Kittyspam and drawings

[telophase]

Got a new toy - a puffball on a spring.


And achieved a Sanzo glare. XD




She really prefers to lay on her side and play with it that way, being a LAZY-ASS KITTY, but she occasionally plays with it in an upright position:




After exerting herself for approximately two and a half minutes, she now takes a well-earned snooze to recover.




I finally got off my ass and started soemthing I'd been wanting to do - go through a magazine (last month's Vanity Fair for those keeping score) and draw all the hands. Well, I'm not drawing all the hands, but the three hours total of drawing (would be more except I watch TV while doing it and keep getting distracted by the Mythbusters and whoever else is on) have produced the proof that yes, as long as I'm looking at soemthing else and they're not attached to anything, I can usually draw hands.

The problem comes, of course, when I'm trying to figure out how they should go *and* have them the right size and shape for whoever they're supposed to be attached to.

Comments

[kutsuwamushi.livejournal.com]

DeviantArt needs less goth cam girls in its stock photo section and more HANDS. And feet. And heads at odd angles, instead of the usual "full view looking slightly downwards in angsty fashion".

[kutsuwamushi.livejournal.com]

Also, I want to flip your kitty over and jiggle her belly.

[apintrix.livejournal.com]

Do you know the three-plane method for positioning hands? I find it... somewhat helpful. (Hands are quite difficult. Particularly right hands (for a righty like me) as I cannot simply pose my own hand and then draw it!

...I guess I could rig a mirror. I need a pliant roommate, or something.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

YES.

Oh - yesterday I found this guy (http://justmeina.deviantart.com/), who's obviously done a lot of pose work for life drawing classes. (Not worksafe, obviously). They're primarily full-figure isntead of hands and heads, but they're actual life-drawing poses, not random "Now I shall pretend to be Vegeta" poses.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I do that all the time. She usually suffers it with good grace. XD

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Nope. Never even heard of it. :)

I can't even use a mirror - my hands are small and pudgy and apparently my thumbs are freakishly short or something. It's almost impossible for me to look a tmy hands and draw them as long, bony manga hands. I can go the other way if I need to - turn long bony hands into pudgy round ones - but I can't use my hands very well.

What finally got me doing this project was the thought that I'd be creating a hand library for myself. That and i got tired of not beign able to draw hands and having my characters all having freakish mutant things on the ends of their arms.

[kutsuwamushi.livejournal.com]

I'd be happy if I could find "I AM VEGETA" poses; at least that would be a change from what I usually see: row after row of overexposed, pouty faces in the exact same damn pose.

This guy is awesome. Thanks for giving me the link! I'm definitely going to pass it around to my artist-y type acquaintances.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I paged trhough a lot of stock artists yesterday looking for ones that said it was OK to use their poses to sell prints - I know that you can't technically copyright a pose, but I'd still rather look at people who say it's OK since I'm specifically going to be using them to do work to sell. At any rate, I found a club called Dragonball-Stock (http://dragonball-stock.deviantart.com/) that's ... people posing like they're in Dragonball Z. XD

The ok-to-use-for-commercial-work-off-DA people I found so far are here:

http://ahf-stock.deviantart.com/
http://anatomystock.deviantart.com/gallery/
http://cottoncandyispink.deviantart.com/
http://dheks.deviantart.com/
http://dontopen-youreyes.deviantart.com/
http://emostar-stock.deviantart.com/
http://fey-stock.deviantart.com/
http://gracies-stock.deviantart.com/
http://into-me.deviantart.com/
http://jademacalla.deviantart.com/
http://justmeina.deviantart.com/
http://ladyruthless-stock.deviantart.com/
http://lisajen-stock.deviantart.com/
http://lizzytishstock.deviantart.com/
http://ll-stock.deviantart.com/
http://lockstock.deviantart.com/journal/4653009/
http://ngodsend.deviantart.com/journal/5971507/
http://printable-stock.deviantart.com/
http://sevenstock.deviantart.com/
http://stladybird.deviantart.com/
http://veganvixen.deviantart.com/


No guarantees as to quality: I was looking for FREEEEEEEE over quality. XD

[tokyoghoststory.livejournal.com]

i should make stock pics, hrm

[telophase.livejournal.com]

If you made stock pics and gave me permission to use 'em to make prints to sell I would be all about that. XD I don't do photomanips, but on occasion I trace basic lines and that's always a gray area ethically. Unless someone says "Do what you will!" XD

[tokyoghoststory.livejournal.com]

haha i'd make stocks and srsly let people do whatever they wanted with them. there's no shame in my game.as long as someone needed pictures of a fatty girl with nice hips, i'm there.

i should ive it a shot. it'd give me something to do.

