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anime is just one of those types of drawing i never really practiced. i’ve recently been learning to draw in the style, because it’s adorable and fun. this was my first attempt. the hiragana reads “おたく さん!… たかい です ね?” which just means the character’s appalled face is because something is very expensive, and he’s saying so to someone he’s addressing as (in romaji) “otaku san” — “otaku” is an informal or slang way of referring to someone who’s good at nerdy techy stuff or some other hobby that’s not so mainstream. nowadays it’s closely associated with anime/manga-obsessed nerds, but it can refer to any nerdy obsession. since i’m not a native japanese speaker, i don’t know if you can actually say “otaku san”, but i figured that would make the word “otaku” seem like the nickname he’s calling a friend, as opposed to just an adjective. if that makes sense.
watching tv & paused to draw this from a character on-screen. copic marker + colored pencil highlights. i know it’s not so great a resemblance, but this shot was modeled off dr. john watson from the bbc sherlock show, at night on the scene of his first crime-solving endeavor with sherlock. the one he later writes about and calls “a study in pink”.
inspired by coey’s post.
another tv break to sketch. this one was more like 25 min, though. if you notice light on her jawbone that seems out of place, that’s b/c i’m drawing from the TV, and the actors are lit from so many angles, some of which only put highlights in a couple of places. it i’d drawn more of her, you’d see the back of her dress is lit, too.
quick 5-min sketch w/ brown colored pencil. i figured i wouldn’t feel so bad vegging out in front of the TV if i pause periodically & sketch. since i’m not good at faces, and they’re abundant on-screen, what else would i practice? back to my show.
eventually, these will look like jellyfish. me and the wifey got into marathon mode with the show scrubs, and we’re several episodes into the second season. after the actors establish rapport during the first half of the first season, the show really gels and is a super fun marathon-mode show. well, we watched 4 or 5 or 6 episodes tonight, and in between the moments it was absolutely crucial to stare at the screen, i worked on this. the photo is terrible, unfortunately, but it was the best i could get at night under incandescents with my [samsung/tmobile sidekick 4G] terrible phone-cam. …only 12 more months until i get a new one! hopefully in 12 months’ time, they’ll develop a worthwhile phone that also has a full physical keyboard (<ahem> :: 5 rows preferred!) … </tangent> ^__^ … this is actually the same black cardstock i used for the underwhelming b/w chalk drawing of steeply peaked dormers on that vast gothic roof that should show up somewhere shortly below this post.
the big difference is that on this one, i started by turning black to rich, intense cools, by applying violet, ultramarine, and cyan prismacolor colored pencil to the blocked-out background areas. then i got out the china markers: white, yellow & orange. and then, attempting to bring back some vibrance to the background, i used crayola’s construction paper crayons, which are particularly opaque and lay down with less resistance than a typical crayola crayon. and the wonderfulness of prismacolor colored pencils is that they can be gently applied on top of even china marker, they’ll impart some of their color. and as i use a scraper to take the current color down to underneath colors, i get to scrape in varying degrees to go back to white, or bright blue, or dark purple. it’s really, really, really fun and satisfying.
i get to apply, and scrape and it requires no erasing, and getting “back” to highlights is easy b/c the highlights are applied on top of black paper (or other, previously-applied colors), which doesn’t blend with or dilute the white china marker, so i get full control of the value without worrying about limitations of paper that you apply graphite to and then remove again, where it starts to get all shreddy and peely and approaching the paper equivalent of thread-bare… the scraping never goes all the way down to the paper, and it’s so much more numerous in its possible effects than the simple erasing of graphite from paper. you decide that by the order in which you lay down the pigment. it’s SUPER fun.
most of the white in the background here is covering much darker & more vivid shades of teal, cornflower blue, dusk-time glowing blue, and the edges where appear tinges of fuchsia seeping in. so i have a lot of white china-marker wax to gently scrape away to give us intense illuminated hues of teal thru blue thru indigo thru purple thru magenta.
point being: there are all kinds of establishing layers i created in the process of this that are completely not visible under the thick layer of white i laid down in the last step before calling it a night with this image tonight.