Have Sketchpad-Will Travel

It's warmed up a little bit in the last few days, enough that I can take off my gloves and do some quick sketching on the bus without having my fingers feel like they're going to fall off...

Shading studies

Here are some ink doodles I took into Photoshop, playing around with light and shadow:

Btw, I love the new Sharpie pen with the rubber grip. Fantastic drawing tool.

I've been spending my down time reading up on illustration blogs and tutorials, just trying to soak up some knowledge. However, I haven't done much in the way of trying to apply that knowledge, so that's a goal of mine right now.

Yoshiyuki Takani, Master Robot Painter

I've been a fan of Yoshiyuki Takani's artwork since I was a kid... I never connected the man's name to his work until today, when I read an entry on Felix Ip's blog. Since the 60's, Takani has been renowned for his paintings adorning the boxes for plastic models of tanks, planes and mecha from anime like Macross, Votoms, Panzer World Galient-- pretty much anything with a robot in it, he painted. His dynamic illustrations gave robots real weight, making it easy to imagine these hulking machines bounding around with a tangible vitality.

I managed to cull a couple examples of his artwork from the web:

Old man nap

Haven't been drawing in a while, been a bit too preoccupied... Sitting on the bus this morning, I got hit with the notion of doing a quick drawing; at first I was all like, Nah, I don't feel like it, but then the guilt set in-- You really should be drawing more, now's as good a time as any.
Whipped up a sketch of an old guy sitting in front of me, and refined it somewhat afterwards. I felt that I overdid it, as I'm often wont to do, so this version is actually a couple steps back. Walking away from a painting before it's pushed too far is something I really need to work on.

Robot b&w sketches

Freehand sketches with thin-tipped Sharpie and one of those India ink calligraphy pens:

I think for the moment I'm going to go back to the basics (again... and again, and again), working in black and white and grayscale, really try and get comfortable with value and form...

Blade-bot

An exercise in Colors, intentionally working dark, trying to play with light and shadow. Also experimenting with letting some underpainting show through... While I really like working with the textured brush, it's so easy to overdo it; I need to work on finding the right balance.

Zap-bot

Messing around with the new official v1.1 release of Colors! for DS, a freeform painted robot doodle:

Unfortunately, I'm not able to post it to the online Colors gallery due to a glitch-- the suspicion is that it's data corruption coming from either the microSD card or the flash cart. I'll have to test it out on another spare microSD I've got; otherwise I'll have to shop around for a new flash cart...