Man-bot

The idea for this hit me one night in bed. Why do cool ideas always hit when I'm trying to sleep? Anyway, I got up and did a quick sketch so I wouldn't forget about it (how many ideas have I lost by not putting them down? I figured it out one night but didn't want to get out of bed to write it down). The next day I made this image in DS Colors!.

I like combining man and machine into a Manbot of some sort. I've drawn robot bodies with a person's head and people bodies with a robot head. This is the first time I put a human face on a robot head. It's pretty cool, conceptually anyway. It obviously needs some reworking, but I may need to practice a bit more before I tackle this one again.

Columny Thing

This is sort of an introduction, for you, to one of my other drawing staples:

These Columny Things

Several years ago a good friend gave me a copy of Juxtapoz magazine. It was the first time I ever saw "low brow" art that was done so incredibly well. I was hooked. That first one inspired me to work with color so I drew a segmented column with pastels. I really liked it so I wound up doing a bunch of stuff with that concept. Pretty soon it was the main thing in all my drawings. Now it's moved on from the main thing to one of the main things.

I drew this in Colors! I'm starting to get a better idea of how to use it and what I should be trying to do with my natural dispositions and what-not. I scribbled this one, but I'm getting better at making smoother color transitions, so keep your eyes peeled for a (slightly) better version of this one in the nearish future.

Sock Monkey. delirium.

Here is another image from Colors! I'm now playing with the idea of "sketching" with the stylus. The program is really pretty versatile and I'm learning a lot about using it and I'm enjoying using color (something I don't do a lot of in analog work because, well frankly, I suck at color).



"What," you may ask, "does 'Sock Monkey. delirium.' mean?" I don't know. I like to put words into my stuff. I generally go with things that sound good to me at the time. There may be some actual reason that my sub-conscious brain chose those words to sound good to me at that moment, but I'll be damned if I know what that reason is. Sometimes I choose words based on how long they are, or how they look on the page. Rarely do the meanings really have anything at all to do with why the word, words, phrase, what-not were chosen in the first place.

Robot from the DS

I've been using that Colors! program some more and I'm beginning to get a feel for it. Here is one of my 'bots.




It's pretty straight forward. Nothing much to comment on. I am enjoying working with the shading using the stylus. It's more like drawing than it is like working on digital images. In Photoshop (because I am using a mouse) I don't feel like I'm drawing. I love to draw so I miss that in my Photoshop stuff. With Colors! I get to draw digitally. Which is the only way I like working with color. (I'm not any good with color. Most of my drawings are pen and ink or pencil or charcoal.)

If you have a Nintendo DS and you're into the home brew thing, check out Colors! in the link section. And check out their gallery for some stuff you just wouldn't believe came from this little app!

Self Portrait

Fairly recently I acquired a Nintendo DS. Then I got a little drawing program for it called Colors!, a simple little program that is a lot of fun to use and quite versatile, especially for its size. So I've been playing with that.

Here is a self portrait that I did on it.




The program is capable of considerably more elaborate images than this one, I just like to do simple work. Of course, that's partially why I like the program so much.

I tried to use some of the features to make some shading, but I have no idea what the hell I'm doing so it didn't turn out great. Oh well, live and perhaps learn.