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.

Mandy, Nancy, and Nathan

Three of the servants in Ella's household. This is the last of the old drawings (done over a year ago!), which means I'll be starting on some new stuff, soon! How exciting!

Mandy, the house cook and Ella's fairy godmother!

Nancy and Nathan, two more servants. I will probably finish up this sketch at some point... I like it. :)

Evil step-family (and some miscellanea)

Back again! Here are Dame Olga, Hattie, and Olive, as well as a few mini-sketches of (gasp) actual scenes from the book! It's possible I do big-kid-size versions of one or more of these thumbnails... No promises, though. ;)

Dame Olga, Hattie, and Olive: Ella's evil step-family. Ooooh, they're mean. Dame Olga strongly reminds me of Dolores Umbridge... The bow seemed appropriate. :)

Writing a letter to Char.

Scrubbing the floor in her own house, while Dame Olga looks on.

This is Nancy, the serving maid. "She crept behind Mum Olga and pantomimed dumping a pail of water over her head." (pg. 169)

Next time, I have members of Ella's house's staff: Nancy, Nathan, and the beloved Mandy!

Char

Just one, today. Perhaps I will update later with a Dame Olga. This is an old picture of Char, and I clearly haven't figured out his hair yet, but this is the best that I currently have. Once I get the front of his hair to cooperate, I'll post a new one.

I seem to do a lot of blank expressions and boring body positions. Soon, I hope to have some actual scenes from the book. That would be swell.

P.S. I updated my first "Ella" post (from October). It's just a small change: the full-body pic was a little leany-backy, so I straightened her out. :)