Surviving the winter, cannibalizing my old sketchbooks :)

I feel the need to assert my status as ‘still alive’. It’s been so long since last posting, that you might reasonably wonder if that’s the case. The truth is, I’ve managed to land a few weeks of freelance work and am now neck deep in deadlines! Nothing has changed in games – still the same crazy schedules :_

But, overall that’s a good thing I suppose. It’s slowing me down right now, but in March I have a week long drawing trip to Havana planned. A suitable reward for being chained to my computer for a bit. It’s too cold to draw outside anyway.

However! cold dark winters are a good time to go back into the sketchbooks. Here’s a couple more experiments with digital watercolors. I’ve had these two old favorites pulled out for a while now. Been wanting to do something with them for ages. The drawings were done at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco a few years back. This was a traveling show, so you won’t find these suits of armor there now, but the permanent collection is well worth a drawing trip on its own.

These are (as with the previous post), scanned watercolor sketches layered under the original black line art, and contrast tweaked in photoshop. In this case I’ve done a tiny bit of opaque sketching on top. Basically what I would have done with prismacolors in the old days. I really like this effect. As much as I love painting – I also love the pen and brush – those rich blacks and squiggly lines! So why not fuse them together?

By the way, 8×10″ prints of these are available in the sketchbook pages section on my Etsy Shop.  It would be wonderful if you stopped by and maybe found something you’d like to own. It would help out with our travel expenses for the upcoming sketching trips :)