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 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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Monday Morning Marty & Jenny

(Click on image for larger version)

Last week I started a big storyboard job that will take up all my time for the next month or two, so I didn't have time to draw up a new Monday Morning drawing today.

So instead I took a really sweet photo of Marty and Jennifer and applied a few Photoshop filters, did some nudging and finagling, and came up with this portrait of the two of them. Hope you like it.

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Monday Morning Minnie & Marty -- 2-25-08

(Click on image for larger version -- as always!)

Continuing on my 'simplification' kick, this week I decided to make Marty and Minnie into cartoon characters.

Last week I mentioned the importance of exaggerating the differences between your subjects. Marty here is a good deal shorter, and stockier than in real life. It's hard to make Minnie even skinnier than she really is, but I did a little.

I also tried to get across Minnie's eager spirit, and Marty's friendly attitude -- at least toward those he knows.

Notice another feature of simplification -- choosing what to include and what not to. Minnie's tuft of white on her chest is very distinctive, as are Marty's spots. And of course Minnie's "crazy eyes!" Sometimes making these choices means leaving out some peculiar elements that, while accurate, may work against the general look you're trying for.

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Monday Morning Minnie & Marty -- 2-18-08

(Click on image for larger version)

This week I've returned to my quest for simplification, but as you can see the results were mixed. Minnie's tufts of fur and Marty's musculature proved too interesting for me to gloss over. That's okay, because overall the image feels the same. Well, except for Marty's face. It's perhaps a little too simplified, and those eyes are too big. He looks a little too "Muppet Babies" for my liking.

Actually, upon closer study, I think Marty's whole body is a bit more simplified and streamlined than Minnie's. That's not necessarily bad, either -- when you're drawing two subjects, it's often important to highten the contrast between them. Since Minnie's fur is longer and wilder than Marty's, the drawing should exaggerate the difference. I've started drawing Marty more short and stocky since we got Minnie, because she's thinner and lankier.

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Monday Morning Marty -- February 11, 2008

(Click on image for larger version)

It seems all I post anymore are Monday Morning Marties and Minnies!

This little portrait of Marty was done in pencil, then scanned and the tone grayscale tone work was put in digitally.

It looks like Marty is looking to someone hoping for a treat! (Don't worry -- he got one!)

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Monday Morning Marty -- February 4, 2008

(Click on image for larger version)

This week I continue on the theme of simplification.

These gesture sketches of Marty (and one of Minnie -- can you guess which one?) show the value of simplification. The idea is to get the gesture, the movement of the dog, not to dwell on details like fur markings or shading. This is a good technique to help learn anatomy and proportion.

I recently learned that some people don't know they can get a larger, more detailed version of the images here by clicking on them. If you don't know that -- you do now!

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Monday Morning Marty -- 1-21-08

For this week's Monday Morning Marty I decided, still thinking of my recent post about details, to try and draw a simpler Marty.

In future entries I'll go simpler still, and see how basic I can make an image that still captures the essence of my dogs. Most people think that drawing with more detail is more difficult, but just the opposite is true; finding a way to distill the essential elements of a likeness in as few strokes as possible cuts to the very core of what is most important in an image.

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Monday Morning Marty & Jenny!

This week the Monday Morning Mammals (ha ha) are Marty and my lovely wife Jennifer! (I'd originally described them as "my first dog and my first wife," but then thought better of it. Now if only I'd thought better than to include this parenthetical comment...!)

Jennifer is the artiste behind The Daily Mammal, which recently had its successful 24-Mammals-In-24-Hours Marathon (or as we like to call it, the Mammalthon.) So many people requested mammals for that, along with their donations, that she's still drawing them.

The drawing was done with markers, based on a photo I'd taken a couple of weeks ago. We all love to hang out on the couch together. Of course the dogs are only allowed up if we invite them, and are very good at waiting and staring until such an invitation comes.

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Monday Morning Marty & Minnie -- 12-31-07

Here's wishing you a New Year full of warmth and togetherness!

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Monday Morning Marty -- 12-10-07

Today's Monday Morning Marty takes us back a few years. This is Marty as a puppy, about three and a half years ago. Hard to believe it's been that long. Such a Sweetie!

The picture uses a Micron pen, most of it using the same line width. The result reminds me of illustrations from the 1970s, which were often traced from photos (as this one was) and have that expressive cross-hatching intermixed with a close tight following of the original photo. In this case the hatching was used to simulate the grass that Marty was sitting in. I put the hatching in fairly loosely, less interested in capturing detail than I was in making a general impression, and in creating a gray tone that Marty's white body could stand out against.

