hardcover sketchbooks

You know those canvas, hard covered sketchbooks that Borders is always selling two for ten? They're actually pretty handy things to have. They paper grain is tolerable, the pages are sewn in, and you don't have to worry about losing the random keeper sketch you'll churn out from time to time.

I wouldn't use them for the longest time. I owned them but I never dared to use them for the longest time. They were too permanent. In a regular sketchbook you can scratch out a terrible mess, rip it out and have the pleasure of balling it up and making a 3 pointer from across the room into the trash can. Not so with the hardcover ones. You draw something poopy, it's there. For good.

There's also the small matter of leaving sketches for what they were meant to be - sketches. Sometimes I want to take every little blip that I draw and turn it into a full blown digital painting that has a ten paragraph backstory. It's hard for me to not make a big, finished project out of everything. It's probably just me chasing some sense of accomplishment.

To make a long story short, I'm getting better at just leaving things alone as the meaningless blips they were meant to be. And I keep them in bound sketchbooks. And sometimes I can go back into those books and find some mildly helpful stuff. Like this fast study I did on different anime-style eyes. You can play name-that-anime if you want. Sorry if this isn't making any sense at all. I'm watching TV while rambling.

Another boring art day

Yep, more thumbnails and rough sketches. I hate layouts with a passion, by the way. It's got to be my absolute least favorite part of making a webcomic - sitting down and doing a rough design of the page.

So instead of including any of that messy stuff, here's a painting I did about a month ago on my ipod touch with the Brushes app. I really like that program and I'm thinking of joining the flickr group for Brushes users.


In other news, I've been deliberating on a question for Skipping Tomorrows. I ended up liking the story a lot more than I thought I would - initially I started it so I could learn by trial and error about webcomics. I never intended for it to take me this long to finish. I really, really hate the old art and for the last couple of years I've wanted very badly to take the whole thing down and redraw the comic from scratch.

Well, I've decided not to.

I seriously have been agonizing over this question for a while now. I even wrote to a very well known and successful webcomic artist about my deliberation. She was kind enough to write back and equally kind enough to give it to me straight. I just need to push through this and finish and move on. I have other projects that are just bursting at the seams at this point and I'm very excited about sharing them with my readers. But ST will be finished before I upload anything else.

As always, thanks for reading! When I have a spare weekend I'm going to try to move the blog part of things over to my site so you guys won't have to click 15 different things to find this.

I did boring art today but ... LOOK! KITTENS!!

Yep, I got to hang out with these 3 little guys today. I don't have a washer and dryer of my own so I drive to my parents house. Gretchen - my cat that lives with them, had kittens on Christmas day. They're pretty stinking cute.

Like I said in the title, all the artwork I did today was dull thumbnails and outlines. And rather than just have no post today, you guys get a very dark and low res cell phone video. Aren't you lucky?

Busy, here's some old stuff I did

No time to actually sit down and do a breather sketch today. But a late post is better than no post.

There's a fairly large, Plexiglas window at my place of work (my work that pays my bills, not the work of my soul :P) and my (awesome) boss wanted to have some festive stuff on them this year. I've never painted backwards before, so the autumn one is as hideous as it is simple. It was really weird painting details first, then working backwards.

None of these pictures will line up correctly, by the way. They were all taken in a huge rush on my crappy little phone camera and then slapped together in photoshop. But this will give you guys an idea of some of the actual painting stuff that I do from time to time. Painting without photoshop, who would have thought.




This is the winter scene that's currently still up. This one actually took me a long time - over 12 hours from concept sketches to cleaning up my brushes at the end. Don't mind my reflection(s).

ST page 158

I've been keeping track of my "warm up" sketches lately and I'd like to make a sort of sketch book off to the side. They won't be ST related very often, so I'm thinking of putting them up on DA. Kind of a sketch journal I guess. I'm too tired to put a gallery together tonight, but here's the one I did yesterday. Yay for colored pencils!

And this one is today's. It's my pally from WoW. You know ... the game I can't play right now. *sniff*



Oh yeah , one more thing ...

The next Skipping Tomorrows page is up. :P

http://www.hoodiegypsy.com/skippingtomorrows/manga/chapter12/158.html

Not Dead

Not dead, not fibbing about updating soon. Gotta go this second, though, late to class!