SJV Random Drawings

[Stewart Vernon]

Doubling up yet again... Inktober Days 22 and 23, more sketch cards!

Day 22 was the Wolfman, while Day 23 is Dracula... both inspired by the classic Universal Monsters versions.

[Stewart Vernon]

Inktober Days 24 and 25, still working the Universal Monster inspired sketch cards...

Day 24 was the Mummy, based on Boris Karloff.
Day 25 is the Invisible Man





I had to strongly resist the urge to just draw a pair of shades and nothing else for the Invisible Man

[sevans]

For the Invisible man you should have just drawn the background.

[Stewart Vernon]

Originally Posted by sevans

For the Invisible man you should have just drawn the background.

I thought about all manner of ways to cheat on him... from floating shades and nothing else... to even a black card with just my signature

[Stewart Vernon]

I fell behind again... but I am trying to catch up!

Days 26-28 are more sketch cards...

Day 26 was Leatherface
Day 27 was Jigsaw
Day 28 was supposed to be Elvira, but I kind of feel like I accidentally drew some other attractive woman cosplaying Elvira instead because it really doesn't look like the actual Elvira as much as I'd hoped.

[Stewart Vernon]

Finished! I made it all the way through Inktober 2017, even if I didn't manage to post the files here every day... so here's the final three Days 29-31!

Day 29 was the Universal Phantom of the Opera
Day 30 was Leprechaun (the creepy scary one)
Day 31 is a Female Zombie

[Stewart Vernon]

Been tinkering with these since late in the month of October... finally decided to be done with them yesterday.

I had drawn the classic EC trio of hosts as sketch cards back during Inktober and I decided at some point to revisit them digitally. I wanted cleaner, as close to reproduction of the original style as I could, versions that were vector format (and thus essentially infinitely scalable) to play around with on other things in the future.

Here is the fruit of those efforts on and off the last few weeks. On the left are colored versions, and on the right are black and white. Technically the black & white ones are transparent, not white, which means I can put any color or style of background behind them for a range of effects.

[Stewart Vernon]

Wow, I haven't posted in even longer than it felt like! Maintaining my Friday the 13th tradition since 2014... here's something hand-drawn from earlier today.



Bender seems to be a kindred spirit to Jason, no?

[Stewart Vernon]

Some commentary... so, this was an illustration inspired by Joseph Michael Linsner's Dawn character and Sarah Rafferty from the USA show, Suits.

I think I rendered a decent female face here, but it looks nothing like Rafferty, so nobody would know I was using a photo of her as reference. This could be good or bad. Good if I was just using her for reference to get general facial features... but bad if I really wanted the pic to look like her specifically!

Also, the hair got away from me. I'm getting better at noses and mouths... but still kind of sucking on hair sometimes. I have trouble getting onto the paper what is in my head... but I'm working at it.

This one is all pencil, on Canson 9x12-in 98-lb paper. I decided from the go that I was not only hand-drawing this one, but going to "finish" it with just the pencil... no ink or colors.

I'm actually pleased with a lot of this... but I still need to keep working at my hand-drawing to catch up with what I can do digitally.

[cesare2009]

imho

if you're going for a likeness, or a realistic representation of a face.....you have to pay closer attention to the forms of the face...really close attention

my impression is that you look at the reference and then approximate what you think you saw. Eyes are not really shaped like that for instance.

There are general guidelines about how different parts of the face are shaped and constructed, you might benefit from looking at some anatomy books.

Her hair is the least successful part of the drawing. The shapes are too large, and frankly dont really look like hair. take a look at how others draw hair.

You seem to have gotten confused about the lighting, you highlights are inconsistent and dont help define the shapes either

The shape of the face is nice though, and despite what I've pointed out, she is pretty.

[Stewart Vernon]

Originally Posted by cesare2009

imho

if you're going for a likeness, or a realistic representation of a face.....you have to pay closer attention to the forms of the face...really close attention

my impression is that you look at the reference and then approximate what you think you saw. Eyes are not really shaped like that for instance.

There are general guidelines about how different parts of the face are shaped and constructed, you might benefit from looking at some anatomy books.

Her hair is the least successful part of the drawing. The shapes are too large, and frankly dont really look like hair. take a look at how others draw hair.

You seem to have gotten confused about the lighting, you highlights are inconsistent and dont help define the shapes either

The shape of the face is nice though, and despite what I've pointed out, she is pretty.

Thank you for the comments! Agree with everything you said too, but for clarity of my intent... I wasn't trying for realism. Sometimes I do, I'd like to get better at that as well, but usually what I'm going for is more cartoon than realism. I'm just not aiming for hyper-exaggerated cartoon. So... the face, for instance is close to what I'm aiming for in style. Not realistic, but not overly cartoony either. I still need to practice to be consistent.

That said... it should still be possible for my semi-cartoon version of a face to resemble the reference more than this one does. I can definitely do it too, just not with consistency by hand. On the computer I can tweak until my heart's content and get it right more easily. By hand, I'd erase a hole in the paper before I get it right sometimes... so sometimes I just quit while I'm ahead and figure I at least got a pretty face of some woman out of the effort

The hair. Yeah, I knew while I was working it that it was all over the place. It isn't moving like the hair in my mind was moving... I absolutely mixed up the lighting highlights, but by then it was already off where I wanted it to look. It looks more like a plastic "mask" of tentacles than it does hair really.

Hair is a weakness too. Sometimes I get lucky. I need to scan and post a quickie pen sketch I did before doing this one. It is really rough, and yet when I look at it, rough as it is, the hair looks much better and comes closer to even getting the highlights right.

I have a combination of needing to improve certain skills AND needing to improve consistency on others. As they say, practice makes perfect. So I keep trying to practice whenever I can and I absolutely appreciate the feedback. It's also nice to know that I'm at least identifying a lot of the flaws myself so I know what I need to work on, just need to put that time into it.