Re: VanderHuge Studios

At the moment, I'm cutting tracing paper and there's nothing on my desk, but I colored this over the weekend. If I drew it over again, the trees would be filled in as black and the grass would be less sketchy and a defined line with pen- I don't think those highlights worked too well. But that's kind of the point of coloring things like this; they come out how they come out. The way these are made, I only have so much control to a certain point, and after that, it's just however they end up. About Drawing Table Tuesday .

There wasn't really a way to crop an interesting section of this without revealing too much, but this does happen to have some hard to reproduce printing errors. They're not hard to reproduce technically , like, know-how, they're hard to pinpoint exactly what you want to reproduce and then remembering to go out of your way to put it there later. It's also hard to make intentional errors look unintentional. Adam Savage explains the idea pretty well whenever he talks about weathering props.  I remember reading an interview with Katsuhiro Otomo and he was talking about a time when he had to arrange three rocks- he kept trying different arrangements all day, but they kept looking staged and unnatural. As a last ditch effort, he just threw them up in the air and they landed perfectly. Point being, intentionally unintentional things are very hard to pull off. The key is something like loud subtlety. There's a streak of magenta and some drips of yellow.

I'm pretty happy with how these lines came out. I tried to get those ghost smudges in the lines on this one*. It's had to reproduce errors non-uniformly. I thought this one came out pretty well, but I won't know for sure until the test proof I had printed gets here. It's been my experience, that blacks print about a hundred times darker than they look on screen, so those blacks should print black enough. This looks great at 600ppi, but I'm not sure what normal photo printers print at, or at least, how well they print it. I'm not sure if the fake printing errors are exaggerated enough to show up well when it's printed and they're all twice as small. Right now though, I feel that if this looks just like high quality scans of real printed stuff, then it should look just like those when it's printed the same size they are to begin with. But I guess we'll see. Also, I'm totally not making that show. I'm okay with that though. I'...

There's nothing on the table right now but a blank sheet with pale blue ink too light to take a picture of, so here's a drawing I scanned yesterday. It's sort of related to my secret project , but very watered down. It's the fifth drawing in the series, but it's sort of the #0 in the set. Doesn't fit quite in, but close enough to slip it in anyway. I'm not too sure how serious she was, but Staci said she wanted me to put one of these in an upcoming show. An Earth Day show, I think? I don't know, I don't have facebook. But if I had to show one, it would be this one. I might. The deadline's coming up soon, so I might finish it in time, but I might not. I'm gonna try to anyway. Coloring it will take a while because I'm still unfamiliar, and, still trying to get a consistent process. I don't want these to take more of my time than they're worth; they're always secondary, more for practice and warming up for real drawings, e...

In lieu of time today, this isn't a photo, just a scan of the top half of a drawing I happened to be scanning when I remembered it was Tuesday. I've gotten into the habit of scanning drawings after I've finished them to mirror them and try to spot things that don't look right. I didn't need to redraw anything on this one. That's why it's reversed; I just cropped it and resized it. I'm four drawings into this series. I think there'll be twenty four when I'm done with them. If things stay the same as they are now, they'll probably be finished just before the book is. Also, the Northeastern coast is the more interesting of coasts in the US. Beaches are boring. About Drawing Table Tuesday .

I was scanning a couple sketchbook pages, got and used what I wanted from them, and was getting ready to close it-  without saving , until I saw this seal up at the very top of the page. This is really, really tiny. I thought it was pretty good for a two second doodle of a seal. So here it is. A tiny seal head. The seal was related to my secret project , but the idea changed in the sketchbook, so this won't ever be used for anything.