Daily Doodle

When I think “Robot Dragons,” I picture the different type of dragons I know of. There’s the stereotypical medieval dragon, the asian serpentine kind you see in parades and art a lot, and then I tried combining elements that are dragon-ish like bat wings and a cobra’s head. At this point it gets more cyborg than robot, unless that head is mechanical. It’s an interesting idea engineering a creature. I saw a special where they discussed devolving birds into dinosaurs versus crossbreeding other animals. Then I think of the times in film and literature where other things are viewed as dragons like construction equipment while demolishing a home. Like anything else, the design comes down to the story behind the dragon. Who made it? Is it advanced or primitive? Aggressive or friendly? These are things to consider when brainstorming.

Today’s concept was “Animals in Power Suits.” It’s no Brute Force, but what is? I probably should have tried a sea creature to continue varying up the designs. Of course, if it requires a tank to survive then that complicates fitting it into a suit to control in the first place. That’d just be another design element to work around.

Today’s concept was “Unlikely Mech Pilot,” so I figured the family dog would make an amusing choice.

Today’s doodle is based on the concept Victorian Wrestling Squad. It came from a brainstorming session where I tried meshing opposing ideas. About the only other thing I would have done with this one would be to try a luchador or two. I could probably spend forever just coming up with weird facial hair designs for this.

This week I’ve put together a list of concepts to work on. The goal was originally ideation and seeing how many versions I could put together for each one. However it seems I’m a little more interested in rendering full drawings. Today’s concept was kaiju monsters. I hit a bit of a stumbling block like I did with my gremlins sketches in that, when I base a creature on something, I tend to want to draw that thing instead of scribbling around and being inventive with it. Still, just rendering larger versions of real things yields some pretty monstrous results.

We close up this week’s collection of doodles with one of my favorite subjects – women. I’m a little compulsive in that I try to draw one male figure for every female, one chubby for every petite, so letting myself just draw ladies makes me feel kinda guilty. But I’m not sorry.

For today’s doodle I wanted to sketch some more shapely figures. This proved problematic when searching. I’m a hefty dude myself, so when trying “plus sized” and “full figured” I was surprised at what google thinks that means. I tried a bunch of terms, most of which led to porno. This was unhelpful for my purposes since it’s mostly people showing off the business with little merit otherwise. When I saw bad poses like that I just heard an angry stripper’s voice yelling, “Look at it!”

Today’s study is of yoga arm stands. The human body can move in some interesting ways and I try to collect reference pictures of it. Drawing poses like this and keeping proportions realistic is a nice way to flex the artistic muscles. Drawing exercise for exercise, or something like that.

More pose tool studies, this time with some athletic stretching and flexing.

I think it’s important when sketching to practice both male and female models. I also like to get variety is body type, age, ethnicity, basically give me lots of different stuff to draw. Sometimes I’m not sure what’s going on in terms of placement of torso or limbs when I start but that’s what the sketching stage is for – figuring things out. It’s really nice working digitally when you’re drawing a leg too long and can scale the whole body down or move it over. Also, I have no qualms about drawing nipples or genitalia, I’m just ignoring them because they’re not relevant to what I’m trying to get out of these studies. Maybe if they’re longer drawings with shading, I don’t know. The whole NSFW issue is never relevant to me when browsing but I imagine people viewing my site care about it. Not that I’m drawing anything particularly explicit but some people are up tight about even artistic nudity.