Get well soon, little buddy

On Friday afternoon, Rippy 336 (my laptop) slipped into a coma for reasons unknown. There are signs of brain activity, but he can't get past spinning his disk drive on startup before settling into a gentle (but completely unresponsive) hum. I'm taking him in for professional help sometime today, with the hope that he'll get better in time for me to write a couple Very Important Papers for school.

::WARNING:: sketchdump approaching!

I realized that I have been excessively lazy with my sketchbooking for the past year or so... thus I am trying to fix it.

From our zoo trip. Armadillos are fun to draw - the three-banded ones are like the illegitimate children of a potato bug and an anteater.

Last week it was actually warm enough for me to sit outside and try to draw. Clearly it put me in a good enough mood to make commentary on everything.

A combining of my favorite two pages from last Wednesday's gesture session. I kept all the drawings on those two pages, so some of them are blah.

Here's an example of me tanking. One of the top guys at Sony came to talk, and I drew him... should have been easy enough, but for some reason I couldn't get him to look like himself. The one on the bottom left is the closest I got. >:P

Managed to get Carson OK, though. Sort of.

So my continuing goal to to draw more peoples' faces, and get them right more often.

Big Cat, Little Bird

It's a match made in the pre-existence.

I want blood like this.

This bizarre but kinda cool story popped into my head last week, and this picture was what came of it.

So there's some kinda monster/creature that is exploring a cave, and for whatever reason he loses his torch. It's pitch black and feeling around in the dark only gets him more and more lost. The thing is about his species - their blood is phosphorescent, bioluminescent, or whatever the heck I really mean. Basically, it glows like the goop in glowsticks.

The creature realizes that if he keeps blundering around in the dark, he's never going to get out and he'll die - starvation or falling into some terrible abyss, one of the two. So after some hesitation, he breaks off a stalactite and uses the jagged edge to open a gash. The problem is, there needs to be a decent amount of blood on the surface before he can really see anything in the glow. And as the blood congeals and dries, it dulls to black.

So what we have here is a race against time - he needs to be bleeding severely to see, and he needs to see to get out... but too much blood lost and he'll weaken and die anyway. The way it ended in my head, he collapses just as he sees light and is pondering the horrible irony when then light turns out to be the torch of a search party member. And when he's old, he shows his scars to kid-creatures as a lesson not to go cave exploring unprepared and alone.

Y'know, those Disney artists weren't kidding when they talked about the value of seeing things firsthand as opposed to drawing from photos or movies. Life drawing ftw.

Y'know, the prograhgm...

One day I will learn to caricature. And draw shoes. But this amused me anyway.