Punching Pandas

It’s been a while since I posted any artwork.  I’ve been busy with a couple other side projects that I haven’t been able to post yet.  Once they’re published, I’ll post them on this site.

My sister asked me to do another drawing of her friends.  I guess art majors are hard to come by at a liberal arts college, :P.  (They ‘d probably do a better job too!)  Below is the result of my chicken scratch.  At first I wanted to do a pencil sketch with flat color.  Then I wanted to do a silly sketch with shaded painting.  Then I wanted to do a more shaded painting without lines.  Then I realized that it was 3:00 AM, my wrist was sore, and eyes were feelin’ buggy.

Anyways, this was the reference photo of two brothers…

…and here’s the drawing. 

Hmmm…

I can’t say I’m entirely happy with it since I started out with cartoon lines and tried to jam them back into realism which made this pseudo-caricature that looks awkward: the proportions aren’t crazy way off base like a caricature, nor are they tight and accurate like a Bargue drawing.  It just makes the whole thing look kind of silly.  The colors are ok, but they seem a little on the bland side and should have more red in them.  At least one encouraging thing was that it didn’t take me as long as other drawings: 3 1/2 hours from pencil to final, but the quality still suffered.

Of course, me being a perfectionist, I get super-bugged when I notice stuff like this…

…which probably means I’ve been up too late and need to get to bed.

Got started on this one and got a little carried away.  4am… where does the time go?  Enjoy.

The timestamp says it all. I lose.

I thought I try my hand at trying a different approach going straight to colors rather than do linework first and then painter. Normally, I’d do my linework in Painter and then color in Photoshop, but this time I stuck solely with painter. The result is what I sort of wanted, but since this was the first time, it’s a little rough despite being submitted as “finished” piece.

Alright, so I got this maybe a smidgen late, but it’s CLOSE ENOUGH. I’m going to take another rule liberty and blame it on IE. For some reason I can’t upload media to Wordpress through Firefox, so I have to use IE. I would have gotten this in on time if IE had not took forever loading a BLANK PAGE!

Anyways, Kristina, I hope you’ll still accept this entry barring my latest excuses.

I reposted the picture with a couple changes. This was an idea I had stewing for a while. I would post these at 1200×1600, but the image is too big for Wordpress. I haven’t heard many new suggestions from anyone, so keep ‘em comin’!