Drawing? What’s that?

Wow it’s been long since I’ve posted anything.  I guess that’s what happens when you start a full time job that happens to be overnights and you’ve spent the past few months adjusting to having almost no social life and having to sleep while the sun is up…

Anyways, I’m jumping back in and hoping to keep it up since I’ve now had plenty of time to adjust to my new schedule.  I decided to best place to start up again would be by drawing.  I recently received two wonderful books as gifts from my amazing fiancee.  Figure Drawing for All it’s Worth and Drawing the Head & Hands both by Andrew Loomis.  I decided to start with the head and hands so that when I moved onto the figure the head and hands would not be as intimidating.  I’m not that far in, but I have created some useful tools to help me understand the physical structure of the head (and they’re pretty funny looking, too!).

Here’s a photo of Drawing the Head & Hands and the two new drawing tools I’ve made:

Nerd Canvas EXPLOSION!

Some time last week I posted about a handful of 4″x6″ canvases I had purchased.  I originally intended to make one large collage with all the canvases, but 15 canvases was just too much.  This idea brewed a bit longer in my head and became much bigger.

Now there are going to be four collages with seven canvases per collage and each collage with have a theme.  The themes are: Games, Books, Cartoons, and Space Travel.  Today I worked on the Games collage which will include a D20, a Portal gun, a Super Mario Bros. fire flower, a Bioshock EVE Hypo and Adam extractor, a World of Warcraft Horde symbol banner, a Minecraft creeper, and a Diablo 2 Horadric Cube!  Here’s my current placement for the canvas:

Obviously I have not painted yet, but all the images are sketched out. The D20 is actually painted, but it was upstairs when I took this picture.  I can’t wait to start painting.

 

Cthulhu Screen is Nearly Half Finished.

Today’s art adventure involved the Cthulhu GM Screen.   The second to last layer of oil paint is on and it looks like water. The player’s view side now only needs the tiny boat for size comparison.  On the far right is the GM side of the front panel, it has the resistance table on it.  It got a blue border and will eventually get chart labels.

Ok, so it’s not the best picture, but florescent lights are not good for photographing shiny surfaces.  Small boat, labels and better pictures to come.

Dune Prep Sketches!

Having learned far more information than any person ought to know about the Starspen Galaxy, and specifically the Canopus system, I feel much more prepared to sketch some layout ideas for my Arrakis painting.   I now know what Canopus, Canopus B, Seban, Menaris, Arrakis, Krelln, and Arvon look like.  To most people that probably sounds like a bizarre list of made-up words, but to a Dune-loving nerd there is an all-too-clear understanding of fictional space!  Vielen Dank to http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Arrakis for all the essential  information, it is greatly appreciated!

The problem I face now is with positioning.  Do I want to show all of Arrakis or just part of it so I can include everything between it and Canopus?  Do I even want to include Canopus, Seban and Menaris or should I just paint Arrakis with its moons? Here are the thumbnails and planning page thus far: