Char 2.0

One of the best ways to learn how to do anything is to find someone who does it well and copy their style. A search for "disney faces" brings up some really weird stuff… but sifting and narrowing down sometimes yields sketches of various expressions that are quite useful to practice from.

Basically, if I don't know how to draw something, I've discovered that a good way to figure it out is to just find a picture of it and copy it.

Remember when I promised to post a new picture of Char after I figured out his hair? Well, I was copying some drawings of Flynn (from Tangled), and I started trying to meld his expressions with Char's face, and these pictures happened. I also figured out a new way of rendering curly hair (curly boy hair, at least), which I like quite a bit.

Ella meets Prince Charmont at her mother's funeral, where he tells her, "You can call me Char."

A similar exercise yielded some nice sketches of a favorite secondary character. Can you guess who it is? :) Tune in next time!

Blogger Pro Tip: Did you know you can click the tags at the bottom of a post to see all posts involving, for instance, Char? Try it out!

UPDATE: Finally got around to coloring this! He came out looking a bit younger than in the sketch, I think. Maybe because his jaw got rounded out when I traced it (and his eyes are a little bigger). He's supposed to be like seventeen, though, so this may be right on the money.

"Even my father calls me Char."

Ella runs away

I felt bad about copping out last night with a pseudo-made-up character, so I fixed the drawing I promised and am posting it tonight! Aren't you lucky ducks! It turns out that Photoshop is really good at things like resizing abnormally largely drawn heads, so it wasn't as much of a pain as I thought it would be.

I'm a total noob. Sorry.

So this is Ella just before running away from finishing school. On her way out, she sneaks into Hattie's room and steals her wig.

(Of course I couldn't be bothered to look up the chapter before I drew this. Ella actually snatches the thing right off Hattie's sleeping head, which makes more sense and is much funnier. Oh well.)

I may go back and shade this… If I do, I'll probably attempt to draw the rest of the room. Don't hold your breath on that one. xP

Doesn't make sense that Hattie would keep her wig on a wig form, since she shares her room with other girls who don't know her hair is fake, but I like how this turned out, anyway.

"Now, what to do with it? If I threw it into the dying fire, the smell might wake someone. I could drape it over the head of the china cat that adorned the mantelpiece, but if Hattie woke early, she could rescue it before anyone saw. So I took it with me, a trophy." (pg. 87)

Cecilia

So… last time, I promised I'd do a scene from the book. In all fairness, I did start one. I can't tell you what it is because I'm still planning to post it. But I started it in June, and when I opened the Photoshop document to finish it this evening, I realized it was all wrong and I need to re-draw a head and that will be a gigantic pain.

In the meantime, I have a sketch for your enjoyment! Cecilia never actually appears in the book, but she's Char's younger sister, and he mentions her a couple of times. She is two years younger than Char, making her exactly Ella's age.

Anyway, there's next to no information about her in the book (except that she may be musically inclined (p. 178) and that Char is protective of her (p. 179)), so I made up a character for her. My Cecilia is much less serious than Char, being free of the "first-in-line" responsibilities, so she's a little spoiled, very energetic, and talkative. I imagine she and Ella would be close friends once Ella moved into the castle.

Char's little sister is either modest and reserved or an amped-up version of Ella. For reasons that should be obvious, I'm going with the latter…

(As always, right–click and "Open in new window" for full size.)

One day, I'll get the steadiness of hand necessary to draw smooth, flowy lines. And I'm thinking I will clean this one up in Photoshop, although I don't know if I need to color it.

Next time, I promise (and by "promise" I mean "hope") I'll post the scene. It's more work than usual because it involves (minimal) scenery. Blech.

Hourlies 6/13/12

I decided to draw what I did all day! Currently working on an Ella for next time. Hopefully this holds you over until then. :)

Conclusion: my family is hilarious.

Ella 2.0

It's been too long since my last Ella drawing. By way of apology, I put extra work into this entry! You get the line drawing plus color. I even tried my hand at shading. Cool, right?

Ella picks out a green dress after her mother's funeral because her mother hated black. This is what it might have looked like. (I need to study medieval/Ella-period fashions; I apparently don't have much of an imagination for gown design.) I really like this Ella, although it's weirdly disproportionate in some places. Also, one day, I will learn how to draw hands that don't look crippled. One day.

Ella's post-funeral garb. I don't know if bare arms would have happened. I was tangentially inspired by Belle's yellow dress in Beauty and the Beast, maybe?

"Although I suspected Father wanted me to wear another mourning gown, I put on the frock Mother liked best. She said the spicy green brought out my eyes. I thought I looked like a grasshopper in it—a skinny, spiky grasshopper with a human head and straight hair." (pg. 17)

My pledge for next time is to attempt an actual scene: action, emotion, maybe even multiple characters...? You'll just have to wait and see!

...Invader Zim?

Okay, I'm officially going to make an effort to update more often. Starting... NOW.

Well, starting next time I post Ella pictures. Today, we have sketches from Invader Zim. Yes, the cartoon. My sister roped me into it, and I ended up watching the whole series (only about twenty-five episodes). Oops. This may be kind of considered cheating, since these characters already exist in drawn-on-paper form, and I won't pretend I didn't just copy them from a Google-image search.

That said, They came out nicely nicely, and I am confident that I can now draw a few of the characters without a reference.

Dib, Zim, Professor Membrane, and Gaz. Yes... those are their actual names.

While I've got you here, I want to point out that Blogger recently changed the way it works, so now, if you click on a picture, it opens a weird slideshow-view presentation of all the pics in that post. This is fine, except that it means clicking on the picture no longer enlarges it, necessarily. (I mention this mostly for my mobile user(s) who have a difficult time making out my drawings on a tiny screen.)

The solution, I've found, is simply to right-click the picture and open it in a new tab/window. I don't know how well that will work on an iPhone, etc., but I thought I would pass along the tip, in case anyone was getting frustrated.

Tree Getting!

A new picture! Not "Ella"-related, but I think it's kind of cute.

From left to right: me, Mom, Dad, sister, dog.

While we were Christmas-tree hunting—or, I should say, after we had found our tree and were headed back to the car—my Dad, my sister, my dog, and I were all lined up more or less just like this, and I thought, "This would make a really nice painting." Later, I sketched this at work and then much later scanned it and went over it in Photoshop. When I learn how to paint with watercolors, maybe I'll make a nice background of the tree farm and color in the people in Ps, and then it will be just how I envisioned it!

Knowing me, that is extremely likely to happen.