Nevertheless, when the Fallout 3 game was released, I bought the collector’s edition, and it included this plastic Vault Boy bobblehead that stands about 5″ tall and it’s head rocks and shakes back and forth on a spring mechanism whenever you thunk it. When I was trying to find a subject for my first still life drawing after many years, I glanced over, saw the bobblehead, and the rest came naturally from that point forward.

Yet, I had some trouble with this drawing as most of my drawing time has been at night, or when it is inevitably raining, and so the lighting is notoriously bad. I really had to work to see some of the details that were blanked out in too much shadow, particularly around his dark jumpsuit and shoes. He just seemed to blend too much into the background in those areas, and sometimes he was just too hard to see with the bad lighting, so I would end up doing something else until the lighting was better.

For my next still life attempt, I am going to have to do something about setting up better lighting for whatever subject I choose since again, it will more often than not be at night when I am working on it. For now though, Vault Boy drawing is complete!

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1. Sketchbook: Quirky Chair
2. Sketchbook: Beginning Again
3. Five minutes to greatness

Note that when using a photo like this one as a reference for drawing, it’s not putting the paper over the photo and tracing it. Instead, the photo is just on the computer monitor (or off to the side if using a real photo) and you are just looking at it and trying to recreate it on paper using a pencil. Or a digital tablet as the case may be. It’s somewhat like doing a still life drawing where you might set up a bowl of fruit and a glass pitcher on a table and then attempt to draw the scenario as realistically as possible. Therefore, the chair drawing is completely freehand. I definitely need to get better at drawing straight lines. The eraser got a lot of work with this one as line would unexpectedly go careening off in one direction when I’d expected it to go somewhere else. Oops!

Still life is actually a better option than a photo if possible since the images on photos can be distorted by the camera and the lighting can also be funky, but there are times when photos are the only available choice for certain subjects and it is better to practice using a photo than not practice at all while waiting for the ideal situation that may never come, or come too infrequently to be useful.

I am still working on a still life of my Vault Boy bobblehead, and when it’s done, I think I will use it for my pre-class assignment over at wet canvas. Yes, I’m doing everything backwards by working on lesson one before completing the pre- part of the lessons, but oh well. There are other things I could draw for the pre-class assignment, but I ultimately want to get better at drawing figures and people, so the bobblehead may be good practice for that as we’ll supposedly be re-drawing it a few times as the lessons progress.

You might also like:

1. Sketchbook: Beginning Again
2. Sketchbook: Vault Boy Finally Arrives
3. What is this flower?

Don’t get me wrong. Photoshop Elements is quite good for what it can do. For a person who primarily uses a graphics program to edit photos, Elements might very well be all they’ll ever need, but since I also use these programs to create web graphics, I’m finding it pretty lacking in that area. I’m still planning to use it pretty extensively since there are some other things I really do like about it, but nevertheless, when I recently found the most recent version of Paint Shop Pro, Ultimate edition for $41, I decided that it wouldn’t hurt to go ahead and pick it up. Unless I later decide to upgrade to Illustrator or Corel Draw, it has most of the vector functions that I need. Paint Shop Pro has also had the capability of using Photoshop filters for years, so there’s a lot of good interchange between the two programs.

On another good note, I found out that I can buy the regular version of Photoshop for about half off the normal price simply because I bought the Wacom tablet and there is a special deal included for tablet owners to get a discount. So maybe I’ll do that too in the future. I’ve also found myself kind of wanting Corel Painter, so it may end up being a matter of which of them wins out first whenever I want to spend more money on these sorts of programs.

I’m actually pleasantly surprised by this latest version of Paint Shop Pro. It still has the bloatware problem that started occurring around version IX or so, or whenever Corel took it over from Jasc, but outside of the bloat, it really seems to have a lot to offer, especially for the price. It also still has tubes, which I believe is an exclusive feature that the other programs don’t have. Tubes are graphic options that you can store and then “paint on” whenever you need a lot of those options. The software comes with some tubes, and you can also make them  yourself. They work kind of like Photoshop (and Paintshop Pro) brushes, except they are full colored graphics and not just shapes. Maybe Paintshop Pro is getting better again.

Or maybe I just like playing around with all of this software. It’s probably a mixture of both!

