Sketch Of The Week: Fat Santa

Merry Christmas and other holidays, everyone!

Sketch Of The Week: Lady Superhero

This sketch is a bit old but I always liked the way it turned out. Believe it or not I didn't have any reference for this drawing. When I was drawing it I was just doing my best to use what I've learned about anatomy and figure drawing. I love the exaggerations of the form and the way the shapes interact with each other. Now if only I could apply this technique and knowledge to my finished work.

Color Planning

When creating an illustration, I have a bad habit of not planning my colors out in advance. Usually, I won't begin thinking about my color choices until I'm ready to color the image in Adobe Illustrator. This can be a bit of a problem because I wind up spending a lot of time trying to figure out what colors work well together and constantly tweaking them as I go. This is especially time consuming in Illustrator because every block of color or gradient is it's own separate shape with it's own properties. After all this extra work I usually wind up with a color pallet that is a bit different than what I had originally imagined.

So in order to put a stop to this waste of time and remain more accurate to my original visions, I've decided to start using Photoshop to plan out my color pallete. Photoshop makes it really easy to quickly lay down color with the Brush and Fill tools. It also has a lot of Adjustment features making it simple to change hue, saturation, color balance, and many others. Here's how I did it...


Using my pencils as a guide, I start by blocking in the shades. For an effective composition it's important to keep the shade of each color in mind. Each major shape should be distinguishable against the others. If the image reads clearly in black and white then the composition works.


I knew this illustration was going to be a night scene with some cool colors. Since I had already laid down the shades, this was a simple matter of colorizing the image. I did this by using the Hue/saturation option in the Adjustments menu and checking the colorize box. With the slighty warmer colors on the vampire and wolf, I did the same thing, moving the hue slider around to make the colors a little warmer.

Now, I can just save the image as a JPEG and place it in the illustrator file and use the eyedropper tool to pick my colors.

In the end this method of planning helped speed the process along and made the coloring process much easier.

Quick Comics: Really Tangled

Why did I, a GROWN MAN, go see Tangled? I don't know. Here's a comic based on that fine film/fairy tale.

Much like the secret comics I drew previously I drew this one really quickly. I'm thinking about doing quick comics like this more often, basing them on movies I've seen. It' s a rather enjoyable experience and it keeps my drawing hand limber. What do you think, would you like that?

Sketch Of The Week: Guardian Angel

Yes, I know Guardian is spelled wrong. My sketch book doesn't have spell check.

I'm sure a lot of you know some good Christian folks. I'm also sure that a lot of you know some over zealous, overly evangelistic, crazies who like to appoint themselves as your personal guardian angel. You know the type I'm talking about; The type of person that believes that it's their job as a Christian to warn you against the evils of everything you do or enjoy. I'm not talking drugs, sex, or rock an roll either. I'm talking about warnings against seeing Harry Potter or Twilight movies because they have been designed to fool us into thinking that evil things are good. This is the type of person that will very seriously tell you that the devil has had his hands all over your artwork, or that will flat out lie to a young girl, telling her that her favorite musicians practice satanic rituals in the studio to place curses on their listeners. This is the type of person that places a warm penny on a wall covered in latex paint and believes that the penny sticks there because of God's power.

Yes, indeed I'm sure many of you know a person like this. I, of course do not and any resemblance that this angel has to a person living or dead is purely coincidental!