100 Days of Drawing: Day 13

This one is close to my heart as it's a drawing of one of my all time favourite birds, the sulphur-crested cockatoo. Why is it? Well as a kid we had one as a pet, and man do I have some stories about old Charlie the Cockatoo. In the beginning, when I was young we both hated each other and he would chase me around the house to scare me, as he was a bit of a sadist. But when I was a teenager we were best mates, I loved that bird, he was such a character and literally was a member of our family. Unfortunately he died/disappeared when I was still in high school (long story) and even though that was over 20 years ago, I miss that crazy bird, he was one of my best mates. One day I hope to get a cockatoo/parrot of some sort for a pet as I love them so much. Anyway here it is:

I tell you what, it wasn't easy doing a primarily white bird I can tell you, but I'm happy with how it turned out.

Mike

   

100 Days of Drawing: Day 12

I'm super tired today after my 2 year old kept me and my wife up most of the night, so I was really struggling to focus and think of something to draw today. Thankfully tonight I sat down and flicked through one of my art magazines and saw a picture of a kids with objects as heads and then this image kind of popped into my head and I went with it:

Something different, yet still retaining some of my style and things I like to do. Enjoy!

Mike

Blown (Special Features)

Welcome! I had an idea a while ago to do some behind the scene's 'special features' posts to show in more detail just how I create my cartoons. Mainly from an art point of view as I tend to talk a lot about the idea process in the original post with the cartoon.

So after the idea is finalized I do a super rough sketch, just to get the layout all sorted. In this case it was a quick sketch just to see if I could pull off a drawing of Bumblebee:

Then I move onto the pencil drawing:

You probably can't see all that clearly, but I'm pretty messy when it comes to drawing. And you can tell where I've had the most difficulty as it's very smudged from rubbing it out and doing it over, which in this case is Bumblebee's hand and arm. Also at this stage I started toying around with the idea of a background which I later abandoned. Notice the date and name at the top? I pretty much date and name everything now, mainly for prosperity reasons and of course and copyright issues, if that every happened. I never used to do this and I wish I had, just so I could have everything catalogued in chronological order just to see how far I've come and all. One of my many talents is research, and I always like to my visual research as much as possible, but sometimes time is a factor and I can't. This one was easy though, I just used my old friend Google Image search! To find the Bumblebee image I needed:

Of course I wasn't going to do an exact copy, would have taken way too long and it doesn't really fit in with my 'style' and all.

So, the next step is I take the pencil sketch and trace it onto some glossy laser jet paper (more on that other week) using my lightbox (a big box with 2 fluoro lights in it, with a piece of glass on the top) using a special 'non-photo blue' pencil (basically it doesn't show up on photocopies and barely at all when you scan it the right way). I then trace the over the blue lines with various ink pens and viola! Notice the Autobot logo missing? I really struggled to draw it freehand, so I printed off the above picture of Bumblebee and traced it, inked it and scanned it in separately to combine when I coloured it. 

Next, I scan that into my PC and use good old Photoshop and my awesome Wacom Tablet to fix up any mistakes and clean up lines, then I colour it in. Finally I export it to Illustrator to add my border and text and it's all good to go! Here's the final product: http://brinkscartoons.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/blown.html

So what do you think? In the next Special Features I'll go into more detail about each stage per week or so, hope you enjoyed it!

Until next time!

Mike

Friday Night Art 10

Just a quickie tonight, just thought I'd share the full body image I just finished tonight of my logo 'bert for the upcoming website relaunch:

What do you think? I've gone back to his more 'meaner' looking roots. And here's the pencil sketch of it:

See you next time!

Mike

Friday Night Art 9

I had an idea the other day, I always wanted to use my Friday nights to experiment with different art styles and the other day at work (don't tell anyone) I did this quick (seriously it was, what do you think I stand around all day scribbling?) drawing of good old Mario. If you didn't already know, I'm a big gamer and a huge Nintendo fan-boy, so Mario is kind of my hero and seen as though I work in a games department his lovely face is all over the place. So I had the idea to use this Friday to experiment with drawing Mario in different styles and such, in fact I like the idea so much I think I might experiment with some other of my favourite characters over the next few Fridays. I didn't have all that much time tonight, so here's a bunch of quick Mario sketches I whipped up, I'll do some more next week:

So what do you think? I really like the last one here and I think I might do something with it in the future.....

Later!

