Rushed today as an old artists friends are dropping by today, Alex Pardee of course i've known for years, and and a new guy, an artists Skinner who's work i've enjoyed for years, but never met in person yet.
Here's a few hands i doodled for the Second World's Art book, since I'm already compiling material for that one.
Here's a curious old wooden cup with a vintage Trout Ad on the side ~ this is just luck, but notice how at the bottom.. how the patterns on the wood swirl into the folds of the paper in the Trout ad? Too weird. I mean.. what are the odds of that happening? I didn't plan it, i just notice it afterwords.
I don't know why i got so got into crazy rendering this hand with a pen... must have been in a Way$hak mood.
Here's that curious effect where even with the same light on my drawing table, depending on how the camera catches the image, it either looks yellowy warm or colder blue. Not thebulb either.
Always a good idea to look at your own hand every once in a while and draw it. Course my vines aren't nearly this pronounced or visible. Or.... my last two fingers quite so distorted as these.
...and sometimes.. Grrrr ~ i just can't draw a hand at all.
So lemme try something else.
This will probably wind up being a nola drawing..
her face is really rough.. eyes totally simple so far.
wondering if i can pull of trying for keeping her simple oval eyes, but do a little shadow around the edges? Implying there's some skin folds those eyes are embedded in?
but for now let's juts finish her hair.
why not go for a dramatic swirl at the bottom?
okay, now i wanna *avoid* darkening her hair, for a change. Least at the bottom... keep her lower hair and figure light and diffused..
only get detailed up by her face...
or as detailed as i get on this one.. which is to say pretty damned simple. Pastels to wake me up a little. Breaks me of the color pencil-ink cycle i usually lapse into so often.
some warmer skin tone shades, crimson, vermilion,
maybe a little vandyke brown. some pale orange.. but not to much.
mostly intuitive choices.. possibly mistaken ones.
just seeing how they mix together. But outside of her eyebrows, nose and llips... i don't wanna get her too over-rendered.
So, it's getting there. I think the colored pencil hair and red-ish top is a nice contrast to the thicker more oily pastels on her skin. a little shadows around her oval eyes too..
kinda disturbing when you try to render Nola isn't it?
Kinda funny how often we see these round hallow eyes... Little Orphan Annie, Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbs.. i don't know why i'm so drawn to them.
Sometimes people ask me why i gave Dana and Nola dot or oval eyes... sometimes i revert back to 'normal' ones in a panel or two... but it is something that just makes characters seem ... more lost? vulnerable?
I remember one of the producers of the aborted Four Women movie ( back when there was one, which i was directing... a lifetime ago).. movie telling me how he never realized how much my round eyes made the cindy character's revenge against the rapists seem so much sympathetic, even than the other woman who had 'normal' eyes.
What do you think?
... is there something compelling about oval eyes?
