I’m working on “inking” my drawing of Salad Fingers in photoshop. Thought I’d share.

Most importantly, I think, it’s good for giving access to things that we’re told we’re not allowed to see.

History is important and it’s relevant. Pretending things never happened doesn’t fix anything.

Also, art can be a product of its time and limited by the social constraints and ideas of its time and still be art. And art should never, ever be covered up.

So I’ve decided to ditch the line drawing all together. I’m just going to go ahead and do the thing as a full on digital painting. As I started coloring in her left (our right) glove and playing with that, and then detailing the scars across the right side (her left) of her torso, I realized that the line drawing was ultimately taking away from what could be a better picture.

So yeah, I’ve just been working with the color layer exclusively. I still have the line drawing layer on the picture (though it’s hidden now) to use as a guide, but by the time it’s finished, the line drawing will be completely gone.

I think I’ve figured out what I’m going to do with the suspenders and her pants. I only JUST (like, five minutes ago) started on the suspenders, but at least I know what I’m doing now and how it should (theoretically) look.

As you can see I haven’t touched her face at all since I ditched the line drawing, so it looks pretty goofy at the moment. I’ll work my way up, since when I started I worked my way down. I’m really looking forward to getting up to her face, though it’s going to be a challenge. Mostly I’m looking forward to putting the details into that Glasgow Smile.

I’m undecided on the Joker pin. Part of me wants just that little bit more to tie her in with the whole Batman universe. But then part of me thinks it’s too much. Too busy. We’ll see if I leave it on there or not. It’s there for now, but I’ll probably end up either moving it or taking it off completely.

But now I have to go to sleep because I told Sandra that I’d try to get to bed at a reasonable hour tonight, and 3am is fast approaching and I’m pretty sure 3am is not reasonable.

Anyway, sorry for bombarding these works in progress lately. I like to have them for my own reference, and this seems like a good way to keep track of what I’m doing. I’m really digging how this picture is coming together. Especially since it was something that I just kind of started doing without really intending on putting much work into it. Here we are, like, a couple weeks later and I’m still working on it. I think it’s going to be killer when it’s done.

If you’re interested, for comparesson sake, here’s the previous non-line drawing color version of the picture.

Okay, so I did some more work on the coloring. I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to do for her suspenders, if anything at all.

And, just because I’m thinking about another direction, here’s what it looks like when I take off the line drawing layer.

I’m beginning to wonder, now that I’ve put a lot more work into the coloring than I intended to (initially, I was just going to do some kind of basic watercolorish comic book style coloring) I’m thinking that maybe I’ll ditch the line drawing all together and just do it as a full color digital painting style thing.

I’m also not sure about the hip tattoo. I felt like I needed to bring a little more of the diamond theme into it, because that’s such a big part of Harley Quinn’s look. But I dunno.

She’s kind of soft looking too, but I’m okay with that. The look of her body is based on the model in the original photo, and I don’t really want to try and improve on her body. I figure that if I’m doing a more realistic style version of Harley, then I should use a real person’s body.

And just because I feel like it, here’s a collection of all of the WIPs so far.

I’m hoping that by bringing down the white from her face further onto her chest and dicking around with the scar on her neck that I’ve been able to somewhat address the “flesh sweater” thing that some of you pointed out in the last WIP. I hope so anyway.

Anyway, lemme know what you think.

Did a little more work on the Harley Quinn picture. Started playing around with the color more. I think I’m getting closer to done with the line art part of the drawing. There’s still a fair bit more work to go on her gloves, hat and hair. And whatever I decide to do with her pants. I haven’t figured that one out yet. I’m going to do something else with the suspenders as well. What I’ve got on there right now is just kind of something I threw on there really quick.

I figured that since I was going with the self mutilation thing, I may as well take it a step further and do the diamond shape as scarification rather than a tattoo. I wasn’t entirely sure how to do a convincing tattoo anyway without it just looking like I drew the shape on with a sharpie.