Mike

Friday Night Art 8

Hooray! It's back! After weeks of saying I was going to do it, I've finally gotten around to doing some Friday Night Art! I had an idea the other day, as every time I've done these Friday night art posts I always post them way to late in the night as I'm usually drawing them that night. Not so now, tonight I thought I'd post up some of my old favourite sketches first and then do some drawing so I can then, next week post tonight's drawings and then do some new ones! Damn I'm clever....


Both these two sketches ending up being used in one way or another for friends of mine, this first one:

Was for a mate of mine who was having a zombie pizza night at his house, which ended up being a really awesome idea and it was good fun I must say. Anyway, he asked me to draw something up for the invites to his "ZombiePizzaLooza" so I came up with this.

Now this next one is one of my favourites:

This sketch I drew years and years ago on a train ride home from work. I have no idea what the inspiration was, I just started drawing, I still love this character design. A good buddy of mine had this band way back when and he asked me to design a t-shirt for the band and I ended up using this character for that, hence why I later added the "Run Amok" logo on the t-shirt as that was the band name. I'm thinking I might do some more sketches of this guy again soon and I think I'll keep the t-shirt, even though the band isn't around any more as I like the idea and it can be a homage to those guys.

Anyway, hope you like my sketches! See you again on Monday!

Mike

Friday Night Art 7

Greetings! As I mentioned over that last couple of posts, I had all these grand plans to completely revamp this site for the first anniversary.... unfortunately that date is this Monday and I've hardly done anything for it, plus my web design skills are fairly lacking these days, not that I have the time anyway. But I thought that at least I'd do a brand new header image and slowly tweak things here and there as I go throughout the next year, just so I'm not stressing for Monday. I did have the idea before to spend all day Monday just revamping the site rather than doing a cartoon, but I'd feel bad as it's been a whole year and I haven't missed posting a cartoon yet and I don't want to start now! I still do want to merge this site over to my brinkscartoons.com address, but I'm not sure how that will effect my traffic and I'm not sure what the old address will link to. If I could get it to just have a link to the .com that would be awesome, I just need to look into it.


Anyway so today I started doing some more sketches of Bert for the new banner:

As you can see my 2 year old Dash, wanted to draw with Daddy too, hence why Bert's chin just turns into a bunch of massive scribbles.

Here's the sketch of the new banner:

So I will have to probably do some work on this on Monday, so no more time sonsuming stips and elaboratly detailed ideas, I need to do a nice simple gag and spend the rest of the day working on this I think. Hopefully I'll get some more done on Sunday night as well, I'll see how I go. What do you think?

See you Monday!

Mike

Friday Night Art 6

No more excuses this week, it's Friday Night Art! Back after a couple of weeks off!

(click for a larger view)

So first up are some sketches of some devils/demons I was playing around with, of late I'm started playing around with my style a bit. Experimenting here and there, as you can see, nothing too drastic, it's actually quite hard to change your style when you've been doing something the same way for years and years. I'm never really happy with my art and I'm always looking for ways to improve and get better. This whole thing started as my 2 year old son Dash's new movie obsession at the moment is My Neighbor Totoro, amazing movie by the way....So, the two main creature characters in that movie; Totoro and the cat bus, both have these huge distinctive smiles that I sketched down as the main full bodied devil here and for some reason I just made a devil around that smile. So after that I just started experimenting with the looks:

(click for a larger view)

What do you think?

And finally, the first anniversary of this blog is at the end of this month and I still plan on celebrating by giving the site an image overhaul so I need to redo my Bert logo so, once again I started experimenting with his look:

(click for a larger view)

Now this is something new I'd try, by actually having him smile and look happy for a change. Not sure if I like it, what do you think? Happy or cranky looking? So I'm pretty sure the next couple of Friday Night Art sessions will be all about the anniversary makeover so you'll have to wait and see what I do with Bert next!

Ok, see you all again on Monday!

Mike

Friday Night Art 5

I'm back again for some more Friday Night Art, I am pretty tired and thought of bailing tonight. But I did that last week so I went 'screw it' and whipped out the old pencils and scribbled away and as usual had fun. Why oh why do I procrastinate doing things I enjoy? Anyway so first up I stuck to my current favourite theme of clowns:

Not my usual happy, quirky characters is it? That would be because I was in a pretty foul mood before I drew this. I'd had a really shit afternoon today as my 2 year old son was better a right little shit. This is just a pencil sketch, I darkened it a tad in Photoshop before saving it. So I at least got to vent a bit with this one and I actually felt better after so I then went on to draw this:

Which is another in my "Black and Red" series and also what I tend to call my "Brinkemon" characters that I sometimes draw. Can you see a running theme that I've been enjoying of late? Yep, stripy pants and shirt designs....not sure why I just like stripes at the moment. This was done with plain old red and black felt tip pens. So as with all these Friday Night Art pieces, they are all pretty rough and quick, I was just thinking that I might actually redo/do better versions of some that I love eventually as either paintings or in digital form, please let me know if you want me to and which one's you think I should do.

