Our Latest Collaboration (D & J)

It was high time we worked on another project together!  This is one we've been working on for a few months now:

We are learning a lot, working in this new medium.  The little fellow will make his debut in the spring, and we look forward to teaching him to color inside the lines!  

Sunday Sketches -- Thomas Teeters Toward Termination (D)

As the Year of Hardy gradually draws to a close, I present my penultimate set of character drawings from some of Thomas Hardy's later novels.  This post features Sunday Sketches from various Sundays from November through December.  I quite enjoyed all three of these books, and they're some of his most well-known, especially the one at the bottom (isn't Tess his most famous??  I think it must be).

The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)

The Perils of Drinking, or, Oh Elizabeth-Jane, Your Life!!!

The Woodlanders (1887)

Many Main Characters, or, Beware Country Storms and Sophisticated Doctors

 Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891)

But Really Durbeyfield (Sort Of), or, Men Are Apparently Scum

(P.S. Sorry about the title of this post, sort of. I really wanted to keep the alliteration going with this series.)

Sunday Sketches of an Avatarly Nature (J)

We are still steadily making our way through Avatar!  Near the end of season 2 I did some drawings of all the major characters (I think).  Then we started season 3...so I need redraw half of them now, hah.  I am SO looking forward to the terrible movie adaptation and seeing just how incredibly terrible it is.  The cover box looks bad enough on its own.

Anyway, I digress.  Avatar peeps!  With the exception of Suki, I did them all without any reference at hand, hence any little inaccuracies you may find.  Overall I like how most of them turned out, and I look forward to doing an updated batch in the future.  Perhaps I will make my own picture of the Fire Lord from noodles. 

 Flameo, hotman!  (I finally get that reference!!)

Doodz, a.k.a. The Ice Cream Cones (D)

Sometimes on Friday night when I'm looking for something to occupy my time this happens:

Just a bunch of random dudes.  The a.k.a. comes from when J and I were listening to some of her music and she asked me who sang a particular song and I couldn't think of anything, so the only thing that came out of my mouth was The Ice Cream Cones.  We decided to apply the name to this group of fellows.   Maybe they're a big boy band or something?

Jolly Olde England: A Christmas Surpreeze (D)

This isn't exactly a Sunday Sketch, though I did original draw it over a series of Sundays, as I recall.  In any case, here is one of the Christmas surprises I planned for J.  We have such fond memories of our summer in London, and I did the sketch of this back then as a sort of visual record of some of our favorite happenings there.  We have a sort of English decor in the living room, so I thought (kind of at the last moment) that this might be a nice addition, so I colored it up, framed it, and she had no idea!  That's the best kind of surprise.

For fun, here's the original sketch.  As you can see, I added a few elements for the final version.  I'm a little surprised at some of the things I left out, especially since I remember several times kind of racking my brain to think of more of our activities.  Silly me, how could I forget Big Ben?

Cheerio!

A Hobbit (J)

Back in ye olde days of the past, I spent many many many hours drawing all the different characters from Lord of the Rings.  Wait, I still do that.  Anyway, I used to do it a LOT, and so with the arrival of The Hobbit, it seemed only fair to give it a little bit of the same treatment.

This was a faster drawing, done with just a mechanical pencil in my sketchbook, but he still seemed to take quite a while.  Somehow I started this without realizing his shirt is completely covered in stripes.  Let's just say it was a happy moment when I finished those stripes!  But it seems like every drawing has something in it that makes you insane--like curly hair, embroidery, sequins, what have you.  (If it features Mrs. Lovett, then it has all three of those things and then some.)

Anyway, I can't promise to follow this up with a bunch of dwarf portraits but we'll see.  I'll probably get more inspired with Legolas turns up again...

Sunday Sketches: Now With More Bending (J)

Let's not talk about how long it's been since I posted Sunday Sketches!  But here I am again, armed with a new sketchbook and the same pencil I've been using since 2006.  Except this week I used a pen.  I'm such a traitor to myself!

Recently we started watching Avatar: the Last Airbender.  (Side note: we're on season 2--don't spoil me!)  I like it and stuff.  I like how the different types of bending involve different types of movement, so today I drew a montage of benders.  You can try your hand as guessing which type each person is!  Maybe next week it'll be actual character drawings, though one character did sneak onto this page...

Yip yip!

(Also, trying to do a signature using the touchpad?  Not my forte.)