I’ve been playing around with the color a fair bit more. I think I’ll be able to take what was in there and “paint” on top of that and get what I need from it. I kept finding myself focusing on certain aspects of the color even though I told myself I wouldn’t. Initially I just wanted to throw SOME color in there so I had an idea of what I wanted to do. But I kept getting to involved with actually coloring in parts of it the way I wanted it to actually look. So I may as well just take it from there and keep going. No sense starting over when I’ve already got some of what I want.

I still haven’t decided what I want to do with the background. What’s in there right now is just a basic Photoshop “stain glass” filter. I need to come up with something else though. I might even just do a solid color like I had before. I dunno. Haven’t decided yet.

I keep almost taking in her waste a bit, just so she looks a little more unrealistic and comic booky. But then I don’t. I figure that if I’m drawing based on a photograph, I should really use the physical dimensions of the model. I mean, I am going for more of a realistic looking picture rather than a overtly comic bookish picture.

Oh, and if you’re ever looking for reference pictures on self mutilation, blood play and scarification, be wary of Google Image Search. Very wary. There are things are there that are far beyond what I was looking for.

worked on this for just a little bit tonight. Posting all of these “Work in progress” pictures is really more for my own reference later. I just like to keep a record of how projects look at various stages. And it keeps me working on it.

Click for bigness if you’re interested.

Here it is with the basic place holder colors in. When I actually do the coloring, I’ll do it properly. This is just so I have an idea of what it might look like.

RE: This post

Worked a bit more on that Harley Quinn picture.

Click for a bigger version.

I also threw in some color. More just for my reference later. The actual color job won’t really look like this. I just wanted to see how the black line drawing looked over SOME kind of color. So I just kind of did this really quick. Looking at it smaller now, I’m going to change where her gloves end. And I’m probably going to take out her eyebrow piercing. I just drew it because the chick in the original picture had it. Though I do kind of dig the lip and the nose.

I figure she airbrushes the black over her eyes like Daryl Hannah in Bladerunner.

Sandra’s up at her grandma’s with her family. I’m at home alone, drifting from one present to another.

One of the things Sandra got me for Christmas that I opened early (because I ended up running into Futureshop to pick it up, since it was on sale that day) was a new Wacom tablet. I think I’m going to have to take it back and get another one though because the eraser doesn’t work.

Anyway, I’m killing time at home and started working on this in photoshop.

Which will ultimately be a newish take on the Batman character Harley Quinn. Obviously inspired fairly heavily from the Dark Knight version of The Joker. I typically don’t use black and white to actually “ink” anything that I’m drawing in photoshop. I generally go for more of a painting style approach, but I figure that since this was a comic book character (though, originally cartoon character if you want to nitpick) I should take a more Tim Bradstreet approach.

Plus, Sandra bought me the Brian Azzarello/Lee Bermejo Joker graphic novel which has a similar kind of gritty, demented approach to The Joker that’s very inline with the Dark Knight interpretation.

I haven’t read it yet, but I’ve flipped through the pages and taken a look at the style and it’s very much like the movie. I don’t know which came first, but I’m gonna assume that this book was inspired by the movie rather than the other way around. Either way, it got me wanting to do something like this.

I figure I’ll lay down a fairly intricate black and white drawing with line shading and bold outlines and then paint the colors on a layer under it in photoshop.

I really liked the scarification on The Joker’s face in the movie and I think that was a pretty interesting interpretation of the character. Doing away with (apparently at least) the whole “You dropped me in a vat of chemicals and now I hate you because that was such a dick movie Batman” aspect. Leaving the audience to assume that he either did it to himself or someone did it to him.

Either way, I think it works even better in the context of Harley Quinn. I mean, she’s the ultimate abused girlfriend. The idea that SHE either did this to herself to prove her love and admiration to The Joker… or, even worse, he did it to her to prove his ownership. Whichever way you look at it, it works in the context of the story.