Anyway bed is calling, see you again on Monday!

Mike

Friday Art 4

Hello again, I'll be brief tonight as I'm really tired....I was going to just bail, but no I want to keep up my good habits, I'm having such a good year. Anyway so I 'quickly' whipped up a new piece for my "Black and Red" series I'm working on:

Enjoy! I'm going to bed....

Mike

Friday Night Art 3

Welcome to another instalment of "Friday Night Art"! One of the things I've been enjoying and finding challenging about having a whole night dedicated to just creating art, is what to draw! You see for a long time now, if I drew something (other than the odd doodle and sometimes an incomplete drawing) it was solely for a purpose, mainly a cartoon, or relating to one. So during the week I started thinking about what I like drawing, and in the next few weeks I plan on doing some practice on drawing animals. But this week I remembered I love drawing clowns! I have this old diary that I leave in the lounge room that I do really rough pen sketches in, and most of the time my 2 year old son draws all over them at the same time, so we both share! It's fun! This week I started sketching some clowns in it and as I do I ended up drawing Engelbert (or 'Bert as I tend to call him). Who's Engelbert I hear you ask?

This is Bert, you may recognise him from the logo at the top of this page, he usually gets referred to as "my clown character".He's a character I've been drawing for a very long time now and he's always been my 'logo' of sorts. I love drawing him and it always cheers me up when I do, I can't even remember when I first drew him and why to be honest. I've never used him in anything either, although when I was studying art, a couple of mates and I were planning a comic book and he was the main character. It was a bunch of rejects who meet in an unemployment office and decide to form a 'hire a superhero' team. The concept was that they were born for their jobs but were bad at them, Bert for example was born looking like a clown and he tries to be a clown but he's very violent and not a very cheerful person. We also had an ex-postal employee who was a weapons expert....man I should try and do that one day! Anyway so every few years or so I redraw my logo and update ol' Bert, so as I'm planning a big over hall of this website, I thought I'd update him. Eventually I want to get a tattoo of him, I just need the perfect design....


Next up, I thought I'd stick to my series of "Red and Black" pen pieces by doing another clown:

Another thing I plan on doing with my Friday nigh sessions is experiment with different styles and try some more wackier ways of drawing stuff, this is not so much, but it's heading in the right direction. It's going to take some practice to get out of my 'comfort zone' of drawing.  It does include two of my favourite things to draw, afro's and buck-teeth.....I have no idea why and when you read that is sounds weird, but it's cute right? Right? The afro thing is because afro's rule! And back in the day I used to have one, (I only have one surviving photo, I'll try and find it and scan it) and here's useless fact, when I make a character in a video game I nearly always give them a purple afro. The teeth thing comes from another well drawn character of mine, who's changed and evolved a lot over the years and I seriously do plan on using him in a comic strip soon, more on that another week I think....

Ok, see you on Monday for a new cartoon!

Mike

Friday Art

As you may remember I mentioned the other week about my new years resolutions, well I have some others, I've actually created a sort of rough timetable for how I spend my spare time, so I can try and get more stuff done (My issue is that I enjoy way to many things and it's difficult to do all of them, like games, books, comics, art etc.). I have to say its been working out really well, which brings me to Friday nights, which is art night! It's been so long since I've just sat down and drawn stuff just for the sake of it, not for a cartoon or anything and man it felt really good!


So I worked on two pieces tonight, the first here is an unfinished sketch that I'll do some more work on next week I think. This started as a random sketch I doodled in my son's diary, we sometime draw together....well I draw stuff and he then scribbles all over it. So I thought I'd do a bigger, better version, so here's the sketch:

So it's still a work in progress, I'll see what happens to it next week.

Next, I just grabbed a handful of random black and red Artline felt-tip pens and just drew whatever came to mind and here's what happened:

So as it was so random and unplanned, there's a lot that needs fixing, but it was very liberating to just randomly start drawing with ink pen and not sketch in pencil first. I intend to explore this technique more next week as well. 

Oh sorry about the photo's, I would have scanned them but the drawing pad I used was too big for my little old A4 scanner. So what do you think? I had fun, that's what's important. What I do with these who knows, maybe I might do final painted versions, maybe not, we'll see.

Mike