More Tentacles.

So, I pretty much spent my entire Sunday afternoon drawing tentacles, sounds kind of bad, but I feel I learned quite a lot. About drawing tentacles. These have just been b&w'd for clarity maybe I'll colour them in.

I am pretty pleased, I promise I will move on to the rest of the beast, eventually.

Kraken.

So I recently bought ImagineFX Comic Artist magazine, and it has a great tutorial in it for drawing a huge sea monster and the surrounding water.

Although I didn't follow all the steps as I didn't have much time to, I thought I would have a go at a sketch or two. I drew it in one of six boxes as I wanted to make several attempts at it. This is the first.

This is the sheet with all the different sketches, drawn on super cheap printer paper, with Rotring mechanichal pencils and Staedtler Fine Liners.

This is the final "retro" sheet with used textured pulp paper and using Jack Kirby's colour palette as I wanted it to look more "Golden Era" comic. I really like the look and feel of it, despite the art not being so great. I would really like to repeat the entire process again and spend a lot more time on it, especially focusing on the the water splashing.

Trees, yup trees.

So I have been pretty pleased with my character drawings, steadily improving and I think I have certainly developed a style for them. That said I really feel that my backgrounds could really do with improving so I have decided to heavily focus on backgrounds, starting with trees.

Below is the first tree I drew, and yes it is heavily influenced by Skottie Young's amazing X-Men cover as I do believe it really helps you explore a subject when you are enjoying what you're looking at and his work has always inspired me to pick up a pencil.

It is the first one I drew but the second one I coloured, I think the shading on the branches under the foliage is a lot better on this one.

This is the second tree I drew but the first one I coloured, based on the elements for the first. I think it is a more rounded tree. I built it on two layers of paper; tree and leaves, colouring it in photoshop.

It has been great fun so far, and I thing I will now move on to looking at some other style trees I like from of my favourite artists.

Added later.

So I decided to have a look at "Adventure Time" trees, which I also love. They are very strange and like most things in that cartoon very suggestive. I haven't added the leaves that will come later if I want to. I like them and even though I used the exact same colours, they have come out completely different. There are some rocks too. Things are getting exciting.