That’s one of the things that’s so fascinating about Harley Quinn, and by extension The Joker himself. She was his psychiatrist. She started off in a position of power over The Joker and ultimately, he took that from her in the most extreme way. Or she gave it to him. If The Joker is the ultimate bad guy, then Harley Quinn is the ultimate doomed woman who can’t help but love bad guys. By the time she became “Harley Quinn” she was so far gone whatever power she ever had that she’s completely lost in this abusive, demented relationship with a man whose only emotional relationship with her consists of abuse and control.

It’s funny how Harley has become this kind of “powerful woman” character in the Batman universe, teaming up in almost homoerotic side stories with Poison Ivy. Because Harley Quinn is about as far from a “powerful woman” as you’re going to get in the comic book universe. They treat her like she’s this Mallory Knox kind of character who is somehow partnered with The Joker to pull off these intricate, entertaining crimes. That they’re on equal ground. But that’s not really true to her character at all. Without The Joker she’s nothing. Or, even more boring, without The Joker, she’s healthy and functional. But he’s managed to break her down so far that she can’t exist without him. Her entire emotional and mental structure is based on this need to please a man who only wants to keep her under his thumb.

It’s true that she is capable of holding her own, within the context of doing his bidding. She is a smart, capable woman. But she’s not strong. She’s incredibly weak and dependant. But not because he’s a man, or even THE man, but because he’s so fucking BAD. She’s beyond “He’s bad but I can fix him and make him love me” and into just getting off on how bad he is. That’s what I love about Harley Quinn. If she believed she was going to fix him and make him love her, then she’d be boring. But no… she just wants to watch him be evil.

And that’s hot. Abusive wife syndrome (which, I don’t know if that’ s actually a syndrome, but that’s what I’m going to cal it) isn’t an attractive quality in a character… but a character who gets off (I’m reading a little more into a children’s cartoon that I maybe should but whatever) on watching someone physically and emotionally hurt other people is both interesting and sexy. In a fictional character. In real life, not so much. But when we’re talking fantasy, that’s pretty hot.

It’s a shame that Heath had to die. There was talk (and, like so much talk around these Batman movies, I imagine it’s bullshit) that they were planning on possibly doing another movie that featured The Joker, this time focusing on his trial. It was (supposedly) going to have The Joker conducting all of these terrible things from his cell in Arkham Asylum, ala Charles Manson during his trial. THAT would have been the perfect context for bringing Harley Quinn into the movies. Can you imagine if they’d managed to have Heath in as The Joker, in Arkham, and had cast Michelle Williams as Harley Quinn?

That would have blown my mind. Of course, the history between the two would have made it that much more twisted and awesome.

But now we’ll never know.

Anyway, if you’re interested, this is the picture I’m using as reference for the Harley Quinn drawing.

And yes, she’ll probably be topless in my drawing as well. But I haven’t decided for sure yet. I’m going to draw gloves on her and probably some kind of hat with the pointy jester things and bells. If you could see more of her arms, I was going to have the diamond pattern tattooed on her. I may still work that in there. I was stuck between a few different poses from the same set of pictures.

I also liked this one, but I didn’t think you could see enough of her face to get the scarification across.

And I like being able to see her stomach. I’m thinking about doing something with that.

gravity sent me this link. Here are some of the standouts.

Still working on this, slowly but surely. I seems like I’m drawing in little half hour bursts. For instance, I worked on this for a half hour last night while Sandra watched The Hills. That’s okay. I can deal with that. A half hour a day is better than nothing I guess.

Haven’t done any blending yet, which is unusual for me. Usually I’ve already started blending WAY before I get this far. But whatever. I’m taking it all very organically. See what happens.

Did a deviantart.com search for “Dexter” since I submitted my “work in progress” last night and I wanted to see other portraits.

This is one of the results.

by *14-bis

Here are a few of the (Dexter related) stands out.

And then there’s these two, which are both fine portraits. I include them because they both did the same thing I’m planning to do, which is draw in traditional black/gray graphite and then go in with something red and drawing the blood. I thought I was so original.