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Monday Morning Marty & Minnie: Comparison

This sketch was done as a comparative study of Marty and Minnie's chests.

Though they're both roughly the same size, Marty is a lot heavier than Minnie. That's because Marty is solid muscle, whereas Minnie is mostly fur.

In this sketch comparison, you can see Marty's barrel chest on the right. He's got the muscles. His wide chest accounts for his front legs being so far apart.

Minnie's front legs are often far apart, as they are in this sketch, but that's more to do with poor posture than athletic physique. You can see her chest is a lot less bulging, a lot less muscular. And much of the volume that's there is her longer fur.

The odd perspective regarding the legs and tail, etc., are due to the fact that both the dogs were sitting right in front of me while I sketched, so I was looking down at a sharp angle. At first they were hard to keep still, but the more attention I'd give one, the more the other would want it, and they quickly figured out that sitting still was their way to get it. Quick learners, these two.

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Monday Morning Marty & Minnie!

The other day Marty and Minnie were tugging on the same stick. It was really cute, so we took a few pictures.

I used one of those pictures as reference for this drawing. I decided to do another woodcut technique, like I did back in August. Since the technique requires that the image be drawn in negative, then reversed digitally, it's difficult to visualize as I'm drawing -- every black line I drawn in ink will become a white line, and wherever the white paper is left will be black. So it's difficult to gauge exactly how it'll look. That presents a challenge, but also makes the project fun -- the end result is always a surprise.

I did retouch the image a little, around the dogs' eyes and some of the outlines. But overall, it turned out as I expected.

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Introducing Monday Morning Minnie!

Now that she's been with us a week, and begun to settle in here (?) It's time to give Minnie her formal introduction. Notice the black coat and those piercing orange eyes! Okay, you can't tell they're orange from a black-and-white sketch, but I was able to capture the piercing part. And those ears that tuck down onto her head -- sometimes you can't see them at all, and then she really looks odd.

I mentioned last week that Marty's first reaction to her was a bit -- well, aggressive. Well now they get on like a house on fire! They jump on each other like Grecko-Roman wrestlers, trying to get underneath each other and flip, trying to pin each other down. Their play is so fierce it's frightening -- Minnie will bite on Marty's face and pull on it, and Marty will bite Minnie's ears -- but it's all in fun. The tails keep wagging, and moments later when they're tired out, they'll just fall asleep next to each other. Crazy.

This sketch was done in pencil, then scanned and the tones added digitally. When I augment a sketch like this, I like to keep it minimal. There's a danger of the digital effects taking over, and it's easy to go overboard, but I want the piece to still feel like a sketch.

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Monday Morning Marty -- Marty Deco!

This week's Monday Morning Marty is an Art Deco-inspired poster of our favorite pup. I wanted to get in some practice of my Pueblo Deco style, and I wanted specifically to recreate the look of the WPA posters of the thirties for our beautiful National Parks. Those posters are characterized by colorful, simple backgrounds, solid blocks of color making stylized subject imagery of animals or whatever.

I'm not sure of these colors for the final piece -- I just made this Sunday night, and may want to look at it again in a couple of days and refine it. And I'm not entirely sure of the drawing itself -- a couple of the legs are worrying me. But it's a good, solid start, and with a little tweaking should make a fine addition to my portfolio.

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Monday Morning Marty -- Marty in the Rio Grande!

Yes, the Monday Morning Marty is back!

This weekend Jennifer and I took Marty to the banks of the Rio Grande, which is about a mile from our new house. Marty had never seen a big river like this, and we didn't know how he'd react.

After a little initial trepidation, Marty took to the water like... well, like a duck to water. He loved it! We tossed sticks for him to fetch, and he loved jumping through the water to get to them! At one point he found the rather disgusting skull of what we hope was a coyote, and despite our repeated attempts to get rid of it he kept bringing it back. He was a muddy mess by the end of it, prompting a long-delayed bath when we got him home.

These are sketches of a couple of my memories of the adventure. He sure loved diving into that water! We'll have to take him back again, the next time he's due for a bath.

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Monday Morning Marty -- Woodcut

I'm very happy with this week's Monday Morning Marty.

