*Update!!* I'm gonna be in the Fruits Go Go art show, along with Gabe Swarr, Sandra Equihua, and lots of other cool artists! It's at the Monkeyhouse Gallery in Silverlake. Click here for details!
This is an older drawing that I posted on here a while back, only it's huge now. I inked and colored it on this funny crinkly old paper that did really cool things to the marker ink. Also the design on her skirt is sewn on with embroidery thread. I wanted to do more with string but ran out of time!
Here's how big it is, although now that it's in a huge frame it looks even bigger! I'm not sure I'll be at the gallery opening on Saturday, but I might be. I hope some of you LA based bloggers will stop by and take a look at all the cool art!
OK! Enough about that. My friend Ricky (my friend who does 1930 Nitemare Theatre on Dumm Comics) loaned me an awesome movie! It's called Freeway, and aside from just liking the movie, I also got really inspired to draw the main character.
The movie stars Reese Witherspoon...it's one of her earliest roles I think, as she looks super young. These drawings are not very good caricatures of Reese...instead I just kind of wanted to have fun trying to draw a simplified version of her character in the movie.
These first ones are pretty feeble. You can tell which drawings I liked though because I colored them!
Reese is really great in this movie. She plays a screwed up teenage girl in a modern "Little Red Riding Hood" story. She's angsty but goofy, and really likable. She makes great expressions too! Kiefer Sutherland plays the big bad wolf.
You know, Reese always gets crap for her prominent chin, but her chin wasn't the most interesting feature on her face for me. She's got this great big round cranium, flared, downward pointing nostrils, and a really cool mouth that I can't actually draw. Really very cute. I cheated on drawing her lips in these drawings. When I tried to draw them like real lips, they didn't look like hers. Now I have a new way of drawing mouths! Hooray! I couldn't figure out her eyes, though. They're kind of different in every drawing.
Her expressions are great! She makes a hundred expressions per monologue. If you want practice drawing real girl expressions, go rent this movie! And get "But I'm a Cheerleader" too!
I drew all these while watching the movie, but the bloody one was just made up.
Ok, that's it for now! Now it's time for more important business!! After years of begging my boyfriend, he finally caved and let me adopt a kitten! I won't talk too much about him now (there's already enough to read here), but you can expect a huge kitten post soon!
This is what Little Ricky has to say to you!
Remember to try and always adopt pets from shelters if you can! Lots of animals need loving homes! And be nice to your animals, or I'll kick your ass!
Here it is, the second ever man drawing on my blog. Everyone is drawing Uncle Eddie, so I wanted in too! Eddie is one of my favorite mans. Sorry they aren't really finished! Here are some post-its from this morning's bored doodling session: I guess I'm all theroried-out from the last post...but I started drawing again a couple days ago, and now I have a whole pile of pictures to post later on. I have some new projects I'm starting, too. More on that later!
***Sorry, I forgot to add these answers to the questions people asked! Here they are:
Acetate: "By the way...are you going down to Comic-Con?" " How'd the big show go?" "What exactly is this "lip bulb" thing?"
I will probably be at the con this year...I think they're going to have a thing for the new Ren and Stimpy DVD, so I will probably be there for that, and wandering around for a day or two. The show was great, thanks for asking! It was great getting to meet some of the nice folks who read my blog. The "lip bulb" is that middle part on a top lip...like the little pointed part. Urrgh, it's hard to explain, ha! Some people have it, but other's don't. It's not the philtrum...here's a "diagram." Clinton: "Katie, how do you scan your drawings in without getting those evil grey borders invading your drawings? My latest scans are full of them. How do you photoshop them out?"
Most of the time I don't draw in a sketchbook, so I don't have to worry about grey borders! But I'm pretty sure you can use the "brightness and contrast" or the "levels" in photoshop to get rid of them.
R: " Hey, K! Do you do commissions? And how much would one set me back if ya do?"
Right now I'm supposed to be doing a few commissions for friends of mine, but I'm not doing a very good job of finishing them right now. So I probably won't be picking up any more until I'm better about procrastinating. Hopefully in the future I'll be able to handle doing commissions better!
Shawn: "Hey, Katie! Where do you find light flesh colored markers and those pale yellow ones you use? I have so many marker colors, but I have no tasteful way to color flesh."
Ugh, flesh colored markers never ever look like flesh, it's so true! Most the time I layer weird colors together, or use colors that aren't real fleshtones at all...like orange or grey. But otherwise I use the lightest markers they sell, and then use the darker markers to add to it. Most brands have a few super light colors...you can't tell by the way the marker looks on the outside though, so just test them all until you find the right ones. :)
Kali Fontecchio: "lips are always fun to draw. And to see if you're as weird as me, when drawing yourself, do you amp your lips up waaay more than they really are? I know I do! Just curious :)"
I think I amp up all my features! I'm one of those weird people that has big everything- big eyes, big nose, big mouth, big teeth...sometimes I wonder how my face fits on my head. Does that sound weird? Urrgh, sorry, ha! I'd like to see one of your self portraits, though! :)
Anonymous: "P.S. What is your all time favorite Ren & Stimpy cartoon?"
I have too many favorites!! "Space Madness", "Stimpy's Invention"...I really love all of them. I guess "Big House Blues" might be my favorite though, just cause it's so cool looking.
Lacie: "Did you just randomly draw these girls or look at pictures?"
Most of the girls from my mouth post were drawn from magazines, although a couple were made up. Maybe I should do a post sometime comparing referenced drawings with non-reference drawings...what do you think?
Alex: " Are their any tutorials on drawing assholes so I can put Cory's theories into practice?"
I will Ask Cory to do one, and if he refuses to give out the address of his blog, I'll just post it on mine!
Thanks everyone for contributing mouth theories! Those comments were fun to read...
My two favorite things to draw are mouths and legs, but for some reason I feel a little funny talking about them here! I can't tell if I'm giving away "secrets," or just stating the obvious! Anyhow, since people have asked for it and I'm always obsessing over them, here is the mouth post!
There are a few things I always look at first when drawing someone's mouth...does she have that little "lip bulb" on the top lip (I can't remember who coined that phrase, but it's a good one!), or is there just a little hole? Does the mouth point down or up when making a nuetral expression? Is the top lip bigger, or the bottom one? (Also, I REALLY like overbites and underbites, and I'm not going to even get started on teeth here...)
All those things change how a person makes expressions, too. I've really been wanting to do some photo experiments- I want to take pictures of all my girlfriends making the same mouths shapes, and compare them all to one another. This would be great for animating lip synch, and just comparing the vastness of human shapes in general. Maybe I'll do a post about that later, and people can help me out with supplying pictures!
Here's a funny observation about mouth construction- you know when you're constructing a drawing, and you draw the center line, and you draw the eyes and nose and chin and whatever all lining up accordingly? The mouth doesn't fit on that line! It actually sticks out, like a weird human muzzle. I tried to draw it here, in sort of an exaggerated way: My friend Robert Cory pointed this out to me a long time ago, but he used a much more vulgar way of describing this phenomenon. Maybe sometime he'll get a blog and describe it in his own terms for you!
Here's another one: in a three quarter view of a mouth, the part of the lips that are farther away from you are thicker. This is kind of hard to draw without making the face look like there are nasty worms on it. John K. is really good at it though. His bad catholic school girl drawings influenced me a whole lot. I tried to draw some here: Well, I can't really think of much else to say! It's one thing to make observations and attempt to put it on paper, but then trying to describe it in words is even harder! So...here are some faces that I drew tonight while becoming completely fixated on drawing weird human orifices! I know someone's going to call me "weird" for this!
