The Doodle Bug

This was the beginning stage of Gulp the Alien. Painted and finished...

ART TREK! And we have liftoff!  Art Trek has officially started.  It's part of Google Hangouts/Communities.  The goal is to have an ongoing, prompt-based art challenge.  A new prompt will be posted every two weeks.  At the end of the new two weeks participants/members post their final work.  Check it out, it's a great way to keep motivated and productive!

Sometimes these photos grab me...like this guy, I just had to draw him.  He looks rather dapper and classy, I couldn't help but wax his "stash".  And I might just revisit this in the future, surely to put a top hat on him and perhaps a manacle or something of that nature there too. Again with this character...I absolutely had to.  Check out his funky eyebrows and that expression.  What makes me laugh about this guy is he just looks so damn bored and utterly disgusted with his situation.  Man, I don't know, if I was born a frog looking this cool...I'd be smitten with my life.  Sometimes these things just draw themselves! I have had a long love affair with ravens, and thought this guy would make a good warm up.  When you think of a raven the color associated is black...but through this drawing I learned that there's a lot going on there in that black...a surprising amount of color variation.  I learned a lot with this guy.

This is an example of one of my morning studies, a portrait of Anthony Hopkins.  This was somewhat more of a challenge as i had to work starting from a black background with the lighter shades.  I could feel a different part of my brain struggling with the task, but I really enjoyed the different approach.  Something akin to scratchboards and such.