#fanartfriday: Sailor Moon!

This week’s #fanartfriday theme is my own personal gateway drug into the mad, colourful world of manga and anime,  Naoko Takeuchi’s “Sailor Moon!” I saw the anime when it aired on Canadian tv over ten years ago and it blew my mind and stole my clumsy-teenage-girly heart. The first manga showcased a fairly different looking design for our short-skirted heroine, and I wanted to give that a draw. Enjoy!


Inked with a quill (the R. Esterbrook & Co 1000 gifted to us in Florida by the super awesome Jimmy Palmiotti!) on bristol, and coloured in photoshop (the texture is from scanned scrap-booking paper).

bleu clair

Shrub Monkeys #124 and Sketch Crawl

Last Saturday was the "World Wide Sketch Crawl", a day where tons of artists escape from their studios and dark office spaces to wander around the outside world, blinking in the sunlight, and drawing whatever comes across their path. Despite the distractions described in this comic I actually managed to get a couple sketches done, which you can check out below!

Note: Hmm, I still can't seem to post comic images on blogger as large as I'd like (which usually leads me to just link to the full comic on Girlamatic). I'm looking to eventually switch to a wordpress website/blog sometime soon, so hopefully that'll fix this problem!

Viral Spiral Goodies!

I must say, today's been a pretty awesome day for my brother, friends and I on the internet! I woke up this morning to see that our live action Little Big Planet skit (from my brother and pal's Escapist internet series "Show About Games Show") went viral with plugs on Kotaku, Reddit, Geekologie, and on the twitter and blog of the original game's creators Media Molecule! Mega congrats to everyone involved! As it says on Kotaku:

"Give this Show About Games Show clip ten seconds to let you know what's going on. Give it thirty to warm your heart. Then give it around sixty to blow your mind."

What was also cute was my bro and I shared the top front page of Reddit.com today as someone went and linked to my "cold feet" sketch. Thank you very much to the folks that hang out over there!  This of course lead to internet weirdness...

 (my original drawing) ^

  (A revised "forever alone" meme version) ^

(The most amazing god damn thing I've seen all day) ^

And speaking of weirdness, you know it's going to be a good day when your mother calls first thing in the morning to say, "They're talking about your boobs on the internet!"

And there you have it, I think I've achieved everything I've ever aspired to do on the internet, JOB WELL DONE.

Sunday night's life drawing haul

 ^ A sneaky warm up doodle of my drawing buddy and man-man, Gerry. 

 ^(1 minute) ^

^(1 minute)^ I tend to shy away from posting sketches without hands and legs attached (results of scoldings from Sheridan profs) but there were elements here I kind of liked. 

 ^(5 min)^

  ^(5 min)^

 ^(10 min)^ ... might have given him a bit too much booty... 

(okay that sounded wrong reading it back >_< )

 ^(10 min) ^

And that's all the naked men you'll be getting from me this week! :D 

daily doodle: pegasus

The Spirit

For #fanartfriday's Will Eisner week, it's “The Spirit"! (Brush and ink, coloured in photoshop)

A birthday drawing for my roommate, who's enjoying the date at a sunny resort far from chilly Canada (lucky!)

Daily Doodle Theme: Cold!

A Plug for my bro: Watch the "Show about Games Show!"

A while ago my brother Shagster Shan and his buddy's entered a 'looking-for-new-video-content' contest on the mega popular videogame website "THE ESCAPIST" and were picked in the top three! What did they win? To make MORE VIDEOS! For the next couple months their video-game variety sketch show, "Show About Games Show" will air online on "The Escapist" website EVERY THURSDAY with quality skits, whacky sketches, and random video game related weirdness for your viewing pleasure!

Episode ONE just aired today! I helped out with props, effects (and singing) in the mind-blowing Little Big Planet sequence at the end, check it OUT! And let us know what you think on The Escapist site!


And you can check out the Pilot Webisode here!


There's more to come, my brother and his friends are just getting RAMPED UP! So stay tuned, and you can keep an eye on these folks and other shenanigans they get into over on their website Uberfriendship.com

Cheers all! :)

~Kt

Bubbling Mermaid

Today's warm up doodle, mostly I just wanted to play around with drawing bubbles underwater... tricky lil' things...

I had "The Mermaid" song playing in my head while drawing this, an adorable (naughty) song by Great Big Sea based off the Shel Silverstein poem.

Friday night flaming sword warrior lady!

