Trisscar's Sketchbook

[Trisscar]

Oftentimes I've wondered if I should give up on this sketchbook and begin a new one. Looking back on it, some of my posts here are bloody embarrassing (not just the artwork, but my daft responses).

But you know what? Let this sketchbook stand as a testament of my growth not only as an artist, but as a person in general.

Mind you, I'll probably change this opening blurb again in the future

[B-Man]

Great, fresh meat! welcome! Now bring it man, so we can start picking you into peices!
kidding... sort of.
Post some pictures and I'll help in any way I can.
mahalo!

[Icedearth15876]

Hey welcome to CA, post some stuff so we can start helping you (Evil Grin).

[Trisscar]

I really hope this doesn't turn out ridiculously huge... Hell, I hope it just turns out!

This crazy bandit first appeared in a nightmare I had back in 2007. Unfortunately I didn't have the sense to do a sketch of him while he was still fresh in my memory, so this is the next best. He was part of my Artworks Project at university, where I drew a comic about him.

This was the first 'refined' sketch I did of him back in 2008. I'll upload all my concept drawings of him in my thread here, to allow people to see the character concept progress from 2008 to 2009.

Lastly, he has no name. I've just given him the title of 'The Freak'.

[Trisscar]

Thank you for the welcome, B-Man and Icedearth15876

Pick me to pieces all you like. I want to learn from my mistakes and then stitch myself together again

[Trisscar]

My tutor had told me that he felt that this was my strongest drawing of the Freak. I didn't particularly mean to draw him in a sort of manga style, that was really unintentional.

I wish I knew how to reduce my digital drawings properly so that the resolution wouldn't be so murdered

[Trisscar]

This was done using Sai. I was toying with the idea of giving my man a hat, since quite a few horror-type icons wear hats.

[Trisscar]

The Freak without his coat. I'd like to think that the belts hanging from his arms resemble the straps of a straight jacket.

I used Hellsing volume 3 as a reference for this pose.

[IanE]

This character has a nice idea behind it, but it's coming off really incomplete, and maybe it's just this last image you put up, but I'm really seeing Tony the Tiger mixed with Hellboy mixed with The Crow mixed with Freddy Krueger and that makes me reach 1 critique for you:

Refine.

Pick an idea, pick the best, most important aspects or criteria of it, and develop those flawlessly and let the style develop on its own. It seems like you've got too many ideas going on here, which isn't a bad thing to have too many ideas, it's just bad to try and apply them all without any true purpose for each one.

Let's see some more work now!

[Trisscar]

Gorilla@Attack: thank you for your kind words and it's a pleasure going through your sketchbook

IanE: (salute) Sir, yes Sir! But first I have to work on my anatomy as B-Man suggested.

And also... I almost burst out laughing at the Tony the Tiger comparison. I've had quite a few people liken him to Hellboy, Freddy Krueger, the Crow etc, but Tony the Tiger?!

I did try my best to draw him how he looked in my nightmare, but I'll try to refine him a lot more. As Foghorn Leghorn would say, 'It's back, Ah say it's back to the drawing board...'

Thank you very much for your feedback It's greatly appreciated.

[Trisscar]

I would've updated my sketchbook sooner, but I've been enduring jury duty for the past few days.

Practising postures and body structure with box figures.





All of these (except for the silly one) are taken from the book 'Figure Drawing without a Model'. What I aim to do next is to box-salamify images from magazines, newspapers and the like to get a better understanding of anatomy.

[My57]

k. If ya wanna make a comic or w.e. i would recommend a lot of anatomy studies and face studies. If you have a tablet work on painting with it as well. I would say that learning anatomy and faces is probably one of the most important things for comics (tied with doing environments). Unless you plan on doing a cartoonish comic thats filled with funny jokes and hilariousness. Like penny arcade. <- Which isn't a bad idea, but you gotta be funny.

scribd.com has a lot of anatomy books you can look at. Including stuff from hogarth and such...

[The7Artist7]

Hey - my internet is back from holiday lol

The work you have here is not a bad start at all - one really important thing you have is life and character in what you create (rather stiff and suffering from quite a bit of what I call 'jelly-joints' but interesting and engaging). I'm really liking the box figures!

