A haiku reflecting my drawing skill.
I make and create
These doodles for the ages
Stick men to enjoy
Creative
E is for Eyeball
A quick doodle made in Sketchable. It’s hard to screw up an eye, but I still tried!
Programs used: Sketchable, Photoshop CC 2017
Hardware: Surface Pro 3 with pen
D is for Dinosaur
This crudely drawn T-rex was done in almost a single continuous line due to how the Autodraw site works. As far as I can tell there is no erase function, though there is a generous undo ability.
But I don’t have the patience to keep doing and undoing so here’s my stick man dinosaur.
Autodraw threw out a ton of completely random guesses so it wasn’t too terribly impressed by my artistic ability. As I mentioned in the previous post, I was never great at drawing or painting and I’m okay with that.
It did include a T-rex head as one of its guesses, though. I’ve included it below my masterpiece.
Program used: Autodraw, Photoshop CC 2017
Hardware: Wacom Bamboo Fun tablet, my uncoordinated mouse hand
C is for Carrot
Yes, I realize I am way behind on these. I’ll catch up somehow!
Program used: Sketchable, Photoshop CC 2015.5
Hardware: Surface Pro 3 and pen
Photoshop was used to crop and resize the image and to add the text.
I bumbled my way through Sketchable, learning a few more things. The following is a very crude depiction of Angry Carrot, with no shading at all. Think of him as an untextured polygon from a late 1980sPC game.
I’ll try to revisit this one later if I make it through all 26.
B is for Ball
I actually struggled with this one, even though there are a billion things that start with the letter B.
And then I cheated.
B is for Ball.
Program used: Photoshop CC 2015.5
Cheat used: created ball using ellipse tool. Freehand drawing is for losers.
More cheating: used the Lighting Effects filter to create a pseudo-3D effect
In other words, I used about the least amount of my own minimal artistic talent as possible. I’m okay with that because I dig the totally retro border and Cooper Black font. Also, you can see the pixels on the ball because I was too lazy to figure out how to apply antialiasing. That makes it more retro.
A is for Apple
I am going to do the old shtick of going through the alphabet and draw something each day that starts with the appropriate letter.
Today, A is for Apple.
Drawn in: Paper (iOS app)
Tool used: My finger
The combination of an inadequate tool (my finger) with inadequate drawing skill (my brain) has produced something vaguely reminiscent of an apple. It could also be a tomato. Possibly a short-stemmed cherry. Maybe an apple.
Probably an apple.
Edit: I went back and edited the image using Adobe Photoshop CC 2015.5, adding a snazzy (?) red border and explanatory text.
Robot with spoon eating a fork
By request, I did a drawing of a robot eating a fork with a spoon. I call it Robot Eating Fork With Spoon. This is my virgin effort using Sketchable on my Surface Pro 3. It’s kind of slapped together.
I draw forks the same way Rob Liefeld draws feet.
I can see how someone with actual talent could make something nice in Sketchable, though. It’s a pretty nice program.
Gum Gum people, toothbrushes and bananas
More scans of my doodlings from days of yore!
The Gum Gum People were small, pink elastic beings that giggled a lot (specifically “HEE! HEE!”) and in a handwritten and unfinished screenplay for what would have been the best Gum Gum People movie of all time, they plot to take over Earth, without having any real malicious intent.
I occasionally doodled out the GGP (if I write it as The GPP it looks a bit like a funky band name) and below are a few sketches that appeared to be a part of a series explaining them, perhaps as a primer before people went to see Invasion of the Gum Gum People. By the third sketch (not included here because it’s little more than a few errant lines) I either ran out of ideas, enthusiasm or pencils.
Sketch 1:
Sketch 2:
The GGP getting scratched looks positively delighted. It almost makes me want to try using a toothbrush the next time I’m itchy.
You may have noticed the first drawing looks a lot dirtier. This is because it was on the top of the drawing pad and picked up something like 20 years of crud that the scanner accurately captured. Hooray for technology. (I chose not to clean it up because cleaning up art can have unintended consequences.)
December Drawing, Week 1: a potato
After toiling away on my Surface Pro 3, first using the included Sketchpad app (which is pretty bare bones) before switching to Photoshop (which has 5,000 pounds of blubber on its bones), I have drawn a potato.
An amazing potato. It sits on an abstract landscape that invokes memories of the family farm. If you didn’t have a family farm it may instead invoke memories of bad drawings you did when you were a kid, which this essentially is, minus the kid part. I’m a little out of practice.
Secretly I wanted to draw Super Spud but balked because trying to do a simple shape and then adding arms, legs and a face to it was too intimidating after years of not-drawing and even more years of not-drawing-in-computer-programs-I’m-barely-familiar-with.
Nonetheless, here is potato. More to come!
The December Drawfest: Coming soon (specifically December 1st)
For December I am going to use my Surface Pro 3 and Surface Pro 3 Pen to make a Surface Pro Drawing of something or other once per week for the duration of the month. It may be a tree or a potato or perhaps the moons of Uranus (hehehe) but it will be something and each of the four drawings will be amazing*.
Starting tomorrow.
* amazing subject to availability and may be shipped at a later time
Still more Mac and Tosh: Finding love and sinking boats
Here are the two remaining Mac and Tosh strips from the fantastic but short-lived Mac and Tosh Comics collection.
The first, “A very merry quite contrary scrumpdilliishus meal” starts with a title that makes little to no sense then segues into a heart-warming tale of love and acceptance in which Tosh gains weight in order to match the ample size of his girlfriend. Although it reads today like an affirming take on accepting people for who and what they are, at the time I probably just found fat jokes hilarious. I was an easily amused kid.
The second strip, “A ‘wet trip'” is very much accurately titled, as it recounts Mac and Tosh’s disastrous attempt to boat to Hawaii. I apparently did not have a dictionary handy to confirm how to spell “Hawaii.” Or a lot of other words. Even in the few strips presented you can already see how Tosh is always optimistic, even in the face of tragedy and despair, while Mac is constantly skeptical and cynical. How very odd couple! I didn’t actually watch a lot of The Odd Couple, though its theme of “opposites attract” obviously resonated with me for some reason. If I had to speculate it probably began when I sat down and asked myself, “How can I do a comic with two stick figures but make them look different? I could give one a hat. But hats are tricky to draw. I know, one will be less stick-like than the other. Genius!” And from there the personalities of the two practically wrote themselves.
I like the puzzled fish at the end, likely reflecting the take of anyone reading the comic.
The Mac and Tosh Christmas Special
Here’s another scan from the rare, coveted Mac and Tosh comic book collection, of which there exists but a single copy (because I did not have access to a photocopier as an eight year old kid).
This is a heartwarming Christmas tale. Or rather, it is a needlessly cruel Christmas tale, as it openly mocks Tosh’s belief in Santa Claus. The best part of the comic may be that it clearly identifies who Tosh is, ergo who Mac is as well.
But there’s so much more. The world’s best Santa Claus costume. The public ridicule for believing in Santa and subsequent physical illness when being told the truth about the jolly old elf. The complete non-sequitur involving “super candy,” as if I had a panel quota to meet, the tantalizing cliffhanger. Read on and see, indeed.
