Drawing, painting, drawing, painting,smoke, draw, draw, paint, paint (repeat) smoke

It's all in the title. Today was another fun filled drawing/ painting day here in Atlanta. First off I continued to work on my "Blood-lust" painting. I re-worked the hand to be more in line with the style in which I executed the face. I also managed to work out some of the afore mentioned kinks I was having with the cobalt, by simply sealing the layers I had completed with a gloss medium and then painting over it with nice results. You can see the ghost of the old hand if you look closely. I plan on taking care of that before I pronounce it done. I probably have about 3-4 more working hours left on this, so hopefully it will be finished tomorrow, and obviously it isn't finished. I just like being able to see the progression of how other artists work, and thought that maybe someone might be interested in how I work. Don't be afraid to fix something in a painting if you think it looks wrong the first time around. The extra effort involved is what can push a piece over the line from simply "okay" to outstanding. Not to say that this piece is outstanding. It takes years and years or hard work and practice to become Great and I have only been serious about painting for about six months. Not to say I started painting six months ago, but it was when I felt like I really needed to do this. I had this internal force that simply drove me to paint. It pains me on the days when I simply don't have the time or the resources(i.e out of town) to draw or paint. I come home and start furiously working on something.
Today while I was waiting for layers to dry I ran over John K's blog and took notes. He posted all these great model sheets from classic animations such as Tom and Jerry cartoons, Hiawatha, and The Reluctant Dragon. Inspired by some of my childhood favorites to draw I gave it a shot, here's the results
<-This is inspired by a squirrel that guest starred in a Barney Bear cartoon, only I interpreted the squirrel as a sassy female who is only out to steal your nuts. (note the nuts) The cute lil dear and pals are inspired by the Hiawatha cartoon which was loosely based on the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem written about an Indian. So no, it isn't Bambi ( obviously). If I was able to work in the animation industry today I think I would create an old throw back to the Silly symphonies hay day and have similarly designed woodland characters set to the musical story of the William Tell Overture.


This was my attempt at using a clear line of action. As usual I probably over reached my own abilities with this one and tried drawing something I had never draw before. It didn't come out too bad, maybe some color it would pull it together. It was my first attempt at drawing a cartoon duck, and I only worked on this for about three minutes. I bet if i worked on it a lil longer I could clean it up a bit. This is the last one I drew, bare in mind I drew all three of these in about three minutes. The eyes are a lil stiff for me, but other than that it wasn't completely unsuccessful. The next set of drawings I did was taken pretty much directly from this model sheet. Actually you even see in this picture where I printed out the model sheet and and taped it into my sketch book and drew directly from it. The only original thing I did was change the rose around a bit to make it look a bit more... rose like, and give the poor gal a neck and bust.The rose is a little too big for my liking, but otherwise, I think this is pretty decent. I really love this style of old timey girl.
The finished version is to the left------->

The last thing I have to share from what I did today is a VERY rough, extremely tentative sketch for an Illustration of my up coming book, I have been playing with a bunch of ideas for main character design. I even looked at some drawings of pebbles and Bam Bam to get some ideas for little kid composition.
But this is what I just I tossed together while the paint dried.