Scrap-Paper Sketches

A sketch of a Serval (Leptailurus serval)
Did this on my field trip - being a biological science campus the place had a lot of National Geographic magazines, and I used this beautiful photograph as a reference.

Drawn in a Moleskine, across two pages (and now I'm paranoid and have to keep a bit of paper in between which is why I don't normally draw on both sides). By my standards for realistic and detailed sketches, this is quite large! (slightly smaller than a4, or the size of two half-spread hands held side-by-side).

This is the first sketch that I've put up as a Zazzle Design.

Didn't finish all the spots because they were really boring >.> Just pencils. Also LOVE LOVE LOVE having my artist putty rubber stuff again.

Time was... dunno. An hour? Three hours? I was away a week and would do this in spare, bored, moments... You can see more of my cat paintings and drawings on my Cat Paintings lens.

Batwings for dragons and demons, feathered wings, but a way to effectively combine the two.... I really want to use this idea. I have Plans.

A 2B pencil and half a page of A4 scrap paper, about 30 minutes, while bored.

I had nothing to do, so raided my photo albums and found this one - it's of a friend, circling her eye with her thumb and fingers. The photo was so blurry and the hand looked so out of context that most people don't even recognise what the photograph is meant to be! It always amused me, that you had to know what it was to know what it was. If you know what I mean.

Reworking of this painting (the colourful one up in my profile on the top right) on the back of an assignment I was about to hand in! (Didn't get it back for a week).
Half a4 paper

A model in an ad in a magazine. Had the 'Twilight' look going on - pale, Bella-ish, dark hair, very bright blue eyes (obviously edited) but it was a good photo and I had little choice of references. And her face is interesting.

A 2B pencil and A4 scrap paper.
About 30 minutes.

A concept sketch in class - a furry tree that purs when you stroke it. The cheshire cat is part of the tree - a fruit or a knot in the branch.

You can also see the writing on the other side!

Off the back of the V For Vendetta DVD (love that film, And the book).
About 30 min in an A6 sketchbook

Coloured it later with coloured pencils - you can see that version here.

Drawing all over the back of my note paper. Or in this case, the assignment I was due to hand in. At least the lecturers were amused (I actually thought it was my scrap paper and did what must have been a rather dramatic double take when I picked it up and checked the other side).

So yeeesss. Some kind of medusa theme, and a sword in a glass pedestal, and a whale... and a badly drawn fish, but we won't talk about that >.>

Half of an a4 piece of paper.

Practicing cats, then adding something for them to chase. I'd just been drawing butterflies for another painting, so I redrew what I remembered of the wing pattern.

But butterflies are boring, so they're obviously little dragons. And then I decided I really liked that idea, so I added another.

A bored magic-student girl summons a glowing light to distract her little dragon and lure him into spitting out his own little twists of flaming light.

Found this by chance in my Moleskine sketchbook. Tidied it up a little, now I have more artist putty/ PROPER rubber thing (also known as a kneading eraser) again and darkened her eyes and things and finished off little details. But not all details. I like the see-through floatiness of it, and her pose - which I think was rather hard to do,a nd get the proportions and tensions in her limbs right.

I seem to like designing clothing

First page in my new moleskine sketchbook. This was a birthday card for my sister.

Neil Gaiman's Death, one of the Endless, and the oldest and wisest.

Practice sketches using a comic as reference.

This is what I drew sitting in an office over a day or two while holidaying in the UK (was doing work experience in my uncle's fisheries office in Brixton )

So I figured it was time to practice my realism.

Half of these are copied from fish flyers and conservation leaflets around the office - the three fish across the top (eel, redfish & Chub Mackerel), the penguin, and the loggerhead turtle.

The birds are all from my own photographs - I had my camera with me and just referred to the screen. Little Egret I happened across in Kingsteignton, a canada goose swimming (I like that one) and Gulls and a turnstone from around the Brixham quay.
The barn owl was a stuffed one from the Cardiff museum :D

The Sand Tiger Shark head, the Bream, and the spidercrab are from photos of a trip to the Plymouth Aquarium. As was the dolphin - except that was a model.
Horse was photographed up in Bristol.
The boy is my youngest cousin, also from a photo.

