that I think could use some work. The toolset is pretty barebones, and kind of reminds me of the early days of painting on the old homebrew app Colors! for DS. But I have no doubt the developers will get the program up to speed sooner than later.

Here's an attempt to create an illustration fully within Mischief:

Still a bit rough around the edges, but with a lot of potential, I'm really digging Mischief. At only $25 for both the Mac and PC version, it's definitely an affordable drawing and painting program worth checking out.

Autodesk Sketchbook Mobile

Autodesk just released their latest version of Sketchbook Mobile today, and what better way to commemorate a new drawing app than with a cyborg portrait?

I really appreciate all the new additions to the program, they've genuinely elevated the utility of my Galaxy Note 2 as a portable digital sketchbook. Things like selection tools, smudge brushes, gradient fills, and guides are warmly welcomed. Unfortunately, even if you already own the previous app Sketchbook Pro, you'll have to pay to upgrade Sketchbook Mobile in order to access its full feature set. Still, it's only a few bucks... For the cost of a comic book, I can't ask for much more.

At any rate, great app, available on iOS and Android.

Once more into the breach!

I was up again far too late working on this painting, one of those instances where I got lost in the flow:

Hardsuit 85
(A bit of trivia: the 85 is a nod to Robotech, which had 85 episodes and first aired in 1985.)

Tried to concentrate on a couple things in this exercise, with varying degrees of success:

• Contrast/1-2-3 read of form
• More detail in the light, less detail in shadow
• Unified color palette
• Working with more opaque paint, rather than building up transparent washes

Painted with the app Colors! 3D on my Nintendo 3DS XL. Here's a playback for your viewing pleasure:

Chrome Dome

I'd forgotten how fun it is doing these freeform paintings...

Concept ship

Here's an attempt at a concept art-style spaceship, using techniques I picked up while studying digital painting from various sources:

Considering it's the first time I've really tried this style, I'm pretty happy with it... I've read and watched a bunch of tutorials, and it's nice to finally put some of what I've learned into practice.