Or you'll go blind. 20:42

This is the kind of drawing that's like eating a big bar of chocolate or posting to deviantart. It's good for making you feel better and...well that's about it really.
But you get to wave it around and shout "look! I'm a real artist! Look at my rendering!"
How to do this:

• get a photo. (Yay)
• put down a midtone grey
• smudge all over with a rag
• draw photo
• use fingers to "blend" (eww)
• erase with putty rubber.
• do the arty-arty dance.

It's artistic masturbation but sometimes you just gotta. XD

~John~

Lifedrawing.avi 21:02

I spent a long time drawing from Yoga videos and exercise videos as warmup sketches every day. Then for some inexplicable reason I stopped- probably just when it was getting interesting.

Lately i've just got back into it again- and have been on the hunt for boxing and wrestling clips online to draw from. One interesting exercise I found while doing these, was to pause the video and do a gesture study. Then you advance the video a couple of frames and do a constructed drawing ( block and shapes- etc.) on top. You really get a better feeling for the movement and form of the figures. Much better than using them almost as interesting photo-stills.

I've found kickboxing and wrestling to be the best motion videos to use- not much clothing getting in the way, and plenty of muscles to get your pencils around. Also, if you search for "Naked Gymnastics" there's a whole softcore porn fetish for girls stretching and leaping about etc. Which is pretty cool if you can put up with porno-jazz in the background.

Click here to see a small collection of my Yoga drawings from a couple of years ago. Yeek, old drawings are painful to look at!
~John~

Layoffs. 21:17

Well, the DFC went kaput recently, which was a drag. I don't doubt things like The Spider Moon, Mezolith etc. will eventually be made into Graphic Novels, but it's the "eventually" which is ticking everyone off. I have my fingertips in other pies at the moment, so i'm not panicking- but I do have a lot more time now to draw Tanks.
Y'know... as you do... when you're male.
~John~