HeroMachine Character Portrait Creator

This one turned into more of a finished drawing than a sketch, although if it were really for publication there's still a bit I'd do to it. I'd likely shorten up the nose some, dress up the linework on the helmet, and work on the mouth.

I went ahead and screencast this one, too, although it took me so long I ran out of the ten minute YouTube time limit. There was a decent amount of work after the end of the video, but such is life. For those of you who are interested, here's the clip:

I also screen-cast this one. It's kind of long, if anyone knows of an easy way to re-record movies at double speed or something, please let me know. I'm ignernt. I tried figuring out iMovie, but for a design-oriented company, some of Apple's software interfaces are confusing at best, incomprehensible and frustrating at worst.

This one proceeds the same way all my illustrations do. First you lay down some basic sketch lines so you know in general how the drawing is supposed to look and where things go. I then make a new layer, turn the old one either gray or turn on "onion skin" mode for it, then draw on top of it with darker lines. If I were doing this by hand I'd just use very light pencil strokes to start, then get firmer and firmer til the drawing took shape.

I remember when I was a kid, sitting and watching my brothers Jimmy and Johnny sketch. I was mesmerized. Sometimes they'd let me request a particular subject, but really it didn't matter, I just was fascinated by the whole process of starting with a blank page and ending up with something awesome looking. It was like a kind of magic, and that it was my own brothers doing it just added to the whole thing.

Jimmy ended up becoming a dentist, and though he continued to have a passing interest in comics I don't think he kept up with the sketching. Johnny's a geologist, and around high school I think it was, ended up turning his creative energies to music instead of visual art. He's not only darn good, but his kids are amazingly talented musicians as well.

So I guess it fell to me to uphold the family honor in the visual arts. You can in part blame them for my love of drawing, and in part my dad for bringing home comics from time to time. But mostly, you can blame Superman. Punk.

I'm going to try something new this year and do a "Sketch of the Day", with just a hopefully quick drawing of whatever. Several other, much more accomplished, comics artists are trying it out and I thought I might as well to try and get the ol' juices flowing. Here's the first one.

Would you be interested in me doing a video capture of the actual drawing process on these?