Monday Morning Marty & Minnie -- One Defining Line

Which one's Marty and which one's Minnie?

Talk about simplification! This is a good exercise for artists to help define their characters, real or fictional, and help them distill the essence of their personalities: draw one line that best represents the person (or animal) concerned. Can you guess which one is Marty and which is Minnie? (I'm not sure I made the definitive lines for them, but this is a good start.)

Now, unlike other forms of simplification this one may or may not bear any visual resemblance to your subject, though it often can. Your line should bear as many of the same characteristics as your character's persona. Is your character swift or slow? Ambitious or lazy? Focused or all over the place? Honest or shifty? Smooth or awkward? Your subject's determining line should reflect that.

Now here's the payoff: when you draw your subject, try to use this defining line as often as you can. Look for places where the physical likeness and this defining line meet, and accentuate those points as much as you can. You'll have a portrait or a likeness that doesn't just convey the subject's look, but the subject's personality and character.

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Monday Morning Marty -- The Lap of Luxury!

(Click on image for larger version.)

Since the last two Monday Morning drawings were of Minnie, I figured Marty was due.

This was drawn with a Pigma Brush #1 pen. The drawing is based on a photo, though not traced. The photo was actually Marty luxuriating on my wife's lap while she was on her laptop, but I only wanted Marty in the image, so I used a little creative license. But normally he only looks this happy cuddled up to her.

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Monday Morning Minnie -- Fetch Girl Part 2

I know, I know -- I just drew Minnie last week, with a tennis ball, and with the title "Fetch, Girl." But really, she couldn't fetch to save her life then. We'd tried and tried, and all she ever did was gnaw on the felt of the tennis ball.

Well, this weekend the most unexpected thing happened. Minnie suddenly could fetch! She ran after the ball, picked it up, brought it back, and dropped it off in front of us, or even in our hands! It was remarkable, and deserved a commemoration.

My apologies to the estate of Dr. Seuss, but this is just how Minnie looks. It's not up to me.

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Tuesday Tutorial: How NOT to draw Silhouettes

(Click on image for larger version)

When you read most instructional books on drawing, the advice given about drawing silhouettes is usually: draw in your figure as if it's not going to be a silhouette, then silhouette the drawing.

That's terrible advice.

A silhouette has to convey all the usual information about a figure solely through the outline. If you draw in the whole figure you cannot tell if that information is coming through until you fill the whole thing in, at which time it will be too late.

Take your favorite illustration and fill in the figures. Do they still read? Do they still work the same way? Now go find a great silhouette and fill in the details of the figure. Do they make sense?

The fact is, what works as a silhouette may not work as a fully fleshed-in drawing, and vice versa. You need to draw the silhouette AS a silhouette to make sure your pose, your details and your composition all work AS a silhouette. Those interior lines you're relying on are giving you a false impression of what your final drawing will convey.

By all means, if you need to sketch in the rest of the figure to help you figure out proportions or anatomy, do so. But as quickly as you can, get rid of those interior lines. It doesn't matter if the figure looks good with all those interior lines drawn in, does it?

Also: Another pitfall to avoid when drawing silhouettes is looking at the inside of the outline. Most artists, when they draw, they see the inside edge of their outlines as the edge of their object. But when that object is filled in, it'll be the outer edge that is seen. Make sure that outer edge is the one that has all the right details and proportions. Use the thinnest line you can to make sure your outer line is true.

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Monday Morning Minnie -- Fetch, girl!

(Click on image for larger version)

Minnie's not much into fetch. While I throw the ball for Marty, who'd fetch himself to death if given the chance, I toss a second ball to Minnie. Sometimes she tries to catch it or pounce on it, and sometimes she tries to chew it and put it in her mouth, but usually she just gets hit in the head and ignores it.

This illustration is based on a photo taken while Minnie had some interest in the tennis ball, but didn't seem to get what she should do. It was inked with a Micron Pigma Graphic 1 pen, and colored in Photoshop.

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Tuesday Tutorial: Mock Woodcut

I've shown this technique before, but decided it should be covered in more depth.

This was a job I did several months ago for Miller WhiteRunkle in Seattle. They wanted a woodcut-style illustration of several objects, one of which was a poncho.

I began with this line drawing of the poncho, done in simple brush. I used this drawing as a guide for the final woodcut drawing, so what I needed here was clarity. I kept the lines crisp, and sketched in the shaded areas using an approximation of the line work I'd use in the finished illustration, but not concerned with the line quality.

The next step was to scan in the guide image, and reverse it. The woodcut effect is basically a brush drawing in negative, where the brush strokes you put down in black end up being white, and the white becomes black. So I needed my guide drawing to be in the negative as well. I then turned the image into a very light cyan and white. This made the image visible to me but not so visible to the scanner. You'll also notice I added parallel horizontal lines to the image -- I wanted my hatch marks to be horizontal, and these lines would help me keep them straight.

Here's a picture of the "final" art in progress, with me inking in the blue parts of the image with my brush. You can see the horizontal hatch lines that will look very "woodcutty" when it's all done.

It's at this stage that the tone for the image is determined. A tighter inking job with shorter, thinner strokes can give you a more engraved look, while a looser stroke with a heavier line weight and rougher edges can make a woodcut or linoleum block kind of effect. If more of the latter look is wanted, then I will try NOT to be too perfect with it. The more of those tiny "mistakes" -- ink going thin, stray line edges, smudges -- the more your drawing will look like a woodcut.

