I am not a big fan of chemistry. I always prefer to stick with computers. But there is no escape from chemistry for me. The reason for this is that my wife did her undergraduate degree in Chemistry. That means I'm stuck with it for life. So instead of avoiding it, why not embrace it? Or at least use it to make cheesy puns for her:
(The caption reads "There is chemistry between you and me.")
Some web cartoonists have been experimenting with just that. Using video streaming services, they let you watch as they draw the following day's comic strip. I've already seen two artists trying this out: Scott Kurtz, from PvP, and Mike Krahulik from Penny Arcade. I think what they are doing is simply awesome. Watching a real pro doing all the computer drawing and editing is really useful for aspiring artists such as me. If you're interested, check out their live streams at: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/htmw for PvP and http://www.ustream.tv/channel/penny-arcade-tv for Penny Arcade. Of course, they probably won't be drawing at the time you click on the link, but you can still watch some of their recordings. You can also stay tuned to their respective blogs for announcements of drawing schedules. Be sure to give it a try!
As an aside, this is my 99th post. I've got some surprises coming up in my next post, so stay tuned!
I was going to post yesterday night, but there was no internet connection at my house. I felt almost useless, since most of my schoolwork also requires the internet. Anyway, this is the last post of this week of old drawings, which I hope you have enjoyed. Today I'll just show some miscellaneous drawings (and some that I just forgot to post in previous posts). Here we go.
This one is one of my favorite cartoons that I've made up. It's a lizard-like creature that subsequently appeared in many of my drawings (sometimes hidden in the background). His name is Jeraim, a variation of a name which I got from random searching in the Bible. The Bible is actually a fun place to look for strange names for your characters (not always for your children!).
Here is Jeraim in color next to a self-portrait. When this was drawn (in middle school), corduroy pants and Hawaiian shirts were in fashion.
You may remember from the comic strip drawings that I used to draw cartoons of my ninth-grade classmates. Here is one drawing with all of them in a skate park.
Going back to my anime-inspired era during middle school, here is a funny drawing. It has Pikachu doing some sort of Kamehameha thing, similar to Dragonball Z.
I showed a picture featuring "The Blue Flame" before, but here he is in color. Notice how even his hair is on fire.
As a Final Fantasy fan, I can't avoid drawing characters from this series. Here are the ladies from FF7.
This next two drawings are a bit more recent (less than two years ago). This first one is a cartoon representation of my Speed Team while I worked as an intern at IBM. They were a really cool bunch!
Finally, drawn during the same internship, as a suggestion from one of my teammates, here is XML Guy! For those of you who are programmers, notice his body tag in his chest (complete with surrounding arm brackets) and his extensible cape.
Well, that's it for this week. Someday I hope to show even older drawings from when I was in elementary school, which I have at my parents' house. I also hope to keep drawing some new ones, including the comic strips, which I have neglected this semester. But for now, I simply hope you have enjoyed this drawing week's posts.
Something I used to do a lot during middle school, which I believe helped me train my observation skills, was copy other drawings. When I say copy, I don't mean tracing. I would have the drawing I wanted to reproduce next to my blank piece of paper and try to draw it as exact as possible, sometimes scaling it a little. These drawings are some of my favorites, because the quality is much better than that which I can produce by myself. All of these drawings were done when I was in middle school:
I drew these rain forest animals from a How-to-draw book:
This car was from a video game magazine, probably from a Gran Turismo review:
From that same magazine, I drew this ninja, though I can't remember from which game it was. The original drawing was about two inches wide.
This one was from a Xenogears Strategy Guide. I never got to finish the coloring.
This last one is my favorite.I started inking it, but decided to ink a copy instead because I was afraid to ruin it. Although I'm not a Mortal Kombat fan, this drawing of Sub-Zero is just too awesome:
Although copying other drawings always results in high-quality drawings for me, I think I don't do them often because I prefer to work on my own creative skills. Someday, hopefully, I will be able to produce similar drawings all by myself.
I have always been a fan of dinosaurs. Jurassic Park used to be one of my favorite movies as a kid. And many of my earliest drawings are of dinosaurs. They are always fun and relatively easy to draw (no hair!). Here are some fairly recent depictions of dinosaurs.
I drew this one sometime during high school:
This one is also a classroom doodle during high school:
I drew these "ready to fight" guys during class too:
This is another of those few drawings that I have colored. Drawing all the scales on the dinosaurs and getting the colors for the lava right were really time-consuming.
This last one is a very recent one, drawn as a classroom doodle about a month ago.
As a bonus, here is a drawing that Lidia requested in the comments of my last post. It is another one of those single-panel comic strips I drew in high school. The title reads "The classroom before a test".