I haven’t drawn seriously in well over a year. I just… haven’t. I’ve tried a few times but never made it very far. The last thing I even remotely drew seriously was the Al Swearengen portrait that I never finished. And I last worked on that in Nov of last year.

But tonight I got a bug up my ass and decided I was going to draw something. That happens every so often. I get a bug up my ass. But what usually happens is that I break out the big 14X17 sketch pad and get in WAY over my head (considering how out of practice I am) and I get bored/discouraged before I get anywhere near done. For instance, this picture of Heath Ledger as The Joker that I started and never got anywhere near finished. It’s now sitting in the  bottom of my coffee table, getting dusty. I just got bored.

I blew my drawing enthusiasm wad just drawing that fucking glove and playing card. It was far too big a project for me. I worked my way up to the 14X17 sized paper before and I should remember that in the future I will need to work my way BACK up to paper that sized. I just don’t have the attention span to work on the same piece for that long.

So anyway, tonight I got a bug up my ass and felt like drawing. So I made a deal with myself. I would draw a figure that was almost exclusively a face. No hands, no complicated clothing or textures (like Al Swearengen’s fucking pinstriped suit. WHAT WAS I THINKING?!). Just a face. And I would draw it on the 9X12 paper rather than the 11X14 or the 14X17. So that’s what I did. Sandra and I sat on the couch and started rewatching Lost season 4 and I drew. And this is as far as I got tonight. Hopefully I’ll be able to pick it up and finish it tomorrow.

Also, I’m not using a bunch of different pencils and erasers and stuff. I’ve got a 2B mechanical pencil and a kneaded eraser. Oh, and my little clicky pen eraser. I may go in once it’s close to done with a 6B or something and darken in the blackest blacks. I’ll probably just use tissue paper to blend rather than blending stumps. And only if I want to. I might not even do that.

OH, and I’m going to go in with a red watercolor pencil and do the blood spatters on his face, which you can see here in the source picture.

I was really torn between that picture and this picture of Stephen King.

Obviously, I decided on Dexter.

I may do the King picture next, if I’m still feeling like drawing.

So I’m doodling in photoshop.

Today was (is) kind of a stressful day, so when I was stressing about all kinds of shit I decided to just throw on some podcasts and work on something completely mindless. I forgot about the Heath Ledger thing I was working on, but that’s alright. I don’t really want to work on something that depressing right now.

Anyway, this is it so far. Thought I’d share.

Here’s what I’ve got so far. The girl, the sky, the grass and the flowers are all on their own layers.

Here’s the original.

So a while back I posted the first “work in progress” for the Al Swearengen picture I’ve been working on.

Truthfully, I haven’t really been working on it at all. The first WIP I posted was over a month ago and I think I’ve maybe worked on it for a total of fifteen minutes since then. Then today I was feeling pretty lazy so I put on the commentary track for Hostel Part 2 and started working on it again.

I ended up doing what I originally planned to do before, which is starting off with the really dark pencils (a 5B) and using that almost exclusively. I’ve only used a 2B on a few little places (his eyelashes, some of the hair in his sideburns) because it’s got a finer tip (mechanical pencil) and I could get a little tighter with the details.

There’s still a fair bit left to do. Lots of blending and detail work. Mostly what I’ve got here is I’ve laid down most of my dark areas and started blending them out to create gradients, and then I’ve added a few different layers of lines for the hair and blended them all together and then added more and blended those until I’ve got a decent amount of different levels of shadows and things. Then I started in with the eraser and picked out highlights and stray hairs and things. I’ve been (trying at least) working mostly left to right, but I got caught up in working on his forehead and nose when there’s still a lot left to do on the left side.

Not to mention that damned pinstripe suit that I’ve been pretending that I’m not going to have to do. It’s going to be a serious challenge.