Recommendations for now:

http://www.posemaniacs.com/

draw, draw, draw when practicing - quick roughs, simple stuff and small focussed studies, studies from life (any objects around you etc) anatomy study (carful not to just copy but learn)

+ work on some quality finished pieces - with these really put your all into it and outdo yourself (you will find you also learn a lot when doing this too)

Be the sponge - soak up all that art skill goodness

And remember - enjoy yourself at every opportunity with your art!

[Trisscar]

Okie doke, I'll try and do all that

'Jelly-joints'..... gotta add that to my vocabulary!

[Travis Smith]

For the type of structures you're using in those last few sketches I think it would be helpful to check out some books that review proportion. For example, right now you're drawing the head volume as a cube instead of a rectangular box shape. Many (most?) systems of proportion use the head as the basic measurement so having a solid understanding of the dimensions will be very important. I would elaborate but I don't have the proportion systems commited to memory yet and I don't want to give you inaccurate information.

If you like though I can suggest some books to you that I found very helpful.

Beyond merely drawing with volume boxes though I think you need to pick up a book on perspective. It's not enough that you draw these boxes, you need to draw these boxes in perspective with awareness of the eye line (or horizon line).

Finally, when drawing the boxes for the rib cage and pelvis don't hestitate to 'draw through'. I see that you were drawing through when the legs overlapped the other parts of the body, but you might also find it helpful to draw the faces of the box you can't see, especially once you start putting these in perspective.

[Trisscar]

Some more box-figure sketches. I know that some of them have pieces missing, but that's because I couldn't see every limb/the whole body. As my ole tutor used to say, 'If you can't see it, don't draw it,'.....





.... except when a wet fish is involved.....

Tb0ne: Thank you for the advice. Would you please tell me about the books you had in mind?

[Travis Smith]

As my ole tutor used to say, 'If you can't see it, don't draw it,'.....

.... except when a wet fish is involved.....

Tb0ne: Thank you for the advice. Would you please tell me about the books you had in mind?

Perspective Made Easy: A good overview of one and two point perspective.
Bridgeman's Complete Guide to Drawing from Life : This book covers drawing the figure in perspective (especially heads), with rythm, proportion, and anatomy.
Dynamic Figure Drawing (Burne Hogarth): Discusses rythm, structure and offers theory on how to create the illusion forshortening.

Any book by Andrew Loomis would be great as well but they're currently out of print.

[Jesus Food]

lol u like darth maul or somethin?

[Trisscar]

lol u like darth maul or somethin?

Heh heh

It's just that my character 'The Freak' has those weird triangular markings on his face. As I saw him in a nightmare, he must have some Darth Maul-type qualities because of his face. I remember watching 'Star Wars Episode 1' quite a lot when it first came out

I've heard that dreams are just a manifestation of things you've seen throughout your day.... or week.... or month.... or lifetime.......

[Trisscar]

A little sketch I did of a table while I was at a restaurant with my Mum and her friends for lunch today. Might not be going back there again anytime soon, though. My Mum had steak pie and the pastry was like charcoal, and my mashed potatoes tasted of nothing.

[Trisscar]

More box figures than a box figure factory working on a new batch of box figures.

Some quick sketches from the restaurant. Most of them are modelled on my Mum and her friends, because there wasn't a lot of people around



That sketch at the top left was the beginning of a sketch from that posemaniacs site, but I couldn't get my head in the game when I tried to sketch it. And that boy in the middle is actually from a painting that was hanging beside our table.

[Trisscar]

Jings, I'm not exactly updating my sketchbook as much as I should, am I? Bad me.

I thought I would update with a drawing of Flik from Disney's 'A Bug's Life'. Someone over on Fanart Central requested it, and I'd like to know what you guys think, please?

Go on. Be brutal! (hides behind a steel wall)

[Eon]

I like your Freak character. His face reminds of of WWE Kane's old mask. The ant character looks good.

You've got good instincts for this. Just build on that foundation. Ron Tiner's Figure Drawing Without a Model is a great book. However take into account that the name of the book describes a goal to attain and not a method. To achieve that goal requires a lot of drawing from human beings, be it reference or live model. It's a long process of osmosis and then regurgitating as we try our best to recreate human beings from our heads. The more you know the more you can do. It's quite amazing how this works at times.

Study: Basic shapes/ figure construction from simple ''skeletons'' on to construction with simple shapes.

Practice your observational drawing skills with still life. The better you are at seeing and interpreting information the more you'll get out of your studies.

Get your hands on as many sources as you can. Look up Andrew Loomis, George Bridgman, Burne Hogarth, Glenn Vilppu.

