Peace Beneath the City sketches

For the Song Title prompt at Illustration Squared, I'm working on a drawing called "Peace Beneath the City". Here are my basic sketches:

Here's the basic thumbnail for my piece. The composition is a bit different from what I normally would do, but I quite like tall, skinny images. I think it will be interesting to try my hand at one. It seemed to fit what I wanted to do.

A bit of a close-up sketch of what's going on in the bottom of the picture. It obviously needs some tweaking, but it's a start.

Stay tuned for the finished piece!

Illustration Squared sketches, part II

Here are some of my more detailed sketches/ideas for the Song Title prompt over at Illustration Squared. These are the ideas that didn't get picked as for my finished piece, but I might still do something with them in the future. I'm not sure yet.

"If I Could Bring You Back"

"Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car"

"The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows"

"Sudden Death in Carolina"

Illustration Square sketches

Remember Illustration Squared? Well, after a brief hiatus, Victoria and I revived it! We had a great deal of fun coming up with a long list of ideas to work for it as well. Several pages in my notebook worth of ideas, to be exact. They should be great fun, and we're looking forward to working on them.

The current prompt is to take the title of a song and use it as the title for a drawing. The image really should not have much to do with the song, just the title. To aid this, we had fun coming up with lists of strange song titles that don't even overly reflect the songs themselves. Mostly, this meant indie songs we liked in high school.

So, here are some of the initial sketches and thumbnails I had done for the project:

Random excerpts

More random pages from my sketchbook!

I was experimenting a bit with skin-tone here. I think that it came a bit too red, but there are some things I quite liked about this. The bent arm, for instance, pleases me no end. I will definitely take a few of the things I did here into other paintings.

Some fun with facial expressions! Nothing deeper going on here, really - just a bit of playing around.

I have extreme love for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. I also tend to draw while I watch movies or tv. End result is that my sketchbooks and notebooks are filled with half-finished things of this nature.

Both of these were great fun to draw. That's really all I have to say about that.

It was recently brought to my attention that I don't draw gentlemen half as often as I draw ladies. I've been making an active effort to remedy that.

Because everyone enjoys the Old West! Really, I love westerns. Cowboy hats are oddly difficult to draw, though. Might be time to drag one out and draw from life because the curve of the brim is bizarre.

Pantalone! He has a very large nose. Yup.

More randomness will ensue later. Stay tuned!

colonial doodles

So, over the summer I went to Redcoats and Rebels (at Old Sturbridge Village) with a couple of friends. It was great fun! Anyway, here are a few of the doodles that trip yielded: