Guess what technique I just learned!

I'm taking an art history class on Renaissance to Present day and I learned about a drawing technique developed early on in that era.
Can You guess which one it is?








Well as you can see I've been using Mantegna foreshortening, which is another word for (as the teacher put it) pretending your audience is full of morons (emphasis on pretending). You over exagerate the contour lines between a persons skin to force the reader to see the depth of their limbs or body. and like that mentally challenged guy from flowers for Algernon, I'm using it at every opportunity no matter how inappropriate.

But, just look at the hands! I think this is the first time I've improved on my hand work since... years before I even started this blog. I mean look at this. Hell, the main reason I kept Magic 8 Ball Girl a Stick figure for so long was because of the hand issue.

So Yeah, Good learning experience had by all.

Severe Updates to M8BG

A new Website is under constuction to be the new home of Magic 8 Ball Girl. With more elbo room, a fully functioning archive system and a shiny new banner.

notice something about Magic 8 Ball Girl



Stick limbs are a thing of the past now. I am confident enough now to draw Magic 8 Ball Girl and all her friends with slightly greater anatomical correctness.

Not bad for a guy who learned to draw from a kanji book.

Creepy sketches

This weeks Sketches may be a bit offputting.

Sasuke and Itachi reenact the infamous scene from South Park's "Scott Tenorman Must Die"


A scrapped comic involving a catholic priest and a high school teacher. You can guess why I didn't finish it.

"Kill him"
With these words the boy's life changed. No longer was he his mother's son, he was the product of his father's thievery and betrayal, and as such his mother would make him become his father's end.
With that accomplished she faded, passing down no compassion, no love, no comfort to her son; only that one burden.

dIRT PARK

A park for dirt

Sundays comic

So for this weeks sketch blog, Here's a timeline of how freaken long yesterday's magic 8 ball girl comic took.

8:00 pm: Mentally tried to picture the panel layout, and accepted the fact I needed to plan it out first for this week:
I wrote it out and divided it by panels
Then I drew a rough sketch for each panel by grid


Now I just figure out the best way to orginize the panels. And I figured the best way was to stick with switching between 1 and 2 panels per row.
They I slanted them were appropriate, and shifted them this way:9:00 pm: Drew up the first panel, started working on how the candles were in there.

Suddenly got an idea for a Naruto comic, sketched it up and uploaded it to Deviant art

10:00 pm: Finished the first panel, Started panel 2. Decided it would be better to make the background for it first. Pulled up a reference for panel 3.

11:00 pm - 1:00 am: got panel 4 and 5 out of the way. Ran into a bit of trouble on panel 6 and dug up some references from page 28 for panel 7 and adapted it accordingly.

1:00 to... 2:30 am: Panels 8 9 and 10 made. Somewhere in that, I respond to a comment on the Naruto Comic. It gets my mind wandering, and I look through some old writings and got some thoughts hammered down.

2:30 to 4:00 am: Wrote out the dialogue for the panels, and then proceded to fill in all the outlines of drawings so that the backgrounds didn't stick out. Added word balloons, and respaced the panels.

4:00 - 5:00 am: adjusted the export window for Flash mx and saved the imageTook the image into photoshop and cropped it into segments that were shorter than 800 pixels so PhotoBucket would not compress them.

Uploaded each image to Photobucket, Saw an error in the third panel, fixed it and re-exported and uploaded that to photobucket.

Posted the Comic to Magic 8 Ball Girl. Collapsed to bed, and saw the light of the sun breaking out the window.


Other notes:
Coloring was down periodically over sunday, so I'm not going to bother timelining that.
Periodically during the process, I would get large 2 cup glasses of Water or Dr. Pepper (only caffinated drink I had at hand), as well as a little of the leftovers from dinner that evening.

Back from Fanime

Man that was an awesome trip. There's a slight irony to the fact that my regular job has me sitting around all day and my first vacation was to a convention where I'm on my feet walking around all day. But I have to say, I feel a lot better after the whole thing. I guess a change of pace is just refreshing weather it's slowing down or speeding up.
Me my sister and my brother were at the convention mainly to scout it out. Next year we will be putting up a booth in the artist alley in hopes to make a sustaining profit off our work.
We learned a lot from the trip and have plenty of ideas for the booth we'll have set up next year, but I have to keep those plans under my hat for now. (Of course, Magic 8 Ball Girl will be a star attraction to the show.

It wasn't all just work of Course, Here's some of the pictures from the Con'. My sister has most of them right now, so I'll get those up later.

This is the "Costume" I had for the convention. I'm not one for Cosplaying, so I got the Elmo Puppet (from the same Youtube Video) and Dressed it up as Tayuya from Naruto. I turned more than a few heads for this one, but MAN ALIVE it was a strain just too keep it's head up sometimes. My arms nearly fell off there.

Sadly, the only Cave Story Costume I came across.

I swear, when they designed the Girl Trainer's costume for Pokemon D/P, They must have thought, "What would be the most Cosplay friendly design for her."

L plays Chess with another L. THIS is what I call getting into character.

This statue was a block away from the convention... I don't think I need to explain what's so funny about this.

Here are some of the Souvenirs I purchased at the con.
In addition to getting the Shiraishi Figure, I also picked up a special box of the first Lucky star DVD.
That sketch in the Middle I purchased from the Artist Alley. on my last day there.
And there was a girl in the artist ally was making custom figurines, so I commisioned for a magic 8 ball girl one. Her Deviant art Profile is here, if you want to check it out.

Including the price of Food, I only spent a grand total of less than 200 dollars at this convention, which appearently isn't much at all. In fact on my first day I spent hours wandering around the "Dealers den" and this Tron Bonne Toy was the only purchase I made. (at half price too). I've always been needlessly finicky, though.

There was also a booth where a girl would draw you in your costume as an anime character. So I commissioned a caricature of my Tayuya Puppet

Lost winds art

This week's art based from the new game lost winds. a game that plays like a japanese platform adventure, but with character designs from out of american newspaper comics.
And... that's all I have... Um...