What Are You Gonna Do?

So the Teen Titans Go movie has come out now. For some this is good, for others it's less. Being on the British land, I have yet to see the movie but wanted this to coincide with it's release date. An inside joke for those in the artist community.

I have had this ready to go since the trailer came out and this will be presented alongside the actual movie clip to set up the joke.

Okay in hindsight, perhaps the upper section of text wasn't required. But here it is, the Teen Titans, DrawingWiffWaffles and her own superhero character Magna Girl against Slade Wilson!

In the actual film, the waffles gag is a reference to one of the more controversial episodes of Teen Titans Go, but to the art community, Waffles is an artist with quite the following which apparently includes the Teen Titans now! I don't know where Waffles stands with Teen Titans Go or if she even knows about this scene but I highly doubt she or her content annoy anyone so Slade's just being a bit of a grouch.

So this was an unconventional post today, being the first meme I have posted. No this won't be a heavily reoccurring thing, in fact I don't see it happening again for quite some time. I'll stick to the normal way of doing things for now, I think we all prefer it. But it was a fun experiment and the first time my art has actually been part of a meme. Have you made any artsy memes of your own? If you want to show off your art memes I'm cool with seeing what you guys come up with!

Have A Nice Trip, John!

A few months back I was thinking of doing a big piece which would involve Agrius tripping up John at Droey's expense. This was a character exchange I didn't want to pass up so while that bigger picture is unlikely to become a reality, John will still be tripped up.

You may notice the colouring might look a little off in this piece, allow me to explain myself. I have used solely Magicfly Pens, I got a set of 100 recently and I really like them! They do bleed a little more through the pages in this sketchbook but they're still fine to use.  Unfortunately not every colour matches those of the character designs and so John's looking a little yellow while Droey and Agrius are a bit dark.

I have never drawn someone tripping up before, so I can't be sure that I have been correct to the laws of physics with John's fall.  But the perspective on John is quite nice, I think I was able to foreshorten well enough. In fact John turned out better than everyone else in this piece, even with the discoloured skin!

Have you got supplies that you are new to? I hope you enjoy making use of them!

Sock Kasey

Kasey Golden is an artist YouTuber who specialises in watercolour illustrations and did a face reveal video on April Fools day. She is also great at sewing and made herself a sock puppet which was given a full body in time for her face reveal so that 'Sock Kasey' could be a nude model! I decided to do sketches with the time restrictions set in the video and here are results.

I sketched every one of the poses Sock Kasey did in the video, why would there be a my need to skip any of the poses? As I had said, the time restraints were applied and I hadn't done any time restricted art (excluding my Mr Men Challenge) since the time I drew a live model so it came to me as a bit of surprise how little time I had to actually complete each one. The best thing to do with time restricted sketches like these is to create the fundamental shapes of the whole piece rather than any of the details, otherwise you are most likely to end up with a jumble of little bits of each pose rather than whole poses which costs you the full benefit of sketching a model.

But this was a delightful bit of fun given that this was a sock puppet I was drawing. I went back on one of em after doing sketches and decided to attempt it again without the time restraint, this one naturally came out better than the predecessors. After sketching this Sock Kasey, I decided I was ready to make an art piece out of one of them; so I looked through the lot of them in the video and decided which Sock Kasey was my favourite one to recreate and I believe I chose the second or third pose. Below you will see the finished result.

Given that this was a Kasey Golden inspired piece, I got out my water colour pencils to give the illustration it's colour. I think this was the best decision for this piece and unlike previous attempts at watercolour in this sketchbook, the page didn't buckle! I used a new set of brushes, though to be honest I did struggle with all but one of them. Paint brushes have never been my forte and I think that is partially why water colours and other paints have been a struggle for me. I'm fine as a fine artist (pun completely intended, I am sorry) but when it's time to get the brushes out I'm daft as a brush (okay, I need to stop!), that said this is one of my favourite water colour pieces ever, and yes I do count water colour pencils in said category.

Did you do any sketches of the Sock Kasey? It's a nice bit of fun and I suppose a good practice before or even after you have worked with a live model. You'll find the video on YouTube if you fancy having a try at it yourself, I'd recommend it!

Red And White Return

Over a year ago I illustrated two different characters based on colours, a red man and a white girl. I was going to do more of these and I may still do but it has since slipped my mind. Instead though I have come back to White and Red and revamped their designs!

So White's redesign was a simple task where all I changed was the addition of an ascot around her neck rather than a loose jumper. One thing I liked about her design was how she slit lay hid her face in her clothes, making her look rather timid. The ascot hides a little more of her face and that works just fine for me. Other than that and the stylistic changes, there's nothing different about White.

To be fair, the same can be said for Red since he has no costume changes. Though he does have a set of bulkier muscles to match up to his six pack. He has also gained some height to become taller than White. I didn't intentionally make his dark red a lighter shade, this was a mistake on my part and his dark red should be the same shade that it was in the first version of him.

Not much else to say about these two other than they're back. Maybe we'll be seeing a bit more of them and hopefully this time I'll think to expand on their group with other colour based characters. Do you have any ideas for colour based characters that you can recommend? I'd be interested to hear about it, be it on this blog or via my Facebook page!

