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DONKEY: Hey Shrek! I got a cunning plan!
SHREK: Tell me, Donkey ... Is it more cunning than a weasel with a doctorate in cunning from Cunning University that has just broken into the cunning reserves and eaten so much cunning that it is literally oozing out his ears?
 | It's the magical door ... and I go in it every morning! Magical! I think there might be a forcefield of drawing power at the top of the stairs because it's just ridiculous in there. Here's a detail of the sign, with the world's best logo. |
 | The Mendenhall Sobieski Gallery is next door, and it has this sign in its window which I found amusing. |
 | This is a fixture in the local grocery store ... as far as I can tell, you put money in and you get movies out. No word on how they hold you to returning it ... maybe you have to use your store's loyalty card or something so they have your address and can send out their movie thugs to get it back. |
 | This is the view from my bus stop in the afternoon. One of these days I will investigate that church or whatever it is; it looks pretty cool. |
This is, more or less, what I was thinking through that whole part of Pirates III.
Every so often I am seized with the urge to caricature the cast of Lord of the Rings ... this is a good way to keep my head from swelling because it's always a painful exercise in futility. After a couple days drawing the same thing over and over, I think I managed to get Eowyn. I begrudgingly chalk up another point for the Cintiq; as soon as I tried doing it in Sketchbook it worked. (Well, on the second try, but that's close enough.) Blast.
A thumbnail for the scene where they're offloading rubber hosing ... it looks cool in my head, trust me. Mostly dependent on colour, though. The composition needs a little finessing before I go that far.
Szpirglas, the pirate captain. After overcoming my tendency to picture him as Reacher Gilt, I realized I could base him off a family friend who fits the description rather well, but these were drawn before the realization, and I'm not sure I have any reference pictures. He could also look a bit like the author, but I don't know what Mr Oppel would think of that. Doesn't look very captainly here, or very piratey for that matter... More attempts later, perhaps.
The book is punctuated with occasional dream sequences in which Matt is flying, so I brought in a bit of the climax and stuck him with a flock of cloud cats ... apparently I can't get over Silverwing either.
Now for some moaning: Every day at work I draw what I would consider decent drawings. Admittedly, they're mostly poses in rotations, but they're solid and confident. I've even taken to doing rotations on paper instead of the Cintiq to keep me in touch with a pencil (and also because it's faster... and better). I get home, though, and open my sketchbook with pencil in hand, and what comes out looks and feels like the stuff I forcibly excreted in the midst of my rough storyboard-induced drawing decay period last summer. What do I need to change? I've been out drawing observational stuff more than ever this year but that hasn't seemed to have helped, it just seems to have made me impatient with my drawings so they're all really haphazard and gestural and I don't bother to get things right.
EDIT 21 MARCH 2009: What is up with this post? How is it getting so many comments? Does it turn up on a Google search or something? Could someone please tell me what is going on?
EDIT 14 NOVEMBER 2009: Thanks to those who commented with info regarding the traffic on this post! Interesting.
It started out as a speed painting but was rather blah, so I bounced it off Sean and with his suggestions managed to make this out of it,** which is actually presentable, hurrah! 
I've been listening to BBC7's run of Sherlock Holmes radio plays, which are very well done and approximately as addictive as crack. There's a scene in The Final Problem where Watson finds Holmes a nervous wreck in his kitchen, having climbed in from the back garden to avoid Moriarty's men. It's jarring to see (well, 'see': this is radio, after all) this character behave in such an out-of-character way, and the scene made quite a visual impression on me. Watson was supposed to be in this scene but, er ... he didn't turn out. (Holmes is far more interesting, anyway.) Thumbnailed at life drawing with a 4B pencil, tightened up in Sketchbook, and painted in OpenCanvas.
Here's the result of Sean's 15-minute design challenge 'The Oldest Creature in the World' ... it turned out better than I expected but still has a few improvements to be made. I'll forget about it if I don't post it, though, so now it is a Note To Self.
