Crosshatch practice - Edward S. Curtis "Big Head"

I decided to continue to practice crosshatching and I thought I photos by photographer Edward S. Curtis might be excellent thanks to the balance of light and dark and clear gradations in his works.

The moment I saw the photo of Big Head (his name, original found here: http://m.theatlantic.com/infocus/2013/04/native-americans-portraits-from-a-century-ago/100489/) I knew that he would be the perfect practice subject.

I did a very quick layout with blue-pencil, added a few shading guides, and then jumped right in with a Tachikawa Finepoint System 0.1 and 0.4. I put emphasis on trying out techniques rather than slavish attention to detail.

Even though I'm working on developing a more cartoonish style and don't intend to focus on realism, it was definitely an excellent way to practice drawing uniform lines and applying different combinations of patterns. I realize now that in some areas, I should have left the horizontal lines alone without crossing them with verticals. I'm going to have to work harder in controlling my tendency to overwork. Often I do it to cover up flaws. There. Now you know my horrible secret!

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FLESH + BLOOD mini-review (Rutger Hauer, Verhoeven)

I'm trying out a new format for talking about movies.

It's a work in progress. I actually want to do more illustration and the sketch of Jennifer Jason Leigh doesn't do her any justice. Once I turned on this movie, I wanted to look into Susan Tyrrell as she always plays highly-interesting broken characters. I plan to rewatch her in Angel (1984) sometime soon.
She has a great quote on IMDB:
I'm a loner. I don't like beautiful people, but I find beauty in the grotesque. And in the sweet soul inside someone who has been able to get through their life without being a rat's ass. I love all the connections that I listed up here. Hauer is one of my absolute favorite actors and I can't believe I waited so long to see him in this. Or maybe I saw the casting and ran far away, cuz this is some bizarre casting!

Verhoeven is a very interesting director as in he's not afraid to do things differently. He apparently experimented while making this film and wasn't ha…

Manga treasures - super rare KoroKoro comic reprint

My good friend Mr. Fujita passed on one of his treasures to my mentor Mr. Hashimoto BUT FIRST he allowed me to share some photos and a quick flip through with you, loyal readers.

In this box is a tiny reprint (a minibon) of the first issue of weekly anthology magazine CoroCoro comics (5/15/1975, featuring Doraemon) which was given away to only the people who attended the editor’s end of year party in what I assume was 2005 as it says 30th anniversary on the box and inside.

I love the mini-bon format and I was sorely tempted to buy the set of Tezuka mini-bon that were sold once. But they’re not the best for research or for reading when your eyesight starts to go like mine has. In the poorly filmed flip-through below, you can see some early Doraemon, a few other series, and some color inserts related to Sadaharu Oh, a Japanese-born Chinese baseball legend who played on the Yomiuri Giants team and holds the world lifetime home run record of 868 home runs.

A bit of trivia about Diraemo…

Just started using toned paper

I've just started using toned paper. I'm enjoying the hell out of it. I drew 5 or 6 things today just trying out different things. In this post I'll show my retro Godzilla drawings. If you haven't seen the original Japanese version, you are missing out. The English version is usually called Godzilla, King of Monsters while the Japanese version is simply titled Gojira (at least on Hulu Plus).
The materials I'm using to work on this paper are: Nouvel PIGMA Comicline 08 for even-weight linesKuretake Fudegokochi brush pen for changeable width linesCOPIC for shades and colors. And finally, I use Uni-ball Signo White gel pen (Thick) for the white highlights.
I'm thinking of switching to white color pencils so I can gradate the highlights.

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