Tea-bending

I love being silly in the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender. My Avatar persona wouldn’t be someone who is badass and can fight. Instead, it’s a girl from the Northern Water Tribe who, through a little teamwork with her friend from the Fire Nation, has perfected the art of making good tea using bending. Avatar (c) the wonderful Mike and Bryan.

Fanart Tuesday!

I could seriously write essays on why Avatar: The Last Airbender is one of the greatest shows of all time. Of all time. Doing so would simultaneously make me revere the creators and hate M Night Shymalamafailsauce for bombing the movie so spectacularly. But this is an art blog, so… I made art. I’ve been experimenting with semi-realism a lot, but drawing real people bore me. Drawing fictional people are more fun.

I am one of those girls who ship Zuko and Katara. As to Toph and Sokka, no, not really, but they were fun to color. Aang, Mai, Azula and Ty Lee remain sketches until I figure out something new to do with them. Maybe I will paint them in Photoshop.

sketchy sketches:

Expect more Avatar art along with my usual mumbo-jumbo!

All In A Day’s Work, Character Redesigns, Fanart, etc

I do not know about you, but I learned my manners really fast growing up. Some people, it seems, never do, as shown by today’s comic. Yes, this did happen at work. For anyone who works or has worked in retail, I’m sure you’ve all felt the same way:After these awful, over-entitled housewives bitched me out for trying to do my job right and stormed out, I got upset for all of three seconds before I realized that while murdering them in real life was a felony, murdering them in comics is perfectly acceptable. Upset mood instantly evaporated as I started envisioning all the horrible things that could happen. Art is the best form of catharsis!

And here are some not-so-psychotic drawings.

I started reading over this old novel my friend and I had written together in high school, and wanted to do a little character redesign with my IMPROVED ART SKILLZ.

Harry Potter, why are you so mean to Kiki? (though to be honest I should have probably drawn Malfoy instead)

I love witches. I think I will also be doing a series of “Influential Witches” illustrations.

That’s all for now! Expect lots of updates, as my work has a great scanner. Cheers!

winter break shenanigans

hello!

I’m terribly sorry I haven’t been updating as regularly as I would like. One would think that winter break, of all things, would prompt more frequent updates! But no, alas.Being home in Connecticut made me sluggish and sleepy, and all I wanted to do was eat and sew things (which I did… more on that in a bit). So while I spent my two weeks home being crafty and the last few weeks being productive (going to work, buying art supplies with Christmas money, painting and doodling incessantly, finding inspiration in all sorts of places) this blog still remained neglected.

Well, I’m blowing off the cobwebs.

I have really gotten into Lolita fashion lately, and while three-hundred dollar dresses are lovely, they are also three-hundred-dollar dresses, to be saved up for and cherished forever. But definitely not garments to be bought on a regular basis. But they are all so pretty! What is a girl to do? Make one, of course. I was lucky enough to score this $5 Charlotte Russe, sweetheart-neckline basic black dress off the clearance rack at the mall, and with a couple yards of fabric, some lace and buttons, turned it into this (also pardon my holey stockings) :

But wait, there’s more! I am also crocheting a sweater to go with the dress, because, as you can see, the cardigan I have on in the photo is too long and doesn’t compliment it in the best way. More on that when I finish.

Now, for actual drawings. I’ve been painting quite a bit:

This was watercolor layered on over Micron pen; I went over it again after I put the colors on to make those black lines nice and crisp.

I really like dry-brushing as opposed to wet brush layering– maybe that just means I’m a terribly impatient person, but I also like the way colors come out when you slather on the shades.

And here are two not-so-recent paintings from the summer that I haven’t scanned and uploaded until now:

I think my drawings of dead people have gotten a little more refined, don’t you?

till next time (hopefully it won’t be over a month!)

cheers,

Wendy

I can’t really photograph things but I can draw them!

So you guys have seen the works-in-progress– the park and the line drawing from two days ago. I guess I got a little carried away and decided to color and add onto this composition!

I am very fond of these characters, named Sanura and Tamus, who are childhood friends and later fall in love. It’s the kind of story I visited over and over again in high school, each time in a different setting.

here’s a close up of some of the “photos”:

(it’s untinted. For the above one I wanted kind of an old photo kind of feel, from before digital cameras and people still did film)

and I did end up using the park as part of the background for this one:

Twenty Minute Doodles

It came as another one of those midnight flashes of “GO GO GO GO GO”, where you can’t help but be super productive and then curse yourself as you are supposed to be getting up at a reasonable hour. But since it’s summer, and it’s a weekend, all that went to hell. Last night what turned into a quick exercise in keeping my tablet fingers flexible became a “hey I’ll do requests for people to comment on this facebook status update–you and something you can’t live without.”

I read about this self-discipline technique that Sarah Wilson blogged on a week or two ago, and (naively perhaps) didn’t feel that it applied to sketching in the same way. She writes about writing in thirty-minute bursts, that once you’re in the zone nothing matters but productivity–forget editing, crossing out, reading back. That’s great, I thought, I’ll try it next time I write. But not when I draw–drawing is always a meticulous process for me, one where I constantly edit the anatomy because it’s wonky, or end up scrapping if the pose isn’t great.

Last night, however, I became less focused on all of that. I forced my perfectionist brain to let go of all the “those fingers look a little weird” “that arm’s off” and instead worked on getting the “feel” of the drawing–of the personality of the subject. These five drawings (four requests + a doodle of myself) were the result. Each of them only took twenty minutes and were done at 300 DPI on 2×4 canvas in Photoshop. They’re a bit rough and raw as far as refinement goes, but it was a great exercise in taking personality from this incorporeal thing to a drawing, as well as teaching myself to ink fast. Fast fast fast.

I’m working on some new projects–business cards, setting up shop, and doing a short comic for a magazine. Stay tuned!

Water under the bridge

I haven’t done a colored picture in quite awhile! And I haven’t done perspective… ever!

GoogleSketchUp is a great program for graphic novelists/comic artists/everyone who ever has struggled with perspective, because it allows you to import 3D models that other people have made or to make your own, and allows you to rotate and view from all different angles. It’s super helpful and makes for much more dynamic perspectives than I have been using thus far. SketchUp7 is free to download, and I encourage anyone and everyone to go download it and watch your perspective magically improve. You import the model as a JPEG file and scale it accordingly. I traced over mine with the pen tool and added some oomph with the tablet, but it’s great if you’re bored and want to do a little freehand sketching as well. Just pull up whatever model you want to use and draw away. It also allows you to make your own buildings and 3D models, but I haven’t played with it enough yet to come up with anything good. You can bet that I’ll be looking to this a lot in the future though!

yesterday was my friend Kieran’s birthday, so I decided to draw him something and practice with the SketchUp modeling. this was the result:

sunshine on a cloudy day

This weekend was impossibly beautiful, so I took my sketchbook onto the porch, set it up as stable as I could get it and took better-lit photos of my new watercolors. Sunlight has a tendency to over-expose, but it wasn’t all sunny all the time. A few clouds were good for the quality. I prefer photographing to scanning paintings, and I think I’m getting a little better at my lighting and angling. Here’s hoping.

I’m excited to get back to New York on Monday afternoon. Connecticut is lovely and quaint (and there’s a peace that comes from being at home), but there’s something about being in the middle of a crowd on a sunny day in Washington Square Park that makes painting more fun.

Being back at home also makes me nostalgic for high school times. The background is based on the senior walk at my old high school.

This little girl is Rosalie, a character from my short story “Practical Alchemy”:

A girl in some tall grass with a bunny at her side. I was just playing with different methods of shading, the darks first this time. I’m pleased with how her dress turned out.