Say it with me...

IT'S CLOBBERIN TIME!!! Here's the ever-lovin' blue-eyed Thing, the Fantastic Four's cantankerous, yet endearing tank:

My year has so far been filled with plenty of travel (not bad) and illness (not good)--I'm feeling fine now (with no further travel on the horizon), but I'm still playing catch-up. So, tonight's post is a quick exercise in the rare (for me) traditional media. I sketched it in red and brown color pencil, colored it in marker, then went over the lines again with color pencil, and finally added some highlights with a white color pencil. Scanned it, managed to adjust it to match the original pretty closely, and here we are.

Any real understanding I have of color theory has been picked up while working in Photoshop, so it's a refreshing change of pace to apply what I know to traditional media. I think this piece needed more contrast to bring out the larger forms of the Thing's features, like his brow, nose, and cheek bones (cheek rocks?). Recently, I feel like I've been struggling with contrast... having trouble getting it right the first time, and making a lot of adjustments. My sense of color is a bit off too, again, something that I've been getting wrong on early tries and making many adjustments to.

My artistic senses might be dulled as a result of doing a lot of cheap blogs that don't require artistic brainpower, and also banking a lot of blogs ahead of time rather than working continuously. When it comes to drawing, taking moderate breaks can actually help me out--when I come back to it, I feel energized. I suspect coloring is something that I'm still drilling into my brain, and I need constant exposure to the act of coloring, or I start to regress.

Just thinking aloud here, carry on...