If you guessed sharkskin suit, you are correct. Give yourself a cookie–you deserve it. Another practice piece in watercolor crayon:

Now that’s more like it. Not great by any means, but I feel like this piece has got a little more substance to it. Sketched lightly in pencil, colored with watercolor crayon, and inked over with a Sakura Micron (the signature was written with a Sakura brush pen). I wasn’t crazy about how the thick line turned out on the previous piece, so I decided to use a thin line over the colors–a technique often utilized by someone who actually knows what he’s doing. If I could change one thing on this one, I would have blended some blue into the suit to unify the whole color scheme.

These past two have been an interesting exercise… relaxing too, in their own way. Hopefully I’ll be able to fit a few more of these in.

Hello there goldfish-rendered-by-me, what do you think of the quality at which you were rendered?

Junk! Junk, you say? Yeah pretty much.

I felt the urge to experiment with watercolors this past weekend, but all I had were watercolor crayons, and this is what I came up with. First of all, watercolor crayons are, in my opinion, big time cheating. The reason watercolor is tough, is because you have to be able to control/predict the flow of it–but at the same time, you have to go with the flow (literally). At least, this is my understanding of the matter. With watercolor crayons, you just put the color where you want it, and blend it with a wet brush–it takes some control, but not like real watercolor.

This piece was very lightly sketched in pencil (basically I just indicated its silhouette), colored with watercolor crayon, and the black lines were laid down afterwards, with a Sakura brush pen. Clearly, it was rendered without looking at reference of any kind. I’m just practicing, so I did this piece on a scrap of Strathmore watercolor paper–and you can see a vertical crease that goes through the tail.

I enjoy these experimentations, even though the results are sometimes less than spectacular. I’ll post watercolor crayon experiment #2 on Friday, which turned out a bit better, in my opinion.

I was planning on painting at least one more noir archetype (or noirchetype, as I like to call it), with a Girl Friday as the subject. And as a matter of coincidence, my long-time crony Gavin commented, “I think you should finish off the series with a “good girl” in yellow”–so who am I to disappoint?

In my opinion, this piece is back on track after the previous one. Better contrast, bolder strokes, not so fussy. I actually tried out some backgrounds for this one, but everything I came up with seemed to distract from the Girl Friday herself, so I decided to leave it as is. As with the other noirchetypes, this one took about two hours from start to finish. Again, I’m unsure whether I’ll do more of these, but this certainly has been a welcome break from the nerdy grind. But don’t fret, fellow nerds, I’ll get back to the mega-dorky stuff soon enough (some of it is in-progress as we speak).

Not all at once, but over the course of 6 meals. Here’s the breakdown:

Tuesday (lunch@ Tacos Por favor):

1 carne asada taco

2 chorizo and cheese tacos

1 chicken taquito

Tuesday (dinner@ Tito’s Tacos):

5 beef tacos

Wednesday (lunch@ Tacos Por favor):

1 carne asada taco

2 chorizo and cheese tacos

1 beef taquito

Thursday (dinner@ Tito’s Tacos):

4 beef tacos

1 bean/beef/cheese burrito

Saturday (lunch@ Coppelia’s Bakery & Cafe):

2 beef tacos (soft)

2 chicken tacos (soft)

2 chicken empanadas

1 slice of tres leches cake

Sunday (lunch@ Coppelia’s Bakery & Cafe):

4 beef tacos (soft)

1 beef empanada

2 beef flautas

1 slice of tres leches cake

In case you haven’t picked up on it yet, I highly recommend both Tacos Por Favor, Tito’s Tacos, and Coppelia’s to anyone living in the Los Angeles area.

Even while I was painting this piece in Photoshop, I was still desperately craving tacos. I decided that 23 was probably a good place to stop for the moment, and instead just dreamed of tacos while eating yogurt and granola. This piece took me about an hour.

ME WANT FOOD!

I’m continuing to build a generic archetypical noir cast. Here’s a soot-faced street urchin:

I feel like my paints got too fussy on this one, not enough bold strokes. And the contrast stinks! Also it was meant to be less dingy and a bit more green. Oh well…

I’m not sure if I’m going to do more of these–we’ll see if the weekend washes me back to nerdy shores, or if I continue on this path a bit longer.

An equally noir-ish femme fatal to go with last week’s hardboiled detective.

100% digital, just like the last… probably took me about an hour and a half. Too long for a practice thingy, but as I’ve said, I’m quite slow at coloring.

… but hardboiled nonetheless. Just a little practice painting (in Photoshop) of a random, nameless, sardonic private detective. Probably a tangential subconscious sideffect of borrowing The Thin Man (both the book and the movie) from Ren:

I feel like I might be a little burnt out on my usual fan-art fare? I still have an unlimited number of pieces that I want to draw and post, but I just can’t seem to get it together these days… maybe a few more of these painting exercises will do me good. We’ll see–my muse is capricious! I call her Blogonia.

._.

Josh and I were chatting over the internets through the miracle of modern technology, and I drew this kunoichi with a program built into the IM program:

I added the type in Photoshop, naturally. I admit, this post is at least partially motivated by laziness… but on the other hand, I am genuinely happy with how this doodle came out. It’s nice to bust out something spontaneous and simple every now and then, without all the planning, nerdy research, and pointless attempts at perfectionism.

Drawn for the charming young offspring of an old friend:

A rare foray into traditional media–loosely sketched with a blue pencil, inked with a brush pen, and colored with a random assortment of color pencils.