Dancers Dancing, Part One

These are pencil sketches for what became the cover illustration of a short-lived humor magazine published out of NYC in the late oughts of the 21st century.  In my next posts, I will upload more sketches and a couple of preliminary-but-discarded tryout treatment drawings for the finished illustration, (which I will put up at the end of this short series).

Spaceman Blues

This spaceman is in a thrice-fold predicament...adrift between the planets...losing oxygen...bedeviled by mysterious creepy-crawlies swarming inside his spacesuit. I wouldn't want to be in his skin.

Harry

 Harry, a professional artist's model. I drew this in life class a few years ago. I used a fairly hard, light pencil, so I adjusted the levels of light and dark in Photoshop to make the reproduced image a bit more dynamic. 

Colorforms World

This was a little experiment, a bit of whimsy. The title of this post refers to the old childhood art toy that I had as a child. 

A Tough Customer, Three Times

This shows the development of a sketchbook doodle from its original state, (long sleeves, no birds), to its second state, (black tank top, birds), and then to its final state, (long sleeves return, birds gone, color added). The third version, one might notice, has thicker, brushier lines than the previous images. I used Adobe's Streamline to autotrace the first sketch, transforming it into vectors; I then applied a stroke to it in the wonderful little vector graphics program EXPRESSION, by CreatureHouse. Microsoft bought the program in 2002 or so, took it off the market for a bit, and brought it back as part of their EXPRESSION Suite, intended for web-building. It was discontinued by Microsoft a year or so back. Microsoft did not develop it for the Mac, and so I retain CreatureHouse's app on my Mac for occasional use. I wish the original developers would buy back the rights and reintroduce it to market. It is/was much simpler and more intuitive to use than Illustrator, and it could produce more natural-looking artwork...and it was just plain fun to use. 

Army (Jacket) Days

This is another sketchbook drawing done without a pencil preliminary. I used a fine tip marker to draw this army field jacket, which served as my winter coat for a couple of seasons.