Mark McDonnell's sketchbook

This video is related to my last post on watching people work: Mark McDonnell has a nice Youtube channel with videos of him sketching. I like this one where he shows one of his sketchbooks, with great animals and characters.



He says this sketchbook is a Cachet, earthbound recycled sketchbook , ISBN # 1-56152-416-6, and it's great paper that can take a bit of punishment with wet media. He draws with Prismacolor markers and pencils. The black is a Gelly-Roll pen.

Drawing with a brush in Flash MX

Bob Flynn is a cartoonist with a great blog called Drip. He writes about using Flash MX to paint and draw. His line work looks very clean but also really natural and hand drawn.
He starts by sketching in a lighter color and then inks making use of the onion skin feature. Flash is quite a fun app to draw with and using the same techniques in this post and quite a bit of patience you can achieve quite a natural line even though drawing with vectors. Read the articles here and here.

Brushes and Colors: digital sketchbooks

There has been a bit of a buzz lately about Brushes, an app which turns your iPhone into a mini sketchpad. Apparently even David Hockney uses this! I have not tried Brushes but I do use Colors, another little app for the iPhone and Nintendo DS.
Colors is a great app, I use it on my DS lite with a chunky kid's stylus. One of the things that make it so great is that it takes advantage of the pressure sensitivity of the DS lite, just as if you were using a real Wacom or Cyntiq, but pocket sized. I'm not sure if Brushes has this feature but I don't think so.
To put Colors on your DS you have to buy a flash cart for homebrew apps. I use a R4 Revolution for DS. It is quite easy to set up, there is a good walkthrough on joystiq.

Brushes gallery

Colors gallery and my page

Make your own sketch pads

Instructables is a great site if you like to make stuff like I do. As I tend to hoard paper to draw on and had a ton of loose paper lying around I was pleased to find this Instructable : make a duct tape scratch pad.

This works really well and is perfect for making sketch pads, any size or paper type you want. I added cardboard covers to mine and folded the duct tape over the top to make them stronger. And if you do use thicker paper you need a lot more glue.

I made three sketch pads with this method and am running out of paper now so time to start hoarding again.

Sketch magazine

Blue Line Pro art supplies have a magazine called Sketch about all things comics, they have some good articles on drawing amongst other things, although I think they have too many adverts.
There is also a very good forum with sections on pencilling , inking, colouring and Tips & tricks.

Kevin Chen demos on ConceptArt

There is a quite an old thread on the Conceptart.org forums chock full of demo drawings by Kevin Chen. These sketches are amazing, you can learn alot about drawing the figure just by looking through this series. There are 3 pages: Page 1, page 2, and page 3
Kevin Chen is a top figurative teacher and concept artist, there is some of his other work here. I wish I had a teacher like this!

New hub page

I have written a new article on Hubpages called 3 Essential things to do if you want to learn to draw well

Conceptual Art tutorial in Photoshop

There is a good tutorial on painting an enviroment with Photoshop on the idrawgirls site. He shows you how to start with a large brush in b&w and and then refine your shapes and add colour and a bit of detail without losing sight of the whole picture as you go. This technique is very useful as it enables you to work really fast and I work like this a lot. Here are few of my sketches made this way:

Dan Blomberg

Dan Blomberg is a concept artist who lives in Spain. His sketchy style and vibrant colours remind me of Goro Fujita and Craig Mullins. There are some fantastic images on his website, and be sure to visit the sketches section.

David Kassan

I recently started seeing references to this artist all over the place. His work is amazing, I like the drawings even more than the paintings, especially this self portrait. I think it shows how hard this man must work, he looks exhausted.
There is also a video of a 3 hour drawing condensed into 7 minutes. It is low res but still gives a pretty good idea of how he works. Have a look at his website and blog to see more.

My Drawing day favorites on Flickr

June 7 was Drawing Day. These are my favorite entries from the Flickr site. My effort is the monkeystack at the bottom! Click on the images to go to the artist's Flickr galleries.

Drawing day 2008

On june 7 it's Drawing Day.
Drawing Day is a worldwide drawing event encouraging everyone to drop everything and draw for the sake of art. The internet is an open canvas. Help create 1 million drawings online this day and boost online art communities.
I shall join in and post something on Flickr. If you intend to draw something leave me a comment and I'll post links to my favorite Drawing Day art on this blog.

Lackadaisy painting tutorial

There is a painting tutorial by the author of the fantastic Lackadaisy comics on her website. This is a fun tutorial to read as the cat doesn't appreciate her efforts and answers back!

Horses

I love to draw horses but always have to use reference to get them looking right. I came across this neat little horsie tutorial from Droemar. It really helped me to understand the body and neck shapes better and my horses are starting to look a bit more dynamic, before they looked really wooden and stiff . In the second page of this tutorial she shows how to draw trotting and galloping and common mistakes people make when inventing horse poses. This is also really helpful.
Here are some pages from my sketchbook using these tutorials, a bit wonky but but encouraging even so.

Scribble

I liked this video by art teacher Matt Archambault. He talks about warming up if you're a bit rusty by drawing from photo reference. He has several interesting videos on YouTube and a website where you can find his DVDs. If you join the mailing list you get a drawing tip every week, I have joined to try them out.

Anatomy flash movies

In my anatomy course at art school we had to do exercises that consisted of putting tracing paper on a photo and drawing the muscles in the right places. This takes alot of practice and is not as easy as it sounds, well it wasn't for me anyway! These flash movies by Rey Bustos are basically the same idea. What I really like is that you can fade them in and out at your own speed, to get a good idea of the positioning and movement of the muscles. He has also made movies of model skeletons on turntables which you can view from all angles, these are useful for sketching poses.

How to Draw what you See

I found this tutorial on emptyeasel.com. This seems like a good site, mainly aimed at traditional materials and a bit of Photoshop. It is well set out and and easy to read. The idea of drawing what you see reminded me of this excellent article about drawing clutter on the Temple of the seven golden camels blog. I have quite alot of clutter, so when I sit down to sketch stuff the problem of how to get a decent drawing out of it all occurs frequently

Little goat tutorial

there are loads of tutorials on this site I Draw Girls
this guy is really generous! Despite the title, he doesn't just draw girls but all sorts of subjects in styles ranging from realistic to cartoon. Try out this neat little goat.