Years ago, in art school, my illustration teacher Stan Zagorski taught be a great faux woodcut technique. You painted on the illustration board with white gouache, where you want the image to be white. You wait 'til the gouache dries, then cover the surface with India ink. When that dries, you rinse the board in running water; the gouache dissolves, taking the ink on top of it with it, leaving the surrounding ink. It's a great technique; my Storyteller's Workshop logo, above, was done that way -- with a lot of retouching.

Retouching is always a big part of the process, because you never know how well the gouache will dissolve, or how well the surface of the board will handle the water. It's touch and go there.

Well, last week I was working on a logo proposal for Santa Fe's 400th anniversary, and I came up with this new technique. I designed the logo the way I wanted it, then created a negative of it, so everything white was now black and vice versa. I then turned the image into a very, very light blue and printed it out onto card stock. I got out my brush and inked in everything that was black -- or rather blue -- adding lots of stray strokes that resemble woodcut marks. I scanned in the artwork -- the light blue was light enough not to show up -- reversed the image again, and got the woodcut look.

For this Marty picture, I started with a photo that I turned grayscale, then followed the process listed above. The final image wasn't too easy to make out -- I also printed out the photo untouched to help me make sense of it. I had to constantly remind myself that the ink strokes I was putting down would be white, and that the darkest shaded areas would be the lightest in the final piece.

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Monday Morning Marty -- 8-20-07

I'm cheating on this one -- twice.

Once because I didn't draw this just for the blog. This is a close-up of an illustration in progress I'm working on for Cisneros Design in Santa Fe, for a fundraiser invitation to benefit an animal rescue organization.

The other cheat is that I didn't ask Fred Cisneros, or the animal rescue organization, if I could use the image. I'm hoping they'll understand.

It was, in part, my Monday Morning Marty series that convinced the client I could draw dogs for this assignment, so what better dog to use for it? (That other dog in the picture is just a model. We've never actually met.)

I always find it harder to draw a specific individual for an illustration, rather than a fictional character, even if the individual in question is a canine one. After all, when I'm making someone up, no one but me will know if I get the likeness exactly the way I envisioned. And I never say. But when I'm drawing someone's portrait, suddenly I have a measurable standard to be judged against. Yikes, that's scary! If I hadn't been drawing the Monday Morning Marties I wouldn't have had the confidence to even try this one.

Oh, and if you didn't catch the moral in all this -- ironic in a post about cheating -- it's this: whenever you put your stuff out there, good things result. My Monday Morning Marty series turned out to be good portfolio samples as well as a weekly exercise and a segue into moralistic lecturing. I've found that whenever I do work for fun, it seems to become a means to paying work. My long-running comics series Jazz Age (originally Jazz Age Chronicles) has been an off-and-on labor of love for twenty years now, and though it's hardly ever made much money, every good-paying comics job I've ever got, I got from samples of Jazz Age. All you freelancers out there, listen up: Get your stuff out there. If it's good, it'll produce results.

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Monday Morning Marty -- 8-13-07

Here's a Marty comic strip that I drew with my wife, Jennifer.

This was a fun game Jennifer came up with while we were waiting for our food at a restaurant somewhere. Jennifer took the page out of her Filofax, wrote down the title she made up and drew up the panels. I then had to come up with a story to match the title and draw it in the panels.

This is a fun exercise to pass the time, and it also helps sharpen your storytelling abilities. Trying to find a logical reason for each panel to be the size and the placement that it is helps you decide the pace of the story, and that may come before you think of a plot or even a subject.

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Monday Morning Marty 8-6-07 -- Fur

Here's a little portrait of Marty to start your week.

When you're drawing a furry creature, like Puppy here, your pencil strokes can do more than just follow the contour of the general shape -- they can take on the qualities of the fur itself. If you notice, very few of the actual lines in this drawing follow the edge of Marty's head -- they follow the direction and the length of the fur, and the succession of these lines creates the contour. This lets me convey not just the shape of the head, but the direction of the fur, the thickness, and in some places helps suggest the cheekbone and other structure beneath. It's important to be economical in your drawing, and to let every stroke, every line contribute as much as possible to communicating your subject.

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Monday Morning Marty -- 7-30-07

For today's Monday Morning Marty, instead of a single image, I decided on a series of quick gesture drawings. I'd said last week that I wanted to keep the Marty drawings loose and fun, to make them more of a series of studies than worry about perfect image-making or slick, polished illustration. So this week I'm pushing that to its ultimate.

