These things evolve

Well, it was a busy weekend! It was nice and rainy and cozy and I got some drawing done. I have about 56 more drawings to do before Xmas arrives, so I hope this eye strain doesn't sent me to my fainting couch with a cool compress over my face. Maybe some Visine will help, and a new prescription for my glasses, which should be coming this week. Fascinating! Here we have a request for "an animal or a dinosaur." I chose dinosaur!

Then I had a request for a woman with bangs and a ponytail doing an "awesome asana," with optional inspiring yogic quote. Here I had to look through my yoga books to find a photo to base my sketch on. I always thought that Mira Mehta was an elegant model.

I dipped into Steve Ross's Happy Yoga to find a quote, which for some reason I attributed to "el Buddha," since writing "The Buddha" felt dumb. El Buddha has more pizzazz.

Now that I look at these two images side by side I see that I didn't crank her torso quite enough, and that the lettering gets off-line, but I'm still pretty happy with this one.

The next request was this: "I'm a brand new criminal defense attorney, how about something for my office the depicts me as a petite girl arguing victoriously in court in really, really good shoes." So there was no way I could avoid drawing people anymore. In fact, I had to draw a whole mess of them, as well as shoes.

Hoo boy, I tried. Can you tell I put in a Viking to distract you from the flaws in my figure drawing and draftsmanship? I woke up in the middle of the night last night thinking, "I can't send that out, it still needs help." In my sleep-deprived haze this morning I mis-remembered the description for this as "arguing victoriously in court wearing kick-ass shoes," so when I got back to my desk I penciled in the words KICK ASS, which nicely took advantage of her leg as the top of the K.

Though I am a little bit concerned that the person who wanted this is a kind, decent soul who would who will not want the word ASS in her drawing. Sigh.

Then I got to the request for "a nautical theme, I think ... wooden sailboat, narwhal whales and some kind of sea creature wearing a red 'jacques cousteau' hat." At this point I had opened up Kate Beaton's web site and decided I should try using the brush pen that I'd bought but never opened.

This was the other thing that kept me awake last night. I knew I needed to re-do it using a regular Micron pen, and then I changed it around a bit.

Then I was curious about how the lettering might look in black. All I had to fill in the letters was a Sharpie, which maybe isn't the most precise pen in the world.

I cleaned it up a tiny bit after taking its photo but it's back to Art Essentials for some pen guidance for me. I have to work the next couple of days but I'll post what I can, once I see what kind of progress I can make during my lunch breaks. Who needs to eat? Not me! The only sustenance I need is art! And the occasional bag of popcorn.