Sunday Sketches -- A Journey To the Enderverse (D)

I recently finished reading Orson Scott Card's Ender series.  I enjoyed some of the books more than others (you can find and read my reviews here), but I still was pretty invested in the story throughout.  Yesterday when I put pen to paper, my sketchbook was suddenly filled with a bunch of these characters:

Most of them actually turned out how I picture them.  Fans and/or readers may or may not recognize who all of these are, but they're characters that appear in one or all of the four books.  (How many can YOU identify, Enderfans??)  I'm kind of burned out on Orson Scott Card at the moment after this pretty heavy science-fiction (not generally my genre of choice), but I was glad to get to know these characters in the meantime, and now to have them down on paper.  Ender's Game was my favorite of the four, and I'm interesting to see how the movie will turn out next year.  One of these days or years I'll read the Shadow series too, I'm told those ones are pretty good.

Deja Vu (J)

Just as an update to last Sunday's Daria-themed sketches...
It was a pretty quick job, nothing too fancy. I've been working more this week on these kinds of things, which are not so quick:
I am still kind of cheating, but I think I'm getting the hang of this whole lineless thing. Maybe my totally fictional night terrors about it will go away soon.

Miss Tiana (D)

Over the Christmas holiday we watched a couple of favorite recent Disney movies (it's been too long!), which inspired this piece featuring everyone's favorite New Orleans princess:

Miss Tiana, digital

It was surprisingly difficult to get her face to a point where I was satisfied.  She was prettyish in the initial sketch, but she wasn't Tiana.  But then I did a little research and made a few adjustments, and there she was.  It was also fun to find and work with some new star brushes.

As a point of interest, and to provide a little insight into the process, here's the lineart that I finalized before adding color:

Miss Tiana (B&W), digital

I really like how it looks.  If you feel so inclined, you can print this out or drop it into Photopshop and use this as a coloring page and do your own Tiana!  "Cranky waitress"?  Nonsense!

You're Standing on my Sunday Sketches (J)

It's been a while since I've contributed to Sunday Sketches. These are actually the accumulation of a few Sundays, but who's counting right? We've been watching Daria lately and I've seen a few other artists put their own spin on the characters. That sounded like fun to me (and a nice contrast to when I put a Daria spin on myself) so I gave it a try. I think they turned out pretty well!

(From t-b, l-r: Daria, Quinn, Jane, Trent, Brittany and Kevin)

Oh, and here, have a WIP. I have declared 2012 to be the year I finally conquer lineless painting. I will not be afraid! Okay, maybe just a little afraid.
What the hey, I'm afraid. Eep!

Sunday Sketches -- A Smattering of Christmas

It's 2012!  We have big plans and high hopes to post a little more regularly this year.  I'll start by posting something that I meant to post, erm, almost two weeks ago...  Here are some Sunday Sketches!

I love Christmas!  It's already over, alas, but I have a way to make it linger just a little big longer.  Christmastime meant that it was time to do some Christmas drawings!  Christmas even fell right on a Sunday this year.  This belated edition of Sunday Sketches features a mixture of sources of inspiration.  Here you'll see the results of recently seeing a production of The Nutcracker (including some anatomy/ballet studies), a Christmas toy or two, and, unsurprisingly, a little bit of Nativity.

(It should probably be noted that I'm by no means an expert on ballet, so some of the positioning might not be entirely accurate.  I didn't do any extra research, I mostly just tried to make them look pretty, ha ha.)

We hope everyone had a merry Christmas and a happy New Year, and that you'll keep visiting as the 2012 rolls along to see what Pen and Pencil Arts may appear next.