I'll Eat My Hat

So I was talking to a friend and told them that if I was wrong about a certain matter, I would eat my hat. I'm not saying I was wrong, but it was suggested that I actually drew myself eating my hat!

It took me a couple of sketches to work out how my face would have to act in order to consume the hat. Of course the jaw would be stretched, but the cheeks might need to bloat. In the end I decided against bloating cheeks because it make me look like I was in pain. The look I was going for was a comedic, defeated attitude. Here indeed I do think those traits have been expressed.

The peek was definitley the part of the hat that I would keep exposed since that would have the hardest time fitting in my mouth. This worked with the shape my mouth would take on, remaining close to it's original size at the top but incredibly stretched out on the lower half. Additionally this way the hat's logo would be exposed and I could only just fit it into view, beneath the teeth.

A bit of skin shading and some lettering later and this piece was done. I also added a blue border around the illustration to make it feel more whole, if that makes sense at all! This was a very humorous piece to make and something I should've thought of doing a long time ago. At last I have done it and love the result, I hope you do as well!

Art and Sleep Deprived

It's been a while since you've seen these two, though the blonde made an appearance alongside Michow Mooble recently! These are two of the artist student types from one of Lavendar Towne's video as I depicted them. They're just chilling out together.

So in case you haven't figured it out, the yellow one represents the lazy artist who has excuses for not having done her work while the other is the zombie artist, deprived of sleep and trying his hardest to get the work done. I figured they would play off each other quite well, not in a productive sense but with their inability to get their work in on time.

They are unnamed so far so I ought to get around to giving them names, but for now I'll refer to them as Zombie and Sloth. So Zombie is sketching in his book, or at least trying to, and is giving the work his full attention while trying his hardest not to fall asleep. But Sloth, who is adamant on doing her work another time, is trying to steer Zombie away from his work so he can chill with her.

Are these two a couple, maybe, I haven't decided. But they are definitely closer friends compared to the rest of the five. I should bring back all five of these artist students and get them to interact with each other. I'll see to it, and hopefully come back with a finished result!

Trying Out A Situation Prompt

There are prompts for just about anything creative. I sometimes use artist prompts to help me, but there's a great deal artists can do with writing prompts. I've started collecting them to see if little scenes can be painted with my characters or any characters and here is the result.

'Seven billion people in the world, and you're overreacting because we killed one man.'
'But-'
'Seven. Billion. People. Now quit the complaining and drink your smoothie.'

I didn't start with this prompt, but instead started with a character design. Hopefully you're all familiar with Agrius Moth, but the other guy is a newbie. This villain goes by the name 'Raven Hole' and he is indeed a black hole. Rather proud of his image and keen to get whatever he wants, this guy has one trick, one power to grant him the intimidation that'll get him his way.

So in this scene, Raven Hole has just done some of his black hole magic to kill someone and Agrius is in shock about it. I think it only adds to the humour to have Agrius the bad guy just drinking a smoothie alongside another villain, one of a different league.

I also took the oppurtunity to try out some pencil shading, I used only two pencils to shade Raven Hole. Hopefully I'll be able to translate those greys into a colour scheme when I next present Raven Hole. I was going to do the same for Agrius but as you can see in the image below, there was an issue with his glove which meant I couldn't pencil shade there. That's the only problem with the white ink. On the plus side, this allows people to look at our newbie, Raven Hole, more easily.

See that smoothie Agrius is holding, that inspired another new character which you will get to meet very soon!

I'm Sorry For What I Did; I Miss You

In February last year a rather unusual piece came onto this blog and it certainly attracted some attention. This was a giant frog holding a bloody sphere as he looked at his reflection, full of regret. Well after over a year's absence he's back!

There have been a few minor changes to the concept in which the frog man is less giant and more so just large compared to humans. This is not a draw this again though I wouldn't mind trying to recreate that original masterpiece, this is instead different point in time and clearly Gorf the frog man used to be more sane, but he also used to be less lonely.

The lady in his picture is his beloved, no longer with him but they were clearly a happy couple. Gorf  still loves her, but clearly he has done something so bad that he will never see her again. I have to confess that I don't have a solid story behind any of this but it's about time that I saw to giving Frogman his story and letting the world know what he did, why he did it and what the consequences are (beside lots of blood).

I realise that excluding anything Gorf related I haven't actually been doing any ball point pen shading properly and should get more practice with it, though I like how it has been exclusive to Gorf. I had access to better markers this time so streaky colours was a less significant problem and the smaller scale helped my shading in this illustration. I've found I usually work better with ball point shading when I work smaller. Though as I was finishing up this masterpiece, I realised there was one thing that contradicted the original... Gorf's left arm has grown back!

Let me know when you want to see more of Gorf and I can see to it that some of his mysteries are put to a conclusion! We can discover his secrets together and expose him for the things he's done! And if you have no idea what any of this is about, here's the original picture that all of this has spawned from.

PLEASE NOT THE ILLUSTRATION BELOW CONTAINS BLOOD, VIEW WITH CAUTION