The landscape is from this photograph of Dartmoor

Drew this on the back of one of my thesis surveys, during the four hours of presentations on marine reserves (Some of them were actually quite interesting. But I DID have paper in front of me!).

So yes, a fish hunter, with little teeth and scribbly fishies and vague water droplets and pebbly scales.... the problem with this picture is the 'crop' - the actual dragon keeps going, and I know exactly how big the wings are, where the legs, are, but of course, they can't be drawn in here without creating a contorted monster ...

You can see more of my dragon artwork on this lens.

And here we have a dragonish sort of creature, with filament gills, and fish-eating-fangs. An earlier version of the Piscivorous Dragon. Concept and under-the-sea practice. With sharks, in the square sketchbook.

Ref'd from a Doctor Who book I grabbed from the children's section downstairs during a lunch break. Pencil in moleskine; not shaded etc because I'll probably colour it.One day... maybe...

I do intend to colour it, and it's composed with that in mind - it's also a bit of a mix between my 'natural' method of heavy shading etc which is impossible to colour over, and trying to make a clean, easily erased, lineartish drawing.

Sketch of Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) off the back of one of the DVDs.

A Fae warrior, riding her rat-steed. Rats make very good mounts for trees, as they're very agile and have tails that can wrap around everything.

The subject is Julia Deans, from the new Zealand band Fur Patrol - the original photo had amazing red hair, which caught my eye. Anyway, practice, and I only had one pencil, and no proper rubber (I made do with a sort of white bluetac - works well, except you can't undirty it).

Hair practice and faces, really... could improve, but not too bad. Also the original photograph. was quite odd looking too

In a tiny A6 sketchbook, referenced from a little music handout/events article thing. Took almost exactly one hour.

A little swallow from a trip up to Goat Island marine reserve. We went out on the glass bottom boat and I photographed it sitting on the cliff on the island.

Moleskine, prismacolors, and graphite pencil for the rocks.

Doodling while taking notes in a lecture, drawings with a ballpoint pen.

Doodles in class over the back of my scrap paper. A spiky mermaid, a face I erased and redrew six times, and a dragon curled up like a cat. Cats and dragons have a lot in common. (I ran out of room to do the wings properly, but the perspective was interesting to attempt).

These are obviously just a lot of little studies from photographs - the top right hand sketch became this quick painting:

This was actually sketched in ArtRage and was an attempt to illustrate my idea of what an army armed only with two shields would look like.

Prompted by a discussion in the DD snark thread on the GiantITP forums .

Bored at my parent's house, so I decided to practice some more drawing. Was putting together a page of my Buffy pictures and realised I needed to draw Giles.

Of course, I only had scrap paper, and then I had to find a pencil, and then they were all blunt, and then I finally sharpened it and found a rubber... and then with these scrappy leftovers I draw something I LIKE and want to keep. Typical - and how most of the sketches on this page originated!

The man (top two) is Anthony Stewart Head - left is him as Rupert Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and right I think is just a generic celebrity shot. The woman is Christina Hendricks, who played Saffron in Firefly.

Square sketchbooks are fun, you can compose pictures in any direction. This was an attempt to draw a girl as part of a plant. Her fingers are roots, her skin the petals, her hair the stamens...

Practicing the big scary fishies and mermaids. Square sketchbook.

Just a quick sketch of a woman in a magazine advertisement.

Sketched in the back of a customer service handout book (had a session for work - the best part was half of us spontananeously acting out the beginning of Black Books with the Little Book of Calm and Dylan Moran :D )

And one of the people I work with, who is rather awesome and has a Sense of Humour that I approve of thought it was one of the sea serpents from Castle Age, cause we'd just killed one of those together. So to speak >.>

A4, less than ten minutes.

This BJD, Ophelia, was at the Auckland Armageddon convention, and I was bored and so I drew her. And yes, the proportions really are that unrealistic.

Sketch in ArtRage of Felicia Day

Sketchblog post about it here.

Pencil on scrap paper.

Two characters from FFTactics for a friend.

A4 pencil sketches from photos.

Practicing, possible comic panel one day...