The Giant King and the Manic Depressive Squirt Bottle

I'm pretty tired today. Sorry for the staggering in updates, but I've had a ton of homework to do. I can't make excuses. *sigh*

The first entry is another piece for communicative drawing. The assignment was to take three objects and imbue them with a descriptive emotion. I chose royal. The objects were a strange cow money bank my Grandma gave me, a pen, and an Andre the Giant action figure. This was my first time working with prismacolor markers, but I think they turned out swell. Other than the viewpoint, (I should have positioned the camera lower so you would have to look up at him) I think it came out like I planned it.
Click any picture to see a larger version.


The next drawings are doodles for the same class. I had to take an object, in this case a squirt bottle, and imbue it with various character. I pushed the physical limits pretty hard to get some of these.

The Creative Process

For my newest entry, I thought I'd take you a little through the creative process. I wanted to show how trial and error and preliminary sketches play a role in some of the pieces I've been working on recently. This is one of my newest projects. I just turned the final version in last Thursday.

The theme we used involved putting yourself in a place you wouldn't want to be. It was a fun and challenging project that pushed me to some new breakthroughs in my understanding of composition. I'll start off with my preliminary sketches. I decided that, although I really like and respect the bear as an animal, I would never want to be caught unaware by one. I played around with lots of designs until Vance, my teacher suggested that my source reference for my bear was too placid. I later found a more suitable photo to look at, but these initial drawings still contain the first.
Click any picture to enlarge it.


There is another page to these that I think I forgot to scan. Ah well, you probably get the point and can see that my teacher was right about the relationship lacking its full comedic or horrific potential in this case. I went on to make another more fleshed out sketch with my new source material- adecidely angry bear. I decided I wanted the bear looming over me so visually I would be boxed in beneath his size. I used pastels to get a better idea of the color scheme and fleshed out a crude mock-up. Here's the pic.

This is better than before, but my class thought I could push it even more. They suggested making the bear larger and putting more of my figure in the pic. They also wanted me to include the honey container I had in my reference photos. The size difference would increase the tension and more of my figure would lead to me being more visually "trapped" within the composition.

The result came off pretty strong compositionally. I used pastels and colored pencils for my final project and really tried to push color relationships beyond what they were in my references to heighten the drama even more. I think the picture turned out pretty well, other than a snag I had with my spray fixative that caused me to have to redraw about 60 percent of the picture over again. You can still see a bit of the haze it left in some of the lower picture portions.

That's about it for this update. Let me know what you think of my work if you will. I'm always looking for feedback and suggestions.

A Tiny Update

Here's a tiny update for today. It's a digital concept sketch I did for a print I was working on in my creative processes class. I'll publish the actual print here soon, but I don't have it scanned in to my computer just yet. It's another Dennis pic, and he's having tea with a happy little asian girl. I'm not certain why I made her asian; there's really no good reason, but I thought it appropriate at the time. In the final piece there's more action and the storytelling is a bit more developed, but the "pickin's is slim" on this day. That's all for today. Hopefully, I'll put up a better update soon. Click on a picture to see a larger version.


What the heck, I feel bad about just posting this so I'll throw in the very first Dennis doodle I ever did as a bonus pic. It's been seen here before, from the old blog before I wiped it out and started over, but this stupid guy makes me laugh so he gets put back here again.

Something old, something unfinished

First up today is a piece that I did in my spare time watching the business people at a local coffee shop. Modern casual business behaviour is strange and bizarre, fashion gets a little out of hand sometimes, but this guy had a classic look to him that I liked. So I drew him. Graphite scribbles were first laid on the page, then I took an eraser to define his shape. Finally, I went back and tightened the detail with more pencil work.

The second piece is one I never finished, but may work on some more in a revision soon. It was done with ink wash.



(there was a pic of my cat here, but I took it out to edit it.)

The Realm of Fantasy and Sci-fi

No self portrait this time folks, but I will share two of my older drawings. The first is a picture of Samus from the Metroid series. This was done with a graphite watercolor pencil so I was able to get some neat effects with the smoke and such. Overall, I think the composition could use some work to make the scene more mysterious and off-kilter. She's a little too stationary to be exciting. Oh well, it's an older drawing (about a year and a half old), but I thought I'd finally let it see the light of day.


The second drawing is unfinished and I actually started it several years ago. I only post it here because I am very proud of some of the stuff in it. Look at that hand! I think I might turn this into a painting when I get some time, or I might even make myself finish this thing.


Lastly, is a portrait piece submitted to me by another artist. He is a titan in the contemporary art field and I am flattered to have this portrait of me. I think he did it with needle point and dyed snake venom on leather, but I'm not sure. Either way, it's not often others do artwork for me so I am very happy and excited to get it.

-Dave