September Theme for Friday Art show - Lateral-g Forums

mlomaka · #1 09-30-2008, 09:29 AM

I'm tryin, but runnin out of time. Between my computer crashin, power outage (who knew we'd get hit by hurricane Ike up here in Ohio?!) and a round of colds going through our house, I have most of one view done, but really want to do the rear. We'll see what I can get.

Mike

SRD Art · #2 09-30-2008, 01:30 PM

Looking forward to seeing what you got!

mlomaka · #3 10-02-2008, 06:04 AM

Well, I got to spend some time on it last night (till 2 am). It is quicker than I usually spend on renders, but it is scanned & on the PC. A couple things came out of this. First, you gotta spend the money to get good tools. I finally broke down and got some very thin line ink pens for lines. Makes a difference. Next, I found a weak spot in my (& AD markers) collection, orange. This goes back to the first lesson, but I got a couple of copic markers and it made it a lot easier (try blending redwood with chrome orange for darker areas & yellow & orange for high lights!). I hope I can get it presentable.

SRD Art · #4 10-02-2008, 10:15 AM

If nothing else, the purpose of these Friday shows is to push our skills and imagination to a new level. Drawing by hand is a real challenge at times. Good to hear you've got a good combination going there, looking forward to seeing it.

In school we used Vellum and other types of semitransparent paper. Spendy, but you could use both sides to create some cool shading effects. The ink flowed really well on it too. I tried something like this for a clients car, cut out the drawing and mounted it on regular paper for a background and put it in a frame, one of my first out of school. He displayed the drawing in an outdoor show and the sun "melted" the paper and the whole rendering got all wrinkled.

That was ugly. After that I just used 11x17 laserjet paper, but it was somewhat limited to tricks you can apply to it. Agreed, you've got to spend a few bucks for the right stuff. On the other hand...my markers are about 10 years old and I don't use them much anymore. Plus my kids have gotten into them too many times and I find when I pull them out more often than not they are dried up a bit and don't flow like they used to. Because I don't use them much at all anymore I tried something just for kicks recently- I have a bunch of friends that have asked for cartoon drawings but don't want to pay my normal price for a nice computer rendering. So I came up with "Crayola Quickies". Get this, I bought a 20 pack of washable Crayola thick/thin point markers for under $3 and they work great! They flow well on Walmart special 8.5 x 11 copy paper and they have a fairly decent range of colors. Not as nice as Prismacolors or other art markers, but for what I'm doing they work great. I try to spend 1/2 hour or less on the entire drawing, and I get $35 for them. My friends are tickled pink to have some cool art at a "more than fair" price and it translates to about $70/hr. High profit margin with low overhead and equipment costs = $ in the bank and more parts for my big boy toys.