THE SIMPSON NEWS

It’s a four day work week this week.  As much as like getting a day off, I hate having less days to do my job.  The schedule doesn’t change because of any days off we have.  It just means we have less time to do our work. I’m starting on a new show this week and I’ve had to hit the ground running.  Hope I can finish what I need to finish.

ART

I decided to start thumbnailing a more finished drawing with all the characters, only to discover that I hadn’t designed the raven. Well, I began sketching right away. But, how do you design a “heroic” raven?

I came up with a design fairly quickly.  In earlier sketches of the raven, I think I had hit a design I kinda liked.  All I had to do was push it a bit more.  I also chose to give him a “hairdo”.  He now has a bit of slicked back “hair”. I thought it gave him  a bit of “greaser” vibe.

An interesting thing happened as I looked for reference online for the raven. As I looked up photos and typed out “raven”, google suggested “white raven”.  White raven? So I clicked on that.  BAM! I got a ton of photos of white ravens! I didn’t know there were such things.  Wow, I’d never heard of anyone using a white raven in a story before, so I decided there and then that the raven in my story, was going to be WHITE.  This is the reason the drawing in the bottom left of the page above is NOT darkened like the others.

Last week, Maria Johnson (of the CATHOLIC WEEKEND podcast, among other things) left a comment that gave me a good jumping off point for my background designs.   She thought, maybe I could use a Schnitzel stand in Germany, like they have in Bamberg. I haven’t been to Bamberg so I had no visual reference. I decided to try to google some reference.  I was not surprised to find that I couldn’t find anything.  I DID manage to find ONE photo that, even though it’s probably not what Maria was talking about,  gave me an idea of what I wanted to do in the end.

This is the photo:

I love the size of the stand and how open it is.  I love the space too. It seems enclosed yet open enough. Cobble stone floor? I’m so using that.  How awesome it that castle on the hill?

Below are some thumbnails for pictures I might develop into finished pieces. I also drew a top down view of what I might want the location to look like.  I’ve recently taken some pictures that will help me develop it even more:

After that I decided that I might want to start figuring out the colors for my characters.  I took out some Prismacolor Markers, My Pentel brush pen, a colored pencil and began to sketch.  I was originally trying to just solve Rob’s hair (which is a pain in the butt to figure out). I thought that, while I was at it, I might as well ink it and do color experiments.

It was a disaster.  The colors I used were  just the wrong ones. They looked all  muddy.  I hadn’t planned the coloring well enough. When I scanned the drawing to put it up here on the blog, the scanner had managed to improve the colors a bit from the original.  I used Photoshop to try to fix them a bit more but nothing I did helped. The best I could do was what you see below:

Trust me, the original is worse.  Rob is suppose to be dark skinned not pink. The color I originally used was “Mocha Light” but it looked awful.

I guess I really should just use Photoshop to color my drawings. It would be much easier…but…I just feel like using my markers, darn it!

The drawing on the right, drawn on the Post It, was a doodle I did one day, just for the heck of it.  It’s not quite right but there are things about it that I want to keep for Robs final design.

I got more drawn then usual.  There were only two days of World Cup games last week.

BUTTERFLY BEAUTE

Alesha has started writing some articles on a site concerning natural beauty products that help you stay healthy.  This comes as no surprise since she make natural beauty products through her Butterfly Beaute company.

Her first article is called:

The Big Deal About Natural and Organic Hair Care

It’s about all the bad stuff you ought to be aware of, that’s contained in many mainstream conditioners. If this concerns you, click on the link above and read it.

If you want to check out some of Alesha’s natural beauty products, CLICK HERE.

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