Tag Archives: sketchbook

executive genie fashions

Peggy
February 21, 2016

“I like the way you bring your identity of ‘witch’ into your daily life. I’ve been wanting to do that with ‘genie’.” “It’s been pretty powerful! Doing that with ‘genie’ while remaining street-legal feels like it’s gonna pose some major problems, though, hmm.” (because cartoon shorthand for ‘genie’ is always ‘sheer harem wear that doesn’t hide much plus a lot of bangles’)

And then my brain wouldn’t stop turning it over after I got out of bed and I doodled this out in like 10 minutes. Street-legal powerful businesswoman wear, with a genie theme.

business-genie

Turned-up collar to create something like a veil effect. Smoky accents to suggest fading into vapor. And a canvas bag with a bit of gold-toned hardware and embroidery to carry everything one might need to grant the odd wish. Heavy coat? Opaque dress? Depends on the season.

 

New Years Eve Doodles

Peggy
January 2, 2016

I spent most of New Year’s Eve at a party hosted by Nick’s friends. I spent some time talking, drinking, and eating, but mostly I sat around drawing silly things.

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Suggestions from people who would quite happily be pitching for those higher tiers.

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I accidentally introduced Nick to “It’s My Beak” the other day, so I drew the rollerskating duck from the video to annoy him

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“That top dude looks like if the Brothers Chaps did a SF cartoon.”

*draws more stuff that deliberately looks that way*
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Keith Hairy is my new graffiti handle.

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I have a long-standing vow: if someone says “Draw me a yiffy vixen, Peggy!”, I will do so for free, and do my best to make them regret it with the drawing.

This one succeeded.

Then Nick and I got a ride back to my place and lounged in the living room cuddling. We spent most of the next day playing Assault Android Cactus on his computer; I unlocked a bunch of stuff in it because I have been playing that sort of game for decades. Looking forwards to the PS4 release of it.

 

 

 

 

a shading experiment

Peggy
December 21, 2015

abs-shading-solstice-experiment

I was thinking about other people’s processes that involve shading on a separate layer that’s been constrained by a mask of the shapes it’s shading, and knocked this out in about an hour.

It looks nice, but I’m not sure how I feel about the fact that it resulted in about three times as many layers as I’d normally use.

Screen Shot 2015-12-21 at 12.44.26 PM

(All the ‘light’ and ‘shadow’ layers have an opacity mask of a duplicate of the layer they’re modifying; light layers are 100% screen, shadow layers are 100% multiply. Most paths in them are heavily gaussian blurred; all the shadow paths are a blue-purple gradient.)

And just to show how much some simple effects can add, here’s the same image with most of the blurs removed:

abs-shading-solstice-experiment-deblur

I may try experimenting with this on a few panels of Absinthe. Making myself separate “shading” from “drawing” is weird; I’m really used to considering them at the same time. I may also want to experiment with using this method for broader strokes of shading, and doing some of the subtler shading within the base layers the way I normally do. Dunno. My methods are a constant work in progress, and ultimately what matters most is a mix of working speed and how fast they feel – I’d rather do something that’s empirically a bit slower, but feels faster to my brain, because that’s more likely to keep me happily working for a longer stretch. Making sure everything works in silhouette and basic colors before going to shades probably won’t hurt, though.

 

50s style experiments

Peggy
December 16, 2015

Further Confusion is coming up soon, and I’ll be holding down a corner of a friend’s booth doing the odd badge on my new Tiny Printer. This year’s theme is “Cafe FC: A Classic American Diner”, which honestly does nothing for me, Happy Days is not my nostalgia. But. What was going on in cartoons back then? Jim Flora! Mary Blair! UPA! And all that other crazy semi-Cubist stuff. I can totally dig that.

So I googled up some inspiration, and started doodling.

Evernote Camera Roll 20151216 000644 Evernote Camera Roll 20151216 000644 Evernote Camera Roll 20151216 000644

(These aren’t actually on purple paper, I just photographed these under the colored lights in my living room. Rollerball pen with highlighter.)

I’m not sure I’ll go full 50s abstract. I like looking at that stuff but it’s not in my blood like it is for some of my animation school buddies. But there are definitely stylistic tricks I can use to give a distinct “fifties graphics” feel to my normal shapes. Pull a palette off of some Flora album covers, pick a few different brushes based on things I see in collections like this along with some fonts, and I’ll be ready.

