SJV Random Drawings

[Stewart Vernon]

I doubled-up again... First the 7x10-inch comic backing board hand-drawn Santa closeup:



Then I did a completely digital vector render from that baseline:



I like my cleaner lines and colors in the digital version. I think I did a better job on the hand-drawn version though... except for not having a good flesh-colored marker so I cheated a bit with that.

It's one of those rare times when both versions ended up looking pretty similar. Also, I drew these with no reference... which is probably why Santa looks a little younger than perhaps we usually envision him.

[Stewart Vernon]

In honor of Carrie Fisher's unfortunate passing, I've been seeing lots of Princess Leia drawings, and I decided to do a quick one myself.



Hand-drawn, obviously. I decided not to make a digital version this time around.

[Stewart Vernon]

Okay, so I didn't draw this as such... or at all really... I could have, but figured an actual photo sold the joke better. I just wanted to post it here because I thought it was funny and I figured folks here might appreciate the South Park + Flash mashup in the gag.



I now also have a nice little Barry Allen floating head that I can do all sorts of things with

[Stewart Vernon]

Another non-drawn thing... that I couldn't find on the Internet, so I had to make the joke myself... a little Independence Day movie poster parody in honor of today's Presidential Inauguration.



Also, more floating heads for my random collection of weird things to digitally manipulate

[Stewart Vernon]

Something for my blog... time for another simple animation to celebrate the hit counter. My hits haven't come as quickly in recent months, unfortunately, because I've had a lot of down time between several rounds of various illnesses and some lack of Internet access... or I would have reached 30,000 hits much faster than this. Technically, not there yet... but anticipating it within a day or two so wanted to get the animation created and uploaded ready to be blogged.



I've been building off each previous milestone's animation. Don't know how long I will keep doing this, it could get out of hand at some point... but I like having the whole thing keep growing.

[Stewart Vernon]

Posted these in the Lettering forum as well since they are logos...

Playing around with logo recreations and parodies again... First the real Cheers logo:



And my slightly rude parody version:

[Stewart Vernon]

I'm going to be doing sketch cards for this year's Island Dreams set, so that's a cool new thing! Still coming up with ideas for the Mardi Gras theme, but as part of my process I often work up quick/dirty ballpoint pen concept sketches. Some are better rendered than others, as I work out my ideas. Anyway, this is a more complete than usual one, though certainly not without flaws.



My sister is a big fan of ragtime music, and Scott Joplin in particular... so she ID'ed this immediately. It's a tentative connection from ragtime to Mardi Gras... but one theme I'm considering are some famous musicians cards as part of my submissions... so I started with Mr Joplin.

Actual sketch cards would be rendered a bit tighter and would be colored. This was literally probably 10 minutes of doodling so I'm actually kind of proud to have doodled something reasonably decent that quickly.

[Saul Haber]

Nice job on the Member Barry's and the Trump Independence Day. Great expression on our prez, there.

[Stewart Vernon]

Thanks, Saul. I had at least a couple of Facebook friends who are Trump supporters who claimed to not get the joke.

[Stewart Vernon]

Something new I worked on Friday night and into this morning... just in time for April Fool's Day! A movie poster parody for Ghost in the Shell, more based on the original anime than the recent live-action version.



I was surprised to not find anything like this on the 'net already, and I thought for sure this would have been a thing already.

[Stewart Vernon]

I'm going to finally start using my Youtube channel that I've had for a while now. Did a quick funny thing just to make sure I could post a video. It's a video because I needed an audio track to go with the still image I constructed in Photoshop to make the parody...

Lou Gehrig, The Thinker...

[Stewart Vernon]

Another practice pre-drawing... quick pen-sketch in preparation for my Island Dreams sketch card submissions. I haven't put pen to actual card stock as yet... still making decisions and concept sketches... but this one is more complete of a doodle than usual so I decided to post it like I did earlier.



Dr John has more of a direct musical relevance to the Mardi Gras theme than my earlier Scott Joplin sketch... but I may end up doing several in this vein.

[Stewart Vernon]

More ballpoint concept practice... this time nobody in particular... just a beaded woman.



I realize the more I do hand-sketches in pen that can't easily be corrected, that I have a strong classic MAD magazine influence on my natural style. Works really well for caricatures, but I don't always want to do a caricature.

When I'm working digitally I can fix this much easier. Obviously if I were doing anything more than a doodle, I would be working in pencil and fixing this sort of thing before I go to inking... but that's part of why I do these doodles in pen so I can see what comes naturally AND try to re-train myself on things I want to correct.

The cheek shading is a mistake of the pen that I tried to turn into makeup... and you just can't do that with ballpoint!

[Stewart Vernon]

Getting a little closer to what I want here... but the ballpoint pen doesn't always do what I want it to do! Her right arm went a little wonky and the face is still not quite what I want... but I'd be able to fix all that if I were doing the pencil sketch first. I can't do detail work with the ballpoint on this scale (2.5x3.5 in) so things like the eyes end up being larger than I want.

Also, some of the hard black/blue lines would actually be darker shading colors instead of black since I'll be working with color on the real cards.

[Stewart Vernon]

Scaling up a little gives a little better result. Can't fit much more than a head on at this size, but it's more proportional to the level of detail I can control with the ballpoint pen.

Shading would still be improved with markers and color, though... but that wasn't the point of all these exercises.