I CHALLENGE YOU, ALIEN TOY!!!

I'm a big kid at heart, so I like to draw illustration of little kids playing, so when I got a weekly challenge of to draw a Cowboy vs Alien theme drawing, I can't help myself, but draw this.

I spy with my eyes a....

For the past few weeks I been working on character design project for a student at AAU and now that it's over, I  celebrated with a drawing of a mermaid (that is going to kill you because according to one of my dear friend...she has a scary look hahahah. I really didn't mean to, it just end up like that I'll try to draw a nicer one next time).

I didn't think this drawing was going to be too much time, but it took longer than I thought to finish it because I really wanted to have the mermaid to have different hair colors and different color for the shading. I was inspired with Kei Phillips vector drawing/coloring of her characters so I was giving that a try. This drawing was really fun because I learn how to mask layers on photoshop, it really make coloring alot easier.

So enjoy for now, more to come later ^^

-Thanh

Warm-up: Fanboy Captain America

So I watched Captain America a couple days ago and I will admit, it's not a bad film. So today warm-up is a drawing of a kid looking around his house using a trash can cover as the shield, cut out holes on his beanie and wear it like a mask, wears a t-shirt with a sew in star, uses his dad working boots as his shoe, and places his mom dish washing gloves for gloves.

The drawing was inspired by this: drawing

Making of the Cowgirl Illustration

I got inspired to draw cowgirl after this post by a former classmate.

I was looking around for inspiration pose for the drawing and I came across a small pin-up thumbnail painting in the book "The Great American Pin-Up" by Harry Ekman.

It was an interesting pose gesture so I design my cowgirl character around that pose, but add some of my own idea into it. I started with a rough doodle and from there I redraw the drawing using the pen tool to create the lineart:   

 

With the lineart done, I color the character using just simple one tone color to see what suit this character best for me.  

 I'm not really good with tone coloring yet so I'm just testing this style out.

Then I added some highlight and change the background and there you do, my cowgirl pin-up.

-Thanh Ma

Pin-Up Girl

Two years ago I got a book call "The Great American Pin-Up" and I felt in love with all the different styles and gestures in the book. Now I finally got the time try some of the style out and make it my own.

Ahhh within in a month and I will be out of college...I only have three more weeks of school left. It's quite a scared thought. Anyways for the pass couple of weeks now I been devoting myself to character designs for my pitch story. I learn quite a few things and I hope in the future my characters designs will get better, but for now I really need to have a pause on character designs well because I kept changing their features when I should be working on their expression and poses...XD...that is for my pitch book after all designing characters is just part of the pitch book.

I'm quite happy with how the characters came out so that why I submitted my characters design to AAU Spring show 2011. Now the chances that me getting into the spring show is quite slim, but I'm still happy with myself. I know I can push myself alot harder (That's what she (he) said). This is going to be my last submission unless I returns to AAU for grad school, but it's still a new experience for me because within my three years at AAU, I have not submit to the spring show once and now at least once I tried to submit something before I left AAU.

Inking a comic page

AHHHHHHH I spent 15-20 hours...on an inking page...INKING!!! I mean it's great practice, but I might be a bit over my head with this project for my final semester inking class because...Lee Bermejo the penciler has a very interesting take in drawing comic page, there isn't any curve, very straight lines and that's one of the reason  what I wanted to ink his page, but again I feel like I was REALLY over my head. It really take a master of inking like my instructor Mick Gray to capture Lee Bermejo penciling, but you know I try. For a person that only started to ink comic two semester ago..I think it's not bad. But yes...this page is really time consuming and hand sore. I used tech-pen more than anything because I'm still not too confidence on my brushing, I can't do straight SUPER thin lines with a brush like my instructor (he can do it like it's no one business...oh my gosh....well he been doing this for 20 years, but still gosh I'm very happy to have Mick Gray as instructor).

Sorry for that rant there, but here are some pictures of the page:

 

Some of the materials that I used are Tech Pen .05 and 025, black ink, brush, rulers