One thing that’s kind of cool is that because I’ve been working so dark, I didn’t do anything to the picture in photoshop. Usually the finished result is much lighter looking (I guess because it’s pencil rather than like, charcoal or pastel or something) than I’d like, so I usually dick around with the levels in photoshop and darken it up. It always looks better that way. But this time, I just scanned it, pasted the two halves together (the pictures are usually bigger than my scanner and I’ve got to scan them in sections) and save it. So the picture here is a pretty acurate representation of the actual piece, which makes me feel better and less like a phony.

If you’re interested, just for comparisons sake, here’s what it would look like if I’d adjusted the levels and made it black and white it in photoshop.

It does look a little better that way, but I’m digging the fact that I don’t need to do that this time.

So I’ve finally gotten around to starting that Al Swearengen picture I talked about forever ago.

So far it’s just the basic outline. Next comes filling in the darker areas on the left side. I usually stick pretty much exclusively with the 2B mechanical pencil and then go in later and do a few darker spots with a 6B or something. But I think this time I’m actually going to start right in with the darker stuff and then work my way lighter. It’s worth a shot.

here’s the source image:

So I’m thinking that for my next portrait, I’m gonna do Ian McShane as Al Swearengen in Deadwood. I sort of promised myself that my next one would be a female, but I’m feeling like drawing someone with some character in their face, and Ian McShane has definitely got that in spades.

I downloaded a fuckload of pictures from this Deadwood message board. It took me a while to get them down to two, for various reasons.

Of all the pictures, this one is my favorite, and would probably look best as a portrait. But knowing me like I know me (which is pretty well I think) I know that I’ll get bored with it before I finish. There’s just way too much going on in the picture. If I had the discipline, I could do it, but between all the shit on his desk and all the shit going on in the background… I’d lose interest well before the picture was done.

This picture is a very classic head shot and pretty typical as far as portraits go. I would probably automatically go with it, except for one problem… and it’s a problem I have with a LOT of pictures of Al… that fucking pinstripe suit. Like with the desk picture, I just don’t have the patience to draw all of those pinstripes and keep them straight and even. Sandra suggested just skipping the pinstripes entirely and just drawing it as a solid color, and if it were anyone else, I probably would… but I think those pinstripes are a pretty important part of Swearengen’s costume design, and it would be fairly obvious that I just pussed out and opted not to draw them. Not drawing the pinstripes would be like not drawing his mustache. It’s just part of his character. So that’s a no-go.

I like this picture, but we run into two of the same problems I had with the last two pictures. There’s a whole lot going on in the picture and his suit is again pretty predominantly featured.

I like this picture a lot. I like the layout of it, with the side profile shot of him with the coffee or tea or whatever he’s drinking and the fuzzy, out of focus street taking up the second half of the picture. The problem is that for one, in order for the picture to look good, I’d need to keep it in that wide scale. I wouldn’t want to zoom the picture in and cut out the street, because then it would just look like a picture of him with a cup and you wouldn’t really get the full idea of what’s going on (IE, that he’s looking out over the town like the ruler he is) and also, I don’t really have paper in that proportion. Sure, I could turn an 11X14 page sideways and fill the top and bottom in black like letterboxing, but that would be a pain in the ass and look goofy. I suppose I could mat the picture and frame it if it came out good, but I’ve only ever done that with one of my pictures before (the Harrison Ford/Indiana Jones picture)

and I don’t really see myself framing my own drawing of Al Swearengen just because I didn’t have the right sized paper.

At the moment I’m kind of stuck between these two:

The first one I like because I dig the way his hair and sideburns look, and I like the lighter background. It’s a little tighter, which is always more fun to draw, and there’s less of his pinstriped suit. The second one I like because he’s got the toothpick and he looks a little more badass, and you can see a little more of his head. The second one looks more contemplative and like he’s thinking, where as the first one looks like you just said the wrong thing and he’s turning around to look at you and possibly fuck you up beyond repair. I don’t like the fact that he’s squinting in the second picture, but I do like the fact that his ear is darker, mostly because I friggin hate drawing ears (ears and hands, man.) I like the way his eye far eye is just kind of peeking over the bridge of his nose in the first picture and I like the position of his suit (less wrinkles) in the first one.