*

Sketched and inked this last night while chatting with my comic buddy Jason Caffoe (uber colourist of the Amulet series) and decided to slap on some colours before posting. Who is she? Where'd she get them swanky swords? What's the story behind the tattoos? Why isn't she wearing a sweater? What did you say to her to make her look at you like that? (You mentioned the sweater, didn't you.) These questions may not have an answer, BUT as always, this was fun to draw!

~Brush and ink, coloured in photoshop

Here are the pencils if you were curious to see my process!

Happy #fanartfriday! It’s Hergé week, so here we have “Tintin‘s" Haddock throwing a hissy fit!

That's Mr. Kaneda to you, punk!

For last week's "AKIRA" themed #fanartfriday.

It’s Kaneeeeedaaaaaaaaa!!!! I watched the anime again to get myself into the mood for some fanarts. It was such a struggle to draw the bike in this ONE view that my mind does a bunch of mini explosions whenever I watch the amazing drag races on film. Epic to the extreme. I also really dug the animated light effects streaking around so tried to capture the feel of that here.

Thursday life drawing session

I'm pretty rusty but this was a very enjoyable session none the less! I've a lot of studying to do, especially along the lines of understanding more 'athletic' anatomy. I gravitate towards more soft, round "womanly" shapes when drawing people so when faced with a model with a lot of angles and muscle definition, things can get pretty challenging. But half the fun of this craft is the constant learning, un-learning, and MORE learning, so, there you go.

 (20 minutes ^)

 (15 minutes ^)

 (15 minutes ^ This one's pretty wonky as my attempt at foreshortening just gave him big ol' hips)

(20 minutes ^)

The White and Black Swan

Couldn't sleep so thought I'd get another fan-art out of my head and onto the page. From Darren Aronofsky's film "Black Swan," the duality of light and darkness within a single person.

A birthday card for my ACA comic comrade Thi Bui!

New Year New Drawing

Haven't had much time to draw for myself lately, so it was nice to take a break and noodle around with brush and ink again. If you're curious about my process I tend to start pieces like this by sketching in red on the cintiq:

Why pencil digitally you ask? I only do it because it's faster than pencilling on paper (for me) and all the cheats photoshop has to offer for tweaking drawing mistakes makes it a PLUS! That being said, I'd like to be able to move away from digital and work more analogue eventually, because who wants to stare at a monitor all day?? But I digress, after this step I print the image onto bristol board and then it's onto my favourite step... INK!

(Inked with size 01 Windsor&Newton Series 7 sable brush)

Why favourite? Inking is very zen to me, all the blood, sweat and tears (copious, embarrassing amounts of tears) that went into the pencilling stage are long behind and I can zone out and let my hand and the brush do as it will. After I'm done I scan it back into the computer, take out the red channel in photoshop, noodle around with the levels and TADAH I'm done. In this case I kind of liked step 2 better where the brush strokes are showing, but for a professional piece you'd probably have to up the levels and keep the blacks at their blackest. ALRIGHTY! And that's today's lesson-blessin' with yer ol' pal Katie!

Comic Creators Alliance 2011 Donation Drive: Fighting Together to End Human Trafficking

Tuesday, January 11th is National Human Trafficking Awareness Day. In honor of the event, I teamed up with the Comic Creator’s Alliance–a group of over 100 comic book creators (both web and print!) who volunteered our artistic talents to raise money and awareness for this cause. You may not know it, but there are currently 27 million enslaved people worldwide- more than double the number of enslaved Africans during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. UNICEF estimates that 1.2 million children every year are sold into slavery, most of it sexual. The US Department of Justice estimates 16,000 victims of human trafficking are brought into the United States every year. Unlike slavery in the 19th century, what is happening today is happening in secret. It won’t end until awareness is raised, and people like you and me take a stand.

So here’s what we did: each creator contributed an original drawing of one of our own characters, and combined them into a single image! This year's theme was "The Brady Bunch." There is so much going on in this image--you can look at the wallpaper for a long time and still find something new! View the full listing of contributors here: http://comicalliance.weebly.com/the-people.html.

Donate today to download this unique, once-in-a-lifetime wallpaper. Or, this year you can buy a print! (here's a close up with my Shrub Monkey's persona 2nd to the right up top... right above an Adam Hughes drawing! )

The Donations Drive will last for two weeks, from January 11th – 24th. All proceeds will be split evenly between Love 146 and Gracehaven House- two organizations working on rehabilitation of victims and prevention of this crime. Last year our group raised $10,000! This year I believe we can do more.

To learn more about the CCA and to donate visit www.comicalliance.weebly.com. To learn more about the problem, visit http://love146.org/slavery. (Note: contains adult themes and actual accounts of sex slavery.) Thank you so much for reading and a million thank-yous for you help!

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” -Margaret Mead