Weekly Sketch: Sam Draper

Sam Draper. Ex-Imperial Shadow Commander. Gone AWOL, year 430. Wanted by the Imperial Navy for suspicion of theft, fraud, and piracy. Considered untrustworthy and potentially dangerous. [Edit: If they only knew.] Bounty: 1,200 Jons.


I liked this sketch better before I colored it. The green in particular was a mistake, I think. Oh well. How else am I gonna learn, right?

Once again, you are all witnesses of shattered misconceptions. Last week, I said I wasn't sure about using references for faces. My reasoning was, if I was going to draw somebody from my imagination, I didn't want that somebody to look like any existing person.

But you know what? I'm not that good an artist. It takes me a long, long time to get a Specific Person's face looking just like that Person. However, it takes far less time to draw a face that looks only kinda like them.

Case in point: Whose face is/was this? If you get it right, I'll draw whatever you want. (Note: If you say, "It's Sam's face!" you win my appreciation, but not the prize.)

Oh, also, I'm thinking this feature (if you'll let me call it that) needs a name. Something like Weekly Sketch or Sketch-o-rama, but not quite as lame. Any ideas?

Also also: super secret bonus sketch, hidden behind sloppy Photoshop editing in the upper-left hand corner above Sam's head. I was trying to see if I could still draw a certain favorite cartoon character after a decade of not having done so. Answer: mostly.

Meet Suriya

Suriya lives with her aunt in the mountains of Northern Thailand. She was born with the ability to control fire. Every so often, the local villagers find out about her powers. When this happens, Suriya and her aunt become the center of unwanted -- often harmful -- attention, and they have to find a new place to live. Even so, Suriya persists in practicing her craft.


I'm really happy with this one. It doesn't look as amazing as Zhang Ziyi, but it's something new. Nobody's ever seen this girl before, and now you have.

One of the problems I'd been having with drawing from my imagination is I'd just do it too fast. I mean, it took me hours to draw Tosh and Lutiya, but I'd spend like 10 minutes on Fitch. What's that about?

This is also the first time I've used reference pictures (for the pose and the dress). I don't know why I didn't use them before. Did I think they were cheating? Probably. I've got a lot of misconceptions about artists that need to die, I think.

That said, I'm still sketchy about using reference pictures for faces. Maybe that's what I should try next then...

Fighting Monks

This week's sketch is actually 3 weeks' worth, one for each character. I'm getting better at inking, which is to say I'm enjoying it more. The hard part is inking lightly. Things like lips, face shadows, and shaved heads came out more prominent than I'd like, but still better than previous attempts.


Faces are hard, but I'm learning why. Humans are so darn good at face perception. So if a nose is slightly large, or ears are slightly off, everyone can tell it doesn't look right, even if they can't say why.

Conversely, things like hands, feet, shirts, and swords are much easier. People can still tell if they're wrong (e.g. if a hand is too big, or a sword isn't straight), but there's a lot more leeway. After repeatedly practicing faces, it's a relief to discover the body parts I've been neglecting don't require as much practice to get to the same level.

Also, I think I'm starting to like drawing hair. This is a big deal.

I might try drawing from imagination again next week. We'll see. Copying pictures/life is fun and all, especially when it comes out good, but it's not what I want to do. I want to be able to draw whatever, whenever, you know?

I think it's the same desire that causes me to write. I've got worlds in my head, and I want to show them to somebody. I want to show them to you.

Geek Still Life

Early sketch this week because Saturday is Talk Like a Pirate Day and, as the self-proclaimed liaison between the air pirates' world to ours, Friday has something different.

After I drew the fan art, I wanted to draw something that wasn't a face. I also wanted to try something with complicated shading, as that was the most difficult thing for me to ink properly. So I went and got my dice bag.

Of course it wasn't enough for me to draw just the dice bag. I had to find something that went along with it. Unfortunately, I've given away my D&D books, so instead I found the next best thing.

Fan Art

I'm sure most of you haven't noticed but (a) I'm giving you more than one sketch a week and (b) I haven't been uploading "What I Drew This Week." Part of that is I'm still evaluating this whole show-people-my-sketches thing, so I'm just trying things out. The other part is that I haven't finished a sketch for a few weeks, so in lieu of showing the current one, I'm sort of catching you up on what I've been drawing since I decided to draw (>=) once a week.

The first is a piece of fan art I drew for Natalie Whipple's Relax, I'm a Ninja (for which she now has an agent, if you hadn't heard). Readers of Natalie's blog may remember a couple months ago when she found the perfect actor for Tosh. Well that's who I drew. I love this sketch. Every time I look at it I go, "Woah. I drew that?"




The second piece of fan art is for my daughter, Lutiya. If you don't already know, my wife and I live in Thailand where we take in children who have nowhere to go. Lutiya is one such child and has been with us for 2.5 years now. (I recently wrote about Lutiya on our other blog, if you're interested).

This was my first try at inking. Personally, I like the pencil a lot better, but of course I have more practice with pencil. I'm going to keep inking things for a while and see what I learn. If nothing else, the inked sketches last longer.

A Pirate, an Author, and a Baby

One sketchbook page today, three pictures. Also a demonstration of the difference between what I draw from life (or, in this case, pictures of life) and what comes out of my head.

I'll save the best for last, cuz I'm like that. So first up is Fitch Mickells, an air pirate whose only loyalty is saving his own keel. It's almost a shame he hooked up with Sam Draper when he did.

Drawing from my imagination like this is fun, but hurts my fear of failure. I never know where everything is supposed to go. So I figure if I draw like a thousand real faces, I'll be better at drawing made-up ones. With that, here's one of my very favorite authors:


And one of my very favorite sons:

Thinking Through Airships

I've been debating increasing my blog output here to 3x a week. I'll try it for a bit, see how it goes. No guarantees.

I've also been thinking about posting my sketches. As I've said before, I'm trying to draw once a week, but I'm more motivated if I know people are going to see what I draw.

That said, these sketches are pretty old, but I wanted to show you the evolution of the Air Pirates' airships a little. This first one is how I envisioned them looooooooonnnnggg ago - about 4 years. Back then airships were called cloud busters or dusters (in my story). Their airbags were called squits. Thankfully, very little of that slang survived.


I never liked that version, and anyway, airbags are not very conducive for ship-to-ship battles - one bullet through the bag and it's done. Below is another sketchbook page from a couple years ago. It's me trying to figure out what I wanted the airships to look like (I don't know who the girl is).


The ship at the bottom is Shadow's End, a 'dropout' belonging to a pirate named Kiro. That design survived and makes its first appearance in chapter four, "Hagai's Death". (You may also recall Natalie used the same design in her drawing of Sam).

Don't expect all my sketches to be about what I write. I'm rarely happy with the drawings that come out of my imagination, preferring to draw from life instead. But who knows? The more I do this, the better I get. Right?

Writers' Journey

I'm trying to draw something every week, so when someone mentioned a map for Natalie's hiking analogy, my muse said, "Oh!"

The hiking analogy is like this: writing is a hard, long trek up a mountain. It's beautiful, but sometimes you wonder if you'll ever get to the end. And a lot of us are trapped in the Forest of Lost Minds, where we begin to wonder why we started this journey in the first place. But there is a way out and a point at which everything is clear; you can see how far you've come, how not ready you were before, how close you are to getting "there" - Lookout