All the work you'll put into it will pay off. That's the cool thing about it. You get your rewards! Rock on!

[Trisscar]

Thanks so much, Eon I'll keep practising as much as possible. I actually had recently ordered a few of those books via amazon.com and I've already got 'Figure Drawing Without a Model', but it's taking me a while to devour them all!

I'm so glad I registered on this site. All the artists here are so awesome and it's giving me so much inspiration.

One of my problems, however, is that sometimes so many ideas come into my head at once and I don't know which one to focus on first :B

[Trisscar]

Sketch of a table while I was at a restaurant for lunch with my Mum today. I pencilled it out first, then did the shading with a ballpoint pen. You can see that I tried doing some other sketches of a salt cellar before the table, but it turned out terrible. I really must keep a wider range of pencils with me besides a 4H.

And also, I really need to work on drawing circles.....

[Harmageddon]

Hey Trisscar

I agree with most of the crits here: look at anatomy and meanwhile keep on drawing comic style stuff. You'll find they complement one another at some point. The boxfigures can be put to work in realistic drawings too, and anatomy knowledge does help comic figures look more real (even if mostly they have totally unrealistic and thus comical anatomy).

Personally, I like the Freak character (the cenobite style suit, the armflaps).
Try and put him in some solid cast: i.e. always 6 heads tall for example.
Btw 6 is arbitrary here, just see what fits the character best.

About the Freak: he looks friendly in most pictures. Is he a nice guy, gone haywire?
Or is he really just a solid bastard through and through.
Oh and thanks for posting in my thread. Now draw! draw! draw!

[Trisscar]

Hey Trisscar

I agree with most of the crits here: look at anatomy and meanwhile keep on drawing comic style stuff. You'll find they complement one another at some point. The boxfigures can be put to work in realistic drawings too, and anatomy knowledge does help comic figures look more real (even if mostly they have totally unrealistic and thus comical anatomy).

Personally, I like the Freak character (the cenobite style suit, the armflaps).
Try and put him in some solid cast: i.e. always 6 heads tall for example.
Btw 6 is arbitrary here, just see what fits the character best.

About the Freak: he looks friendly in most pictures. Is he a nice guy, gone haywire?
Or is he really just a solid bastard through and through.
Oh and thanks for posting in my thread. Now draw! draw! draw!

Thanks very much for your advice

Regarding the Freak..... I'm really still trying to get his character down without turning him into a Gary Stu. I'd like to think that he was a prisoner of a place similar to Hell, but was caught on his first escape attempt (resulting in those interesting marks of his). He manages to escape the second time and finds his way to a city.

He tries to be a good guy and a hero, but sometimes his psychotic tendancies get the better of him and ends up almost taking things too far. In my first comic of him, he rescues a young woman from a gang of thugs intent on robbery and assault, but he gets carried away and nearly gores the face of one of the thugs with those claws of his.

I suppose he's really still a work in progress. As has been suggested, I need to refine him a lot more. In those concept drawings I've done, he's like a yo-yo dieter I need to stop screwing around with his body shape!

[Trisscar]

This one is just a work in progress. I started sketching it while I was on holiday in June, but forgot all about it since.

I'm stuck on what kind of background I should give it, if any. Anyone got any ideas or advice to throw at me?

[Trisscar]

Freddie the Frog, from the 1992 movie 'Freddie as F.R.O.7', one of the worst animated films ever made. I'd seen it on tv a couple of years ago, and more recently I watched the uncut version on YouTube. I never knew that there were two versions. It was the American version I saw on tv and America pretty much murdered it by cutting out so much of the movie, trying to make it more 'moralistic'. They cut out any innuendo scenes, murder scenes, a few fight scenes (phew!) and a whole song. Not that it made the movie any better....

Despite the rigorous editing, I noticed that, during the song 'Lay Down Your Arms', there's a lyric saying "we rape the land and tear the skin" 0_o' How did they miss that?!

I enjoy nostalgia

This was drawn with Sai

[Trisscar]

I know I really ought to be working on my anatomy skills, but...



A couple of nights back, I had a dream that I was working on an animation (lordy but I need to get out more) involving this little guy, Bitey of Brackenwood, and I felt the urge to do some little sketches of him in flight. I am a huge fan of Adam Phillips' animations.

I kinda buggered up the sketch on the left there. He's supposed to be turning around in mid-air, but I didn't capture it very well