Poison Ivy

Okay. I joined the Newsarama art group. They have a little group of people that draw to a weekly theme just for fun. This weeks theme was Batman villains. Now, all these challenges are nice and I'm giving Gimp a good workout but I DO need to get back to figures and other things...Boring things like animals and rooms and landscapes. I don't want to do covers and pinups. I want to do the stories.

But this looks nifty anyway so I'm going to post it. She still needs finishing somehow and the pictures look better if you click to enlarge.

First pic I posted, redone.

I went back and revisited one of my first batch of sketches with Gimp. Turned out sort of neat. I could have done a better job with a pencil but not bad. I'll probably come back to that again when i'm more practiced with Gimp because for a really quick and sloppy sketch, it seems to have had some good bones. I'm beginning to learn to save old sketches that I previously would have thrown out. Both this one and the Gert and Old Lace pictures were older sketches I thought I was done with but with Gimp I found some more in them I could explore.
Original...











Redone...

So it was my birthday...

...Yesterday. It was nice. My husband took the kids out for the day and I did nothing for a few hours but watch TV, eat chocolate and work on the pics I posted yesterday. Then he came home and brought a cake, Chinese takeout and a present. The present was a sheet of bristol board.

I know most women wouldn't be thrilled with bristol board but this one came with a small backstory. When I decided I was going to start drawing again and become a penciller I didn't say much to my husband. I started the blog and mentioned it to other people but not really to him. I thought he'd think it was silly, think it was another hobby but nothing serious. So I held off.

This blog and the sister blog have done fairly well though. My drawing got better and is now almost half decent. I started buying a few small supplies. And I started to tell him about what I wanted to do and showing him my drawings. He doesn't get really enthusiastic about stuff I do, or doesn't seem to, so he'd look at a picture and say, 'That's nice,' go back to watching some version of Star Trek and I'd take it away a little deflated. One day however we were talking a bit about what I was doing and I mentioned that I'd read awhile ago that pencillers generally work on bristol board and their work gets reduced to comic book size. I said I've have to work at scaling up my figures and drawings. Something said and then forgotten, a throwaway line.

And then yesterday he gave me the bristol board. Shucks. You think a guy doesn't much care, doesn't listen and then he picks out this perfect little gift that says not only has he listened but he has every confidence in your ability to do what you want to do.