Christianne's Art and Comics

Sunday, July 3, 2016

The Madames des Comiques group on Facebook has been doing an ink exchange this year, where various lady-type artists submit pencils for the other participants to ink. I've been really enjoying the process of making art from other people's drawings, and I've REALLY been digging the results of other people working over my own drawings. The above piece was inked by Ana King over this drawing:

Meanwhile, I was assigned this drawing by Elizabeth Schweitzer.

The point of this exercise is to stretch my artistic horizons. I don't usually work digitally--I don't really like working digitally--but it's a skill I need to develop and practice, so I decided to do this in Photoshop (rather than my usual default to Adobe Illustrator for digital work). This is the result:

I'm not sure of what I think about this result, but I'm glad I did it. It was fun.

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Saturday, February 27, 2016

Another Male Nude

Here are a couple of drawings from my last life drawing session. These are red col-erase Prismacolor pencils on crappy Canson sketchbook paper. I need to invest in better sketchbook paper because these drawings are pretty good but for the paper they're drawn on. As one of my old drawing teachers says: You never know when you're going to make a good drawing so make sure you always use materials that are up to it. Also: I did no construction drawing in either of these, preferring to trust my eyes rather than my idea of how figures are made. This works pretty well when drawing from life. The second drawing, below, was a ten minute drawing.

Sunday, February 14, 2016

St. Valentine's Art Dump

Here's some art I've made since last we spoke. I apologize if you've seen some of this before on my social networks.

The above piece is the first live figure drawing I've done since December. It's conte crayon, which I haven't used in forever. I used to love conte crayon, but somewhere along the way I fell out of the habit of using it. It has a rich, velvety darkness of tone that I love, even though I didn't take full advantage of it here. There's a certain creeping monumentalism in my figure drawing lately, which is even more prominent in the second drawing I did at this session from the same pose. This is a more technically correct drawing in graphite. I like it better.

Next up, we have a quick sketch of Oliver Cromwell I did in prep for a comics project I have on the back burner (part of my crippling idea debt). The brush I used for this was dying, but it still had some use left in it.

Next, a couple of fun drawings I inked over other people as part of the monthly "Ink Exchange" run by the Madames des Comiques group from St. Louis. The first was inked over Christina Steenz Stewart, the second over Tara Coble. These were fun to do. I like collaboration.

This was my contribution to this month's event:

Which is a character I'm using in a comic I'm currently drawing. Here's the first panel of the first page of that comic. It came out quite nice:

Finally, there's this, which is something I started for a warm up and got caught up in drawing the snakes. Medusa and her sisters--I think this is actually Eurayale rather than Medusa, but it doesn't really matter--are subjects I keep returning to. This is for sale in my Etsy store.

Enjoy.

Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Some Unlettered Comics Pages

Here are a few unletterered pages from my current project. It's trans erotica again, but with werewolves and swashbuckling. No werewolves in these pages, though. Just erotica. Watercolor and ink on 300 lb Fabriano Artistico watercolor paper. If all goes to plan, this will appear in Alphabet, an anthology to benefit Prism Comics.

Friday, December 11, 2015

Male Nude (back on the drawing horse)

I finally got back to a life drawing session yesterday. I was late so my pose opportunities were limited. In truth, I'm kind of happy with this angle, as in your face as it is. Pencil on Canson sketchbook paper.

Saturday, November 7, 2015

Work Process, Early November

I'm trying to slog to the end of my current big project. I'll be done with it by the end of November if it kills me. That still doesn't prevent hiccups from happening.

This piece is described as basically barbarians vs. giant plasma monsters, with some other game-specific instructions like what weapon the barbarian woman is holding and such. The under-drawing was quick (I did it while I was chatting with a friend on Google+ as it so happens):

Detailed, eh? Most of the fun comes in the inking stage. Here's the inked drawing. I didn't like the trailing figure, so I drew a the archer instead as I inked it:

But this drawing has a couple of problems. One is an inking accident in the lower part of the drawing on the feet and legs of the two male barbarians. You can see the white paint on the thigh of the archer that I used to cover the smear there, and there's another smear under the left foot of the swordsman. Additionally, the aspect ratio is wrong. The size of the space this fits in in the final book is 2.6:5, so it's too narrow. You can also see the edge of the paper on the left side of the drawing. To the Photoshop! I corrected the contrast to get rid of the page tone of the paper, plus the stray pencil strokes that I failed to erase, I used the clone stamp tool to get rid of the ink smears, and I widened the image and extended the landscapes. These I just drew directly with my Wacom tablet (why am I not working digitally on this project? I'm not fast with digital tools, or, at least, not noticeably faster than I am with traditional materials, which I like). Here's the final version I sent to the client:

This next drawing went off without a hitch. The image popped into my mind and the drawing went very quickly. For inspiration and reference, I looked at bunch of photographs of dancers in a production of "The Rite of Spring" choreographed by Pina Bausch. This will be reproduced in a tiny space, so a lot of detail would get lost, so this is fairly simple:

Belatedly, the client suggested that I cover the naughty bits. This surprised me a bit, because the other books in this series don't shy away from harder material and this book has plenty of gore in it. There's a dancer pulling her face off in this image, after all. But, that's fine. I'm a very compliant collaborator most of the time. Again: to the Photoshop! My client suggested fur bikinis for these figures, but I didn't like that idea, so I went with something a little more civilized:

This is ultimately an example of the practice of drawing a naked figure and then drawing clothes on top of them, which is well-familiar to artists of comics. Anyway, I'm pushing through this. Here's a bonus image, one that went through more or less without a hitch, though it's more "sketch-like" than most of the other stuff I've done for this project. The dinosaur is modeled on the skeleton of a giganotosaur, and you can't actually see the tail of the beastie in the reference and I didn't draw it on the page, so I added it in Photoshop after I scanned it because I thought the drawing looked odd without it. I like the dynamism of this image: