tw:arachnophobia and also avenger spoilers...

mhh I seem to be having a weird problem with blogger - when I visit a blogger-blog (haha), I don't get the "follow" button anymore, but a "share" button instead. Did I somehow change something in the settings? is this normal now? Am I blind?

oh well.

My next exam is on the following monday, so I didn't draw much more than doodles recently. My biggest motivation for passing the exam is actually being more at ease with my time managment. While it is certainly not true that I have to spend all of my time studying, I tend to feel like that quickly, which results in guilt once I do something for my enjoyment :/
Once that exam is over I will be able to finish up my commissions, open the etsy store and enter a competition. Looking forward to that <3

I drew SOME stuff in the meantime though

a friend needed something like this for a presentation and asked me for help

gross...but perfect to take my mind off things haha

practicing skintones on my original character Pfeifer. Best smile ever.

One thing I DID allow myself is going to the cinema to watch the Avengers. I can only recommend it, because I had a BLAST. It's probably better if you saw some of the movies that led up to this (captain america, hulk, ironman, thor) but I did only see the first Ironman movie and had no trouble with this flick. You might get more enjoyment out of it otherwise, idk.
If you don't like superhero movies, you should probably pass? but even then, I'd say give it a chance! This movie has some amazing chemistry between the characters and Joss Whedon really knows the cinematic rule of ESTABLISHING and PAYOFF something that I found to be lacking ever since Michael Bay started assaulting the movie industry.

EHHHR SORRY FOR RAMBLING I have a lot of feelings about this movie. For now I had only time for doodles, but here you gooo (spoilers ahead)

May the odds be ever in your favour

Last week was my birthday and apparently that was the cue for everyone to get me books : D I haven't really read in a while, I'll admit that so this is very good.

Amongst the books was the Hunger Games series (Tribute von Panem vor my german readers) and while this series definitely has flaws, I kept finding myself doodling stuff from it.

the Hanging Tree

doodles...Katniss, Haymitch and Rue, and some berries

Johanna Mason! She is described with dark hair in the book but somehow she ended up like this in my head anyway...

Aside from that I guess I doodled some faces? 

Moriarty from BBC Sherlock pulling a face

random dude from reference - gotta practice skintones!

a mad OC of mine

welp, that's it for now I guess

Back to chemistry!

Making Ofs

 I don't have much to show right now but OH WELL. I filled my sketchbook with 30 second sketches (I got over 1000 in the end haha) and I think I will move on to 1 minute sketches now.
Well let's get to the actual content.
This is the Queen of Rats (ACEO #44), an original character of mine. As you can see that during working on this I decided to go for a more unhealthy, unappealing look this time.
I also used masking fluid as you can see in step 2 and 3, which still scares me. Worked well on this paper though.

And I drew Starscream from Transformers Prime. and if you don't know it and are willing to get past some lame first episodes, you should check it out, it's a lot of fun.
This painting isn't accurate at all...I wanted to see how fast I can finish this and it took me like 4 or 5 hours, which is not bad for me. I worked without outlines this time, and I have to say its a lot of fun :> especially with colored sketches, it adds some nice random color.

Mixed everything

Back from the Leipziger Buchmesse :> I had a great time. Artwise, linoleum prints happened~ They had a stand where children could try it on linoleum meant for floors and my friends and I decided to consider ourself kids for this.

Happy plaguedoctor is happy.

The grunt, a monster from the game Amnesia - The Dark Descent. Lovingly dubbed flappie.

It was kind of funny seeing Flappie between those prints haha.

I had tons of fun with this, so I'm considering getting myself some equipment for linoleum cuts :> I'd love to do a more elaborate one, on GOOD linoleum. Well there is only so much you can do in half an hour.

ALSO

I SAW THE FIRST EPISODE OF LEGEND OF KORRA.

And being a BIG FAN of Avatar: the Last Airbender, it got me ridiculously excited. Seriously, if you haven't seen Avatar, check it out. If you have seen Avatar, watch Legend of Korra.

I mean damn look at that badass.

Btw, Korra is drawn on one of the less homogeneous pages in my sketchblog.

For my 30 seconds gesture sketches I started drawing them with brushpens, to reduce the lines I'm using.

And now for something completely different...

Back in 2009 I was working with a bunch of other artists to compile a book that made songs from the german band Subway to Sally into comics and guess what - it's finally there : D

You can either get it at the Leipziger Buchmesse this week or preorder it online at amazon.com :>

What I love most about this book is how different the styles are and the unusual format of using black and white and one signal color:

NEAT

Here's another sample page of my entry :> I might have done it in 2009, but I am still very proud of how it turned out. While my shading and anatomy would be better now, I don't think I would be able to draw better ships hahaha.

That actually took the longest - looking for accurate reference (both ships in the story are based on ships that existed and they both have their own relevance to what is happening in my comic) and learning how to draw ships.

more tiny steps

Basically I just wanted to mark this day, since I reached 500 30-second sketches now :>

go for the stars, green man

I did the last 300 gestures from posemaniacs.com so I think I will switch back to stockphotos for a while.

