Airborn

[tealin]

I just finished Airborn, Kenneth Oppel's first book after his Silverwing trilogy. It's got airships and pirates and swashbuckling good times ... and apparently a reluctance to give up flying mammals, but who can begrudge him that? Anyway, it was fun, so I drew stuff:


Main character, Matt Cruse, looking kind of bland, but that's more or less how he looked in my head ... and this is why I'm not a design star. I also don't have any good early-20th-century uniform reference when my computer is turned off. Note to self: visit used book store next week. Because what I need is more books!

Kate de Vries, leading lady, who makes me wonder about Mr Oppel's wife because she's very much like Marina in Silverwing. Anyway, I'm pretty sure I'm majorly ripping off some Jane concept art but it turned out nice anyway! Yay me! (No telling how many really awful sketches came before this one...) There's a girl at work whose 'look' I want to capture for her...

Szpirglas, the pirate captain. After overcoming my tendency to picture him as Reacher Gilt, I realized I could base him off a family friend who fits the description rather well, but these were drawn before the realization, and I'm not sure I have any reference pictures. Doesn't look very captainly here, or very piratey for that matter... sigh.

A thumbnail for the scene where they're offloading rubber hosing ... it looks cool in my head, trust me. Mostly dependent on colour, though. The composition needs a little finessing before I go that far.

Matt, doing some swashbuckling...

The book is punctuated with occasional dream sequences in which Matt is flying, so I brought in a bit of the climax and stuck him with a flock of cloud cats ... apparently I can't get over Silverwing either.

Now for the moaning: Every day at work I draw what I would consider decent drawings. Admittedly, they're mostly poses in rotations, but they're solid and confident. I've even taken to doing rotations on paper instead of the Cintiq to keep me in touch with a pencil (and also because it's faster... and better). I get home, though, and open my sketchbook with pencil in hand, and what comes out looks and feels like the stuff I forcibly excreted in the midst of my rough storyboard-induced drawing decay period last summer. What do I need to change? I've been out drawing observational stuff more than ever this year but that hasn't seemed to have helped, it just seems to have made me impatient with my drawings so they're all really haphazard and gestural and I don't bother to get things right. Urh.

Comments

[wicked-warrior.livejournal.com]

I would say you could buy an anatomy book. There are some great and complete ones. Usually reviewing anatomy and body poses makes me inspirational again. But maybe it's just that you haven't found something that inspires you strongly: observational drawing is good but only if you get to draw things that catch your eye, it's not use of drawing things for the sake of it IMO.
Still, your pictures seem wonderful for me :) I really like the last sketch and the gril's design.

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Well, brushing up on anatomy is never a bad idea, but the show I'm on has so many muscley characters it's like an anatomy exercise every day. Yeah, maybe I need to find something to put new pictures in my head ... why is Making Money so far away?

[pippins-nose.livejournal.com]

Oh wheeee Airborn! I loved that book so much, it was such a fun swashbuckling adventure :) made all the better by your drawings of course. I love your interpretation of Kate de Vries especially.

[ledygrey.livejournal.com]

wait, i thought his silverwing trilogy was about the bats ... isnt it or am i just going batty?

[anathelen.livejournal.com]

I had a friend complain to me last night that after doing magazine layouts all day she was bereft of inspiration for her comic when she came home from work. I was unable to suggest anything but watching/reading/listening to something that she really liked and inspired her creativity. I believe she hooked herself up to the Pratchett I.V. drip. I've no idea if that approach addresses your problem, though.

Your drawings make my me want to grab a pencil and draw, because you make it look so easy!

[tulanoodle.livejournal.com]

I can't help but think this is more of a phsycological problem. I think that you are so used to wrining out drawings after a hard day of work that you don't really enjoy that even if you do enjoy it your brain is set up that way when you try to draw at home. What do I suggest? I really don't know. Try lighting aromatherapy ;) But no seriously, maybe try to draw out of the house? Like at a coffee shop or something? I hope this helps

[sydpad.livejournal.com]

Aromatherapy sounds cool... you could train yourself to associate, say, the smell of nutmeg with doing good drawings. Every time you do a drawing you like, race out and sniff a jar of nutmeg. If you keep the jar at your desk, and you're halfway through something that looks like it might be good, then you can actually cooincide nutmeg-sniffing with drawing well (instantly capping the jar, of course, if you find yourself doing a bad drawing). Slowly, you can introduce the nutmeg smell before you begin the drawing. Your mind, associating this with good drawings, will produce one. Pavlov!

Okay, I'm kidding, but now I'm looking at that and wondering if it'll work for me... LOL! Christmas you'd find yourself compuslively doing awesome drawings on napkins for three weeks solid.

I have that problem myself... can't say I've ever successfully 'fixed it', so, grain of salt. Bucket of salt. I think 'forcibly excreted' is the key image here (side advice: more roughage. Oatmeal for breakfast is good). Speaking for purely for myself, I can *force* myself to do good drawings, but only if I'm being paid, and I have the adrenalin of competition etc. on me. Then I can do.. I don't know if 'good' is the useful term here. 'Correct' drawings. Drawings that are correct for the production which naturally will have pretty clear guidelines. If you're drawing for yourself, you don't have the fear and you don't have the clear guidelines, so you're still aiming for 'correct' but it's going to be a feebler correct than you get with the fear/money incentive. Uh, does that make sense?

It it might be a bit much to ask yourself to do 'correct' drawings all day and all night! There's leaving your game behind in the practice field, but you're kind of playing a hard-fought game and then going home and... playing the same game. Use your evenings to do stuff in radically different styles, or-- something I found really refreshing-- get some super-Sculpey and turn a character into a sculpture. Mess around with colour or something. I do know guys that animate or board all day and then go home and their own stuff, but they tend to do more experimentally-styled things in their own time so they don't get same-y. I don't have much truck with arty-fartiness but there is a mysterious, playful side to drawing you have to keep connected to, and day after day of 'correct' will kill that. Maybe think of your evening drawings as the ones that are allowed to be incorrect, off-model, crazy, un-animatable.

Now I'm going off to get some nutmeg. That system sounds much easier!

[azvolrien.livejournal.com]

I love Airborn. I liked it more than Skybreaker, but I still enjoyed them both more than the Silverwing series. Dunno why. Probably the airships.

Nah, scratch that. Definitely the airships. I like how you drew the cloud cats. I kind of pictured them having longer heads, though.