One aspect of drawing I have always liked is being able to tell a story. Ever since I was a little kid, I would draw stories (with my limited English vocabulary I would come up with names for characters such as Mr. Monkey and Mr.Squirrel). The stories were never really planned, so most of them took crazy turns or simply never got finished. Unfortunately, the older drawings are at my parent's house in Puerto Rico, so I will show ones from middle school and later. You may notice that the drawing quality is much lower. I would usually sacrifice quality for speed when drawing comic strips. If I tried too hard to make it look perfect, I would get discouraged before finishing the first page.
This first image is the first piece and chapter of a comic strip I drew during middle school featuring every one of the guys in my class (except for two that I was just never satisfied with how I drew them). This one lasted for about 6 pages. Bear in mind that the text is in Spanish.
In high school, I had to live at the during the week and had four roommates. I made up a comic strip while I was there where my roommates and I escaped from the school and some faculty members went after us. The chase took us through the mountains, to an underground secret base, and even to outer space. Once again, I made the story up as I drew, often not knowing myself what would happen next. Other students enjoyed reading my comic strip notebook and would especially enjoy seeing the faculty in action (always a reason for laughter). The first pages had horrible quality, but as people started asking for more, my drawings improved a little bit. Here is one early scene of "Room #4 Comics" (Cuarto Cuatro Comics, in Spanish, named after our bedroom's number), where we see our first confrontation with a teacher:
This scene has us in an elevator in an underground secret base:
Here is the faculty in a battle pose:
And this is where we escape to outer space (you may recognize the spaceship from a previous post):
The comic strip went on to have around 50 pages and nine chapters before the school year ended. I tried to continue on subsequent years, but I had lost the momentum I had gained with the original one. And the fact that half of my roommates had graduated and didn't bug me to read it everyday helped too.
I did, however, draw some single panel cartoons that next year of high school. I would post these weekly at the library's entrance. Here is an example. The residential teacher is making sure that no one is in other rooms after bedtime, which was a very common event at that school:
In college, I did not draw as many comic strips as I did in high school, but managed to squeeze one in every once in a while. Here is half of one I did as part of a handout for a school organization:
I hope you have been able to see at least some improvement over time. The ones I have drawn for this blog were pretty simple, but hopefully not too bad. I'll try my skills again for my 100th post which is coming up soon!
There came a time during middle school where most of my drawing inspiration came from anime. I started practicing drawing full-figured women with anime-style eyes and strong, bulky men (inspired by Dragonball Z, which I would watch every afternoon). All of these drawings, except the last one, were drawn during middle school.
Typical example of many of my drawings.
A lady character (one of few colored drawings).
Sword dude.
A trio of heroes I made up. They were (from left to right) the Blue Flame, the Green Flame, and the Yellow Flame. I often had trouble drawing faces, so sometimes, as in this drawing, I would just draw the bodies.
An unfinished drawing containing some of the characters that inspired my drawing style during my middle school era.
This one is from my first year of college. In all those years, my anime-drawing skills didn't really improve much.
Although this style of drawing is fun, it's still a bit too realistic (and consequently, harder to draw) for me. I always wanted to reach the level of superhero comic book artists, but that really takes a ton of practice. I think I enjoy more drawing comic strip style cartoons anyway.
I tend to enjoy drawing cartoons more than I do drawing realistic objects. Still, it really helps to try to do just that every once in a while. My attempts still don't look realistic enough, but they were not too bad. Here are a few (click on them to see a bigger picture):
My parents' house (I think I drew this in middle school and while at school from memory)
An office chair
A tree at my high school (I ended up drawing a cartoon anyway)
This last one I think is pretty cool. I built a lego submarine-type ship that I was really proud of. It didn't last too long, but I managed to capture it in a drawing from almost every angle before it got destroyed (probably by one of my younger sisters). I think I drew this in middle school.
Lego Ship
You may have noticed that none of these "realistic" drawings include humans or animals. That's because those are way too hard to draw. It's one of the reasons I prefer to draw cartoons. And it's why most of the rest of the drawings that I will be showing this week will be cartoonish.
Today I begin a week in this blog where I will go through some of my old drawings, mostly drawn from middle school to the first years of college. Drawing has been an important part of my life, although lately I have not had time to pursue this talent as much as I would like. I have always enjoyed the fact that I can put into visual form almost anything that pops up in my imagination. This creative side of me is probably what got me to transfer in college from Electrical Engineering to Computer Engineering, where I can put my imagination to better use.
I'll start the week with some pieces of art drawn in one of the best environments for drawing: the classroom. I have done a great deal of drawing during boring classes. And quite often these doodles actually turn out to be pretty good. Here are some that I like (from my high school and early college era):
Ant with Apple
Band (incomplete)
Sleeping (a self-portrait)
Surprised Student (the sort of thing that you come up with during class)
Doodle in the midst of boring Circuit stuff
More doodles
A cool Jamaican/Reggae dude
I hope you enjoyed today's drawings. Stay tuned for more throughout the week!