[tentopet.livejournal.com]

Heh, sometimes when I'm having a hard time drawing a hand connected to a body, I'll draw it off to the side until it looks good, then move/shrink/rotate it to fit back on that arm. Dunno if you sketch by hand (I guess most people do) but I don't! So this is why I use techniques such as these that would make people curse at me if they only knew how un-artistic it all is ;)

I have a moveable mirror attached to my desk, and use myself for hand and face refs. Of course, my hands are slightly retarded because I've got crazy thick skin, AND as a lefty who curves my hand around it's hard for me to draw a righty who's writing or something, but ah well, we all have our limitations.

[apintrix.livejournal.com]

OK-- in case it's helpful at all, here's the method (I learned this in an art class in high school. Woo.)

The basic structure of the hand is three planes/ thin rectangles: the main meaty part of the hand, the plane between the first and second knuckles of all the fingers, and the plane between the second and third knuckles. (You can fudge the last segment of finger; it mostly follows the third plane.) Basically, to get your hand at the right angle, you can pencil in your nice rectilinear planes in perspective and then get the hand position within that framework. It's sort of like drawing in squares-in-perspective first to show oddly positioned objects, like keys lying diagonally on tables... (which incidentally is a problem that gives me so much respect for the old Dutch masters).

It is not helpful for thumbs.

Me, I spent the last summer Olympics with a friend's TiVo freeze-framing the pole vaulters and hurdlers and drawing their positions. (Because that's going to be useful for reference... yeah.)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I usually sketch by hand, but my scanner was falling apart on my when I started Project Blue Rose, so I did that entirely digitally. And now I'm way too used to being able to scribble a rough, slap a layer on top and refine, slap another layer on top and refine 5 or 6 times until I have something I like (or at least can live with). XD

I've got a 3-foot tall skeleton on my desk, and when I remember to I use it for reference, but for some reason although it's less than 2 foot from me, I hardly ever remember that it's there. :/

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Cool, thanks. :D

I think this issue of Vanity Fair is going to fall apart by the time I'm done with it. XD

[kutsuwamushi.livejournal.com]

Hah. I'm never going to have to worry about "okay for commercial work". I'd show you my gallery so you could see what kind of an amateur I am, but there's practically nothing in it because I'm such an amateur that I never FINISH anything. XD

I think there needs to be some sort of community/webpage just for listing good pose sources on DevART.

[homasse.livejournal.com]

...if I ever seriously start drawing, I am so gonna have to look into doing shit digitially because OMG timesaver. After I get detail with faces down, trying to learn how to do all this comic-type stuff is next, because it just seems *cool*.

Although, given how much time I spend glued to my computer *now*, maaaaaaaaaaaaaybe that's not such a good idea. ^^;;;

[fourthage.livejournal.com]

Have you seen the hand study page at Elfwood?

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah. I'm a messy sketcher, and discovering that I could draw, scan it and reprint in blue, the refine on that, and do it all over again until the final drawing was done was amazing.

And now that I've done a ton of roughs and sketching on the computer itself - much less of a hassle than even scanning in. XD I think I may end up doing most of my sketching on the computer, even for the pencil pieces - I can print them out, then use the lightbox to transfer the lines of the sketch to the good paper, then shade from there.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Ah, no, I hadn't seen that. nifty! *bookmarks*

[lady-noremon.livejournal.com]

My cat got one of those things, and she just scoffs at it >_<

and you cat is FRICKING adorable!

and HANDS! sooo many! reminds me of that scene from Labyrinth XD