Quick gestures like these make great warm-ups before going into more detailed illustration, and they make excellent study and learning guides for getting familiar with a subjects proportions, mannerisms or expressions. But they're also great drawings in and of themselves, as they capture a quick snapshot of a moment. In the fact that the strokes and lines are quick, unpolished and unrefined, they can reveal as much about the artist as about the subject.

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Monday Morning Marty -- July 23, 2007

Here's my contribution to the Monday Morning Marty catalogue for this week. It was drawn from a live model, not from a photograph. I have no problem with drawing from photos -- most of my work uses photo reference, including several of my Marty drawings. But one of the reasons for taking on the weekly Marty drawing series was to get back to drawing for the sake of drawing, and drawing from live models, and drawing just for the fun of it.

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Monday Morning Marty -- 7/16/07

Here's the Monday Morning Marty for this week -- and instead of the usual pencil sketch or line drawing, I went with a different approach, and digitally altered a photo of Marty into a painting look. I still plan to have the Monday Morning Marty series be predominantly sketches, drawings and maybe the occasional real painting, but digital illustration is legitimate, too. So today you get a little variety.

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Monday Morning Marty

This week's Monday Morning Marty was drawn on Sunday afternoon, after Marty had had a nice long fetch session in the park near my in-laws' house in Albuquerque. Since we moved here, Marty's really been enjoying himself. He just couldn't get this relaxed and have this much fun in Philadelphia. The closest he every came was at my parents' house, which has a beautiful big lawn just like the park here. Marty loves fetching the tennis ball at full speed about a hundred times, then for some reason he's tired. Like he was here.

The drawing, like previous Marty drawings, was first done in pencil, then gone over with a Micron pen. I liked the line work as is, so I didn't color this one.

He looks pretty happy, I think. He's wearing his red bandanna. So cute.

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Monday Morning Marty -- July 1, 2007

Here's my Monday Morning Marty for the week -- just a quick sketch of the pup while he sits in his kennel. We have another dog staying with us a couple of days, while her owners, family members, are on vacation, and while she eats, Marty stays in his kennel. Perfect opportunity to sketch the ol' hound dog.

Still the least happy with the head. He moves it around too much. As I get more practiced drawing him, I'll be able to do it quicker, and capture the gesture more accurately. But this does look like him. Especially that sweet, hangdog expression. And the crossed paws in front. He's so classy sometimes!

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Monday Morning Marty

Today begins a regular weekly feature on ShopTalk, Monday Morning Marty. A new sketch of my beautiful puppy Marty every week.

This week I worked from a photo. We just moved back to New Mexico from Philadelphia, and Marty -- who's from New Mexico and who can tell when we're entering the state by the scents coming in the car's vents, and who really didn't like most of Philly -- is having too much fun and is too excited to sit still and pose for me. The photo was taken last winter, during one of the few snowstorms Philly had. You see Marty's tail is down -- I told you he didn't like Philly. It hasn't been down since we got here.

I decided to try a limited palette coloring effect, recreating the spot-color look of old magazine illustrations. The picture needed a little punch. I thought blue was a natural choice, conveying the cold of the scene. I was originally going to just use the one color, but when I tried giving Marty a simplified version of his own hazel coloring, it worked.

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Frank E. Schoonover

Yet another link to Golden Age Comics Book Stories. But this one is a good'n. It's a look at the beautiful work of Frank E. Schoonover. Notice how his paintings look so polished and refined from a distance, but when you click on the image and get up close, you see the individual brush strokes and Impressionistic approach. Really nice.

We're in the midst of our big move to New Mexico, so there's been no time to sketch or anything. I want to make sketching Marty a regular feature here -- after we settle in.

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Drawing of My Dog, Part 1

My wife Jennifer believes in drawing for fun.

Wow. What a concept.

She's started her own blog, The Daily Mammal, wherein she will draw a new mammal every day. If she keeps it up, she can draw every named mammal in just 14 years! Wow! But whether she does or not, she's having fun. And she's always telling me I should draw for fun. Not for an assignment, or for a deadline. But for fun.

Fun.

Fun?

Well, tonight I gave it a try, sketching our dog Marty. Here's the result.

Not bad for my first attempt at drawing him. And not bad for my first sketch from life in a long time. It even kind of looks like him. Okay, it looks a lot like him. Not perfect, but pretty good. I'm sure this won't be the last time I draw Marty, and I'm sure my next one will be even better.

But you know what? I had fun.

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