Breaking in a new tablet. I always seem to have to go through four or five pages of crapish sketches before I get something decent, no matter how ‘warmed up’ I am. It’s similar to the intimidation of the blank page- just with more pages.

Speaking of more pages: perhaps the single most helpful piece of advice I can give someone trying to learn to draw is to use up a lot of paper. I almost wish it was more complicated, but it’s simple, and hard. Start sketching. When something feels frustrating or stale, get a new sheet of paper.  ( Don’t throw out the old ones, reworking partial ideas is often a great warm-up.) But if you’re sketching, momentum is more important than trying to make a complete picture on your first or fifteenth try.

Sometimes, my fiance and I WoW together. These are our mains, gettin’ down with their funky selves.

I think I’m getting a closer handle on a consistent ‘WoW’ style, but this one is still a ranging shot. While I like it, particularly the poses, it’s too busy. I expected the shading to help direct the viewer’s eye more than it actually does. I was being too cautious about contrast…again. (Can I just hire someone to hit me with a wiffle bat inscribed with ‘too subtle’ when I do this? Please post resumes in the comments.)

This is also the capstone to my Valentine’s Day self promotion week! So if anybody wants to commission an illustration or a piece of jewelry for their significant other, drop me a line.

This was for my brother’s wedding invitations. My brother has for all of his adult life had very long hair, and well, 98.5% of your typical depictions of a groom just weren’t going to cut it.

Originally this was just a pretty drawing. Then one of my friends saw it, and exclaimed ‘Oh, that looks just like [me and my significant other]!’ As I’m a pretty firm believer in letting my art be what other people think it is instead of trying to keep a stranglehold on meaning, (plus it did sort of look like them) I said ’sure’.

Years later I digitally inked it, and now the person in the suit sort of looks like a crossdressing lady.

Sure.

I think we’ve reached the point where I have to warn the diabetics in my audience: this week’s posts may require you to increase your insulin dosage.  Please consider checking your blood sugar after reading your RSS feed.

Just a reminder- all this sweetness and light is a gentle suggestion from me to you. Commission me to make Valentine’s Day illustration for you or your significant other! Or both! Or hey, a piece of jewelry if you’re into that sort of thing.

Leave me a comment with your email if any of the above piques your interest, so I can get started well in advance. Because overnight shipping charges are a bitch.

Confession Time: I was one of those teens who was afraid to dance.

I thought that everyone was watching me. And I didn’t know what to do, because weren’t there moves or steps or something? Also I don’t like this song, let’s wait for a good song.

But I did learn to dance. Mostly,  I stopped caring so goddamn much. It helps  if you’re willing to get a little tipsy, and if you have a friend who will (loudly) verbally encourage you. But the main point is that dancing is a form of play- and most adults suck at play. We take it too seriously, and try to think too much in words, rather than kinesthetically.

And that’s why couples who dance are always precious and beautiful, even if they’re just shuffling around the floor. Because when you are playing with your favorite person in the world, joy just rolls off of you.

Trust me, I hate when people do this.

By ‘this’, I mean start celebrating an upcoming holiday three weeks before that holiday’s date. (I always wondered what fall/early winter holiday would get squeezed out in the merchandise wars… turns out that at my local mall, Thanksgiving didn’t happen this year. The decorations went straight from Halloween to Christmas.)

Nonetheless. That Valentine’s Day thing is going to happen soon, so I thought I’d attempt to pique your interest in commissioning Valentine’s Day illustrations from me. To that end, all this week I’ll be posting romantic drawings.  My inner five year old is rolling on the floor mock gagging at the prospect of a full week of mushy stuff, but she’s not the best with business skills.

Price depends on level of detail, so leave a comment including your email if you’re interested, and we’ll talk specifics.

In the past I’ve posted a few dragons here, both of the cute and more traditional varieties, but it’s been a while. It’s dragon time.

As you may have noticed, I often construct my inspiration out of pieces of geekery and intellectually stimulating fantasy, as in this old illustration. In this case I was flipping through this month’s issue of National Geographic, and on page 68 there’s a small color picture of a creature called Phyllodoce Madeirensis.

Without exaggeration- it’s a tiny dragon. Well,  it looks like a tiny dragon in that particular picture anyway. I’m pretty sure it would look more millipede-ish were you to encounter it in the water where it lives, but the picture was great inspiration for a speedrun.

Yup, this is another speedrun. About an hour total?

A word about ‘constructing inspiration’. As I’m mentioned previously, I rarely feel inspired by a single idea. It’s when ideas collide that my brain says ‘Hey, neat! Can I play with that?’

Even more interesting from a ‘how creative brains work’ perspective: When those interesting ideas or factoids run into each other, there’s a pause. It feels much like solving a simple mechanical problem, such as assembling a doorknob. All the pieces of a great idea are in front of me, but there’s a moment before I figure out how to put them together. And sometimes I put them together wrong, and then have to dissasemble and reassemble until I hear that little *click*.

Not to worry, the *click* is metaphorical. I’m not hallucinating. Yet.

This last Friday, some toys I’d ordered from the internet arrived.

To clarify, this post is safe for work.

I’m talking about chainmail toys. I’d been searching high and low find beads that were even somewhat similar to beads I’d used before, which are no longer carried by the store I purchased them from, and found toys instead.

For the curious: the beads I’m looking for are shiny grey disks in the shape of an equiconvex lens. I need the beads to be in two sizes, the larger significantly larger than a quarter, the other slightly smaller than a quarter. Ideally, they should match bright aluminum in color. They also need to have one relatively large hole near the edge at a perpendicular angle to the ‘plane’ of the disk. That can’t be too hard to find, right? Right…

But I was talking about toys. I got some tiny rubber rings, (which shall make an appearance later) and a new style of earring mount, but I spent most of my time playing with scales. They are strange, and seem to be mostly intended for making sheets, (like for a mail shirt) but they are funky and I like them.  First Piece: feather necklace.

And! And! When I hunch my shoulders, my hackles raise! *giggles*

Just a couple of troll boys, playing around.

Okay, so trolls are hard. They have weird pointy faces, lanky proportions, and tusks. I meant to have the further troll have sort of a playful smile on, but there’s no way that’s happening with the tusks in the way. Also they have two fingers per hand, and physics-violating ears. On top of that I had a sudden attack of insanity, and thought it would be fun to draw them in a Capoeira exchange.

This was not totally out of the blue. Okay, so World of Warcraft noobs, here’s a brief tutorial. Part one: There’s this playable race called trolls. They have a decidedly Caribbean cultural flavor. Part two: all playable characters in WoW can dance on command, to the great amusement of the parties playing them. (And the discomfort of others, as this allows female collections of pixels to dance 97% naked on big city street corners in order to get ‘tips’. *twitch*) Each gender of each race has a specific dance, and the male troll dance is clearly based on Capoeira.

As martial arts go, Capoeira is particularly hard to draw. As an outsider, it seems that the art relies greatly on momentum switching, acrobatic athletic feats, and constant motion. This makes finding good reference material extremely difficult, because paused video tends to be fuzzy and most amateurs can’t take good pictures of a subject in motion.  It also makes my fallback (pressing my friends and acquaintances into services as models) quite impossible, because they don’t bend that way.