Played with watercolor a little too (both unfinished):

Chalys

Nroci

 On the one on the left I tried to use a slightly different style - more wet in wet, less glazes and no outlines. It's a lot of fun! I also tested my Pentel Aquabrush on this. It's a nylonbrush with a watertank inside. For painting glazes it's a little too uncontrollable for me, but it's awesome for wetting areas before painting on them and stuff like this. I will get the other two sizes as well I think.
The one on the left was just the inkwash for painting over it, but I'm very dissatisfied with the finished product so...THIS IS ALL YOU GET.
I guess.

And since I started watching Todd in the Shadow's Pop Song reviews, I decided to draw a little fanart for that (seriously who can resist painting silhouettes...)

In which we combine science and art!

Well, not really. But that post I made earlier about how horribly wrong using Ecoline in combination with alcohol can go made me want to compare the three main types of colors I use: watercolor, ink and ecoline.

This is not a very scientific test since I only used one sample, didn't measure time and amounts and had slightly varied conditions but uh IS IT POSSIBLE I MISS BEING IN THE LABORATORY A LITTLE...

Pink shade: watercolor (Schmincke Horadam as cake to be exact. This only gives a rough estimate of how watercolor behaves since i found it does not only depend on the brand you are using or whether it comes in tubes or as cake, but also on the pigment itself. I have found that "earthlike tones" as sienna and umbra are usually more saturated with pigment and much more opaque than "artificial tones" such as phtalo blue)

Blue shade: Ecoline (liquid watercolor)

violet shade: waterproof ink (Rohrer und Klingner Zeichentusche)

paper: heavy watercolorpaper (300 mgs, I don't know what it would be in lbs sorry :c), coldpressed

(cut because this got kind of long)

What are torsos?

Hey ich hätte mal ne Frage an die deutschsprachigen Leser, die mir so folgen - ist english only okay oder wünscht ihr euch die Beiträge bilingual? Bis jetzt hab ich stets auf englisch geschrieben weil ich mir eben dachte dass ich eher davon ausgehen kann dass jemand english kann als davon dass jemand deutsch kann, aber mir ist aufgefallen dass ein Großteil meines Publikums aus Deutschland kommt, von daher |D

OH WELL
when in doubt I will continue writing english entries.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I decided to practice drawing since I'm not satisfied where I am right now artwise. To be honest, I never really practiced before...kind of sad.

Anyway, I might need to study a lot at the moment, but 30 second sketches don't take very long and are the first step to improving figure drawing (for me).

I am physically unable to not write stupid things on my sketches

Doing these I realized that the torso is the most important piece in figure drawing. Yeah that is probably the first thing you learn in art school but I never had any schooling so bear with my very basic epiphanies :D

So I started practicing how to place ribcages and hips (all of these are from reference)

I also finished a portrait commission :>
This was fun, I love using red and cool blues together aaah!

tiny steps

Sooo recently I've decided to paint some sets of miniprints and since I had like 5 different ideas I put them up for vote on deviantart and tumblr. Most people wanted to see the Horsemen of the Apocalypse first, so I scribbled some designs for them

war, death, famine, pestilence yeeeaaaaaah

I like simple designs~ and I wanted to go for things that can look good on their own as well. so I went for a pretty classic Death, a LADY KNIGHT, a zombie for famine and uhhh...an OC of mine. That's probably a little self indulgent but I thought it would be kind of cute
I guess.

Another thing I've been doing is practicing anatomy...a little. I drew some 30 second poses, and while I first was a little annoyed that they repeated pretty quickly, I realized that this helps me see PROGRESS.

...well at least I see progress. A little. Haha~

A word on Ecoline

Sooo if you are anything like me when it comes to watercolors, you probably like to mix in some other things to create texture - be it salt, plasticwrap, wax or alcohol.

Yeah.
Using alcohol with Ecoline (a brand of liquid watercolor)? BAD IDEA.

glad this happened with a lineart I wasn't really proud of  anyway

What happened was is that in combination with the alcohol, the ecoline started to stain the paper and behave very much like a marker causing it to run under the masking fluid I had used on this and being impossible to lift off with water.

backside of the paper

 The reason why Ecoline behaves so different from "normal" watercolor? Well my guess is that, since ecoline is a solution rather than a suspension of pigments, that the smaller alcohol-molecules where able to permeate deeper into the paper than water does, taking the ecoline solution with it (since it seems to be stable with water it's probably stable with other polar solvents as well).
Or I might be wrong altogether.

In any case, this was a pretty educational painting
sob

Picture dump...thing

I figured that even if I don't really draw at the moment I could at least put some older things here haha

First some watercolor doodles. I have this tiny watercolorpad that i like to abuse these days. The first three are done in ecoline, liquid watercolors. They are kind of fun to use, but you have to be so careful since they behave a lot differently than regular watercolors!

help how does I put pictures here
And, because I love deinopidae, an ogre faced spider. I used a reference for this but since it was a 20 minute doodle, I used it very very loosely

what I do at the moment is this though:

...sigh.