It's very hard to think in the negative, even with this close guide to follow. The thicker your hatching, which makes your work look darker while you're doing it, the lighter it will be when all is done. It takes a goodly amount of concentration.

When the image is all inked in, it looks like this on the left side of the final picture: a negative of the final image. After I scan the image in, and create a negative of it, clean it up and add color, we get the final image seen on the right.

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Monday Morning Marty & Minnie -- Good to be back!

(Click on image for larger version)

First things first -- where have I been? I just finished a very long, very busy stint as storyboard artist on the new Terminator movie filming here in New Mexico! I'll have a post about that soon -- likely more than one. For now, I'll just say that the experience left me little time for other activities, including this blog. That's no excuse, though, and you do have my apologies.

Now on to the day's drawing.

Here's Marty and Minnie -- remember them? -- sunning themselves in the summer sunshine in our back yard, under a gorgeous view of the Sandia mountains. They've been doing well since you saw them last, frolicking merrily at my in-laws all day while I was at the studio, getting along very well and enjoying New Mexico summertime.

This drawing was originally going to be inked, but I liked the look of the pencils so I just decided to finish it at that stage. I started with the dogs, then went up and added in the background, then went back to the dogs, then the background. That's an important way to work a picture, especially with a medium like pencil, where you're likely to see a difference in your line work as you go. I tend to get darker and more bold as I go, so if I just started at one point and stopped on the other side, you'd see a marked difference throughout the image. Not that the image should look totally the same throughout -- just make sure your differences are intentional, depending on depth, texture or lighting, and not just the order you drew things.

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Update: Mammalthon 2 Rescheduled

Due to a family situation, Mammalthon 2, which I wrote about just the other day, is going to be rescheduled for Saturday, May 3.

But this gives you even more time to collect your pennies and make a donation to The Wildlife Center, and get yourself a beautiful piece of original art in the bargain! See The Daily Mammal for the details.

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Mammalthon 2 Is Coming!

My amazing, talented wife Jennifer -- the force behind The Daily Mammal -- is launching Mammalthon 2 next week. Here's an excerpt from her post about it:


Last December, 36 beautiful, generous, animal-loving art aficionados participated in the first Daily Mammal 24-Hour Mammal Marathon. I stayed up for 24 hours straight and drew a mammal an hour (almost). People who donated to Defenders of Wildlife got to request a mammal, see it appear during the 24-hour mammalthon, and then receive the original drawing in the mail. It was unbelievably fun, and we raised more than $800 for Defenders.

It's time for Mammalthon 2! This time, the contributions will be going to The Wildlife Center, a wonderful wildlife rehabilitation hospital in northern New Mexico. Spring means baby season and hundreds of injured and orphaned baby animals that need a place to recuperate and some help getting back into the wild. Your participation in Mammalthon 2 will help make sure these babies, and all the other animals The Wildlife Center rehabilitates, get the care they need.

* * *

Go to her web site to learn how you can get a beautiful, original drawing of the mammal of your choosing and be part of a great cause all at the same time! If nothing else, stop by on the 19th and cheer her on! See you there!

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Tuesday Tutorial: Make it dirty!

(This is my first of what will eventually be a regular weekly feature: the Tuesday Tutorial. Because of my aforementioned storyboard job, I can't guarantee I'll be able to make weekly updates in the near future, but I will try my best.)

When you're working with photographs, adding new elements or combining pieces of other images, one important rule to follow is to make it dirty! Photos are never perfectly clean and precise, the way computer-rendered images are, and so it's important to give them the same imperfections as the photo, so they'll blend in seamlessly. We'll follow a rather silly example I've put together to (hopefully) demonstrate what I'm talking about.

1. Add the Additional Element. For this example, I'm starting with a photo of Minnie, after she got her first and so far only bath, above. I'm going to draw a simple cone paper hat onto her, and try to make it look real.

Here is a close-up of the image of Minnie with a simple cone drawn on her head in Photoshop. Though I did a fine job masking out her hair and shading the hat, it still doesn't quite fit in the image. (You may need to click on these images to see the larger versions.)

2. Add Noise to Additional Element. Every photograph -- and this includes photos of paintings and artwork, of course -- has some degree of graininess. This graininess runs throughout the image, and if your additional element doesn't have it, it will stand out.

I went to Photoshop's Filter menu, and to Noise. I added 2% noise to the hat. You'll need to look at the photo up close to see that the amount of noise you're giving matches it.

Keep in mind, it's important to make the hat on a separate layer, and to keep it on the separate layer, throughout this process.

3. Add Blur to Element. Every photograph -- even the world's best photograph -- is out of focus, to some extent. It may be the tiniest amount, but there's liable to be some bit of blur to the image. You need to blur your new image element to match the surrounding objects.

Note that in many photos, the amount of blur will vary from the foreground to background, so the right amount of added blur can help pinpoint the perceived depth of your new element.

I went up to the Filter menu again, went to Blur, and selected Gaussian Blur. I then gave the hat a small amount of blur -- just 0.7 pixels.

4. Do Whatever Else It Takes. As you can see from the finished piece, below, Noise and Blur were all it took for the texture of the image to match the photo. There may be additional steps depending on the photo -- if the image in the photo moved, and has a directional blur, adding Motion Blur may be needed. Sometimes lightening the opacity of the picture -- say, to 95% or so -- will allow background textures to show through. This usually ony works if the background behind it is fairly plain, without detailed objects. You also, of course, will need to make sure the colors work well too. But these first two steps -- blur and noise -- will get you on your way.

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