I may also consider having a secondary theme of “your Fallout fursona” because that sure is fifties-flavored, and it’s pretty topical. Maybe just slip one of those into my sample badges. I don’t want to be drawing Your Vault-Tec Guy Fursona though.

(My other alternative theme idea was “50s sci-fi” but honestly I already did that when I did promo art for FC2013 whose theme was “Furbidden Planet”. Somebody on the FC concom must really love fifties retro, I guess.)

Next step: draw up a badge for myself, and for a few friends, as samples. If I go with the rough up there maybe I’ll just describe my take on the theme as “Space Age Bachelor Pad”; it’s a grown-up party let’s all get drunk until someone puts a lampshade on their head.

Hunter and Bard

Peggy
September 13, 2015

hunter-and-bard

 

Nick came over and visited yesterday. He’d just gotten back from a visit home, so things were pretty low-key. We went for a walk in Ballard, then came back and sat in front of the projector all evening. An attempt at legally watching the latest episode of Steven Universe was thwarted by the joys of DRM (thanks for not buffering worth a shit, Amazon Instant Play!), so we ended up just hanging around while I played Bloodborne. I repeatedly failed to kill The One Reborn while Nick acted as my bard, playing gleefully inappropriate music and making the occasional comment on tactics, or on errors I was about to make.

I did not manage to succeed at killing this boss last night. But I drew this. Then when I got up this morning I turned on the PS4 again and killed it on the third try. Hooray for training montages!

(The characters are, of course, one of the OTPs of our various typesex characters. Kalinda the former-cobra-now-archaeopteryx is the foolhardybrave Hunter, and Noelle the unicorn is her bard.)

I drew a comic about some music.

Peggy
September 9, 2015

 

So one of my comics idols, Matt Howarth, did this thing where he’d draw these little comic strips about music he was listening to, and stuck them in the back of his comics. He called them “Sonic Curiosity”, and these things got me to try out a lot of music I wouldn’t have ever heard of otherwise. (He’s still doing this now and then online, as a matter of fact.)

This is me sitting down with the latest album by one of those musicians and doing my take on the idea.

Dead Planet is the second side of a double album. The first side is “Human Upgrade”, in which the alien wants you to have an awesome high-energy dance party. The whole package is ten pounds – about sixteen bucks American – on Bandcamp. I liked it enough to draw this while listening to the second half.

soon

Peggy
September 6, 2015

Soon. Soon I will be able to do this iRL. Soon.

Or at least I hope so. I tried a couple of pole crunches at the end of strength class today and they were pretty damn good, which means I’m pretty close to doing this. Just in time to start running around and getting less exercise as I do four cons in as many weekends, but hey, I’ll have them again in a month afterwards at worst.

I know the featured image I’m referring to won’t show up when this is crossposted to LJ. I wonder if it’ll vanish for Tumblr as well? Let’s find out.

Pronoun Trouble

Peggy
August 21, 2015

so i am at worldcon right now and my friend orbus has a table where he is trying to introduce old-school sf fandom to the concept of pronoun labels, in the form of ribbons you stick to your name badge that tell everyone what pronoun you wish to be referred to as.
he has a handout that explains the whys and wherefors of this idea, but it is a wall of text, and he would like to break it up with some drawings that help convey the concept of different people preferring different pronouns.

so i drew this: three people with a mostly female form and a clear indication of A Bulge between their legs – rather like my own body configuration – who desired different pronouns. one of them may not be taking this that seriously, and that’s cool too. gender doesn’t have to be drop-dead serious 24-7 in my opinion; nothing does.

also i am tired and drunk and a little stoned right now so i can’t be arsed with proper capitalization. so there.

scribble test

Peggy
August 3, 2015

scribble-test

Oh hey if you make a few graphic styles to make it easy to switch between a few sets of settings on the ‘scribble’ effect you can really quickly do something pretty close to cross-hatching. I tried this on a super quick doodle then wanted to do something a little less quick, so I roughed out dragon-self pole dancing because that’s kind of a default thought now I guess.

You can do a pretty similar effect with pattern fills but that tends to either look kinda fakey or wholly mechanical; this one is both really precise and just a little bit organic, which is generally where I want all my Illustrator work to reside. I like it.

 

About a half hour, Illustrator. As usual. I am pretty sure doing this in real media would have taken a lot longer and made my wrist less happy. I’d have had more control over suggesting the contours of the surface but honestly I’m not sure that’s a tradeoff worth making.

 

(CYBOrG ARTIST IS PLEASED WiTH Her CAREFULLY MODULATEd INHUMAN PRECISION)