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1. I have a new toy!
2. Redesign planning
3. All Wired Up (and in Tangles)

Once I got past the initial oohing and ahhhing over the tablet’s basic operations, I pulled out a PDF book I’d gotten in preparation for the Wacom’s arrival, and the beginning of my new adventures in learning and re-learning to draw. The book is Andrew Loomis’s, Fun With Pencil, and it was written back in the 1930′s. Even today Loomis’s books are still very highly regarded as one of the very best sources of learning, and supposedly if you work your way through Loomis, and learn and truly comprehend the books, you will gain a very high level of skill. We’ll see how that part goes, but nevertheless, it should be fun.

I started out drawing a bunch of circles, with lines placed inside to give an idea of dimension. These circles ultimately turn into cartoon heads. I drew up a bunch of these cartoon heads looking in various directions, and it seems that I’m destined to draw up a bunch more of them. I’ve posted a few of them here for reference. The overall idea is that every head is basically a circle, and if you add your lines correctly, you can draw a proportional head facing any imaginable direction. I cheated a bit and peeked farther along into the book and know that eventually, I’ll be putting these heads onto bodies, but first things first.

Note that I won’t be posting up all of the Loomis heads that I draw, but you will probably see a few more scattered around here and there before I’m done. Initially, I started drawing them in Photoshop Elements, but then I tried out this program that came with my tablet called Corel Painter Sketch Pad, and decided I liked using it better than Photoshop for the basic stuff I’m doing now. If I were drawing these heads non-digitally, I’d be using nothing more than a paper and pencil, so that’s what I’m recreating on my digital paper. Nothing more than paper and pencil. Since I’m doing the drawings freehand, I don’t really need all of the Photoshop features…at least at this time. I also like the way the Sketch Pad software automatically groups up drawings into various sketch pads instead of individual drawings. You start the program with a sketch pad that you can name as you like, and then you can just keep drawing on it and adding pages as you go along. So far, I have a sketch pad dedicated to my Loomis practice, and I’ve made a couple others for reference drawing and still life practice.

When I want to post something I’ve sketched to this blog (or elsewhere), I can just select the drawing, and then copy and paste it into Photoshop or another graphics program that gives me more file type options, and I’m good to go. My only issue with the Sketch Pad software so far is that every now and then I do something or hit a button somewhere that starts making it go crazy and popping up menus everywhere until it ultimately crashes. Saving often is a must!

Since doing nothing but drawing Loomis heads would drive me nuts, I decided to try a reference sketch using a photos of a frame from the movie, House of Flying Daggers. I’ve posted my result here. The top part is the original frame and the bottom part is my sketch. I can already see areas that need to be fixed, partly because of me and partly because I was still getting used to drawing on a tablet.

Currently, I’m working a little cartoon using the Loomis heads, and also a still life of the Vault Boy bobblehead I received back when I bought the Fallout 3 collector’s edition a few years ago. Eventually, I’ll have both of these attempts posted to the blog. I’ve also decided to add a “sketchbook” menu item to the blog so that it will be an easy way to find everything related to sketching. (Note that it may take me a while to get this menu option working, so it may or may not be up by the time you read this post.)

You might also like:

1. Sketchbook: Quirky Chair
2. Sketchbook: Vault Boy Finally Arrives
3. What is this flower?

This pink flower is a mystery to me though. My mom believes it could be a Camellia. Is that what it is? All I know is that it blooms every spring, and then a severe thunderstorm with wind comes along, blows all the flowers off the bush, and then I don’t get to see the blooms again until the next year. I guess this year it’s starting early, so I’m wondering if there will be any blooms left by the time spring finally arrives. If anyone can either confirm the camellia, or let me know what it is if it isn’t a camellia, I would very much appreciate it. It bothers me to not know for sure.

If you want to see a couple more pictures of the mystery flower and the daffodils, I’ve put up a new flower gallery here. Enjoy!

Outside of springtime flowers, I’ve been spending some time with my new Wacom tablet, and have sketched a few cartoon heads and a few other things. I’d ordered the small tablet and it’s a lot larger than I’d thought it would be. To think that I’d worried that it would be too small. Now I’m just glad I didn’t decide on the medium one since the medium probably wouldn’t fit on the desk. I’ve been using the tablet on my lap anyway, but that would only work if I never wanted to put it down to do something else. I’m planning to make a sketchbook area on this blog so I can keep track of my progress as it will definitely be a long-term journey. I’ve already almost gotten used to the drawing being on my monitor instead of where I’m drawing, so I think I’ve already surpassed that obstacle in going digital. One down, 293843 obstacles left to go! Go me!