I dunno. I’m torn. I’m leaning towards the first one, but I don’t know for sure. I think the squinting in the second picture is going to be what kills it for me. The first one is more like a side profile portrait rather than a frame grab from a DVD where he might be in mid sentence.

I don’t know. What do you think?

After the ADHD disaster that was my last attempt at drawing a portrait (the John Locke that was never finished) I decided to take on one that might be easier. Closer on the face, very little upper body and arms and on smaller paper. This one is 11X14 rather than 14X17. It’s going quite well. Worked on it for about two hours last night while watching the last couple episodes from the first season of The Adventures of Pete and Pete.
So far it’s entirely a 2B mechanical pencil and some paper towel for blending. As you can see, I’m no where near disciplined enough to start on one small piece and work my way around the picture until it’s finished. I go all over the place. I wish I could do that.
Like Pat McMichael does with his drawings
[link]
He focuses on one section and finishes that section and then moves onto the next and then the next and so on until it’s finished. My attention span is way too limited to do that. I tend to flitter all over the picture until hopefully it looks finished at some point.
Hopefully this won’t take much longer to finish. I’m maybe halfway there. Maybe a little farther.
here is the original photo: [link]
This one is challenging in it’s own way because the original photo is fairly small and it isn’t very clear when printed at full size for my reference. But I think I can pull it off.
The subject of this picture of my favorite modern horror film maker Eli Roth, who wrote and directed Cabin Fever and Hostel.

So this is a perfect example of artistic ADD.

Here is the portrait of John Locke from Lost that I’ve been working on for about… oh… a month and a half I think. It’s been that long because I drew most of what you see here and then got bored with it and stopped working on it. I stopped drawing entirely because I wanted to work on other things, but I didn’t want to give up on this picture. I knew that if I put it aside, it would end up never finished and the time I’d already invested into it would be wasted.

But I’ve finally thrown in the towel. I’m so bored with working on this picture that when I actually sit down and try and force myself, it’s almost like torture. I hate it. I want to work on something else and I start resenting the unfinished picture that’s been sitting there for weeks.

So yeah, this is far as I’m gonna get on this one. The actual drawing is quite a bit larger and follows down to about his middle, showing his arms and hands. That was was really killing me. I hate drawing arms and hands. I love drawing faces but I get really bored drawing other parts of the body. And, as you can see, I get pretty bored doing background blending as well, since I only blended half of the background. Not even half, since I didn’t even finish the left side.

So Sandra and I have taken to staying in Bellevue when we take trips to Seattle. It’s about 20 minutes or so out of Seattle and it’s a very pleasant little town. It’s a pretty rich town (lots of Microsoft people live there) and I saw more expensive cars in one place than I’ve ever seen before. The first time we stayed there I saw a Lamborghini Murcielago and TWO Lotus Elises cruising around town. I’ve only seen one other Lamborghini in my life, and I’d never seen a Lotus in person.

Anyway, so I was at the mall that they’ve got downtown and talking with the dude who worked at EB Games. He mentioned that he went to the Vancouver Film School. I asked him if he submitted anything to the Spielberg/Mark Burnet reality show. He got all high and mighty and was all “Not interested. I prefer to do my work independently. I don’t need any help from Hollywood.”

That’s obviously working out really well for him.

I told him that I prefer to have a million dollars and people actually watching my movies. But that’s just me.

Anyway…

In other news:

I worked a little on the John Locke portrait. It’s still going pretty well. Not a whole lot of difference from the last time I posted a work-in-progress, but what can you do? It’s more progress than you’ve made on YOUR John Locke portrait. Beeyotch.

In other other news:

Sandra and I made homemade pizza tonight. It didn’t turn out that great and now I feel like I’m going to vomit grease all over my living room. In a minute I think I’m going to go vomit grease from my bunshole. It’s going to be that kind of night.

I have to give Sandra her insulin in about fifteen minutes. Then I think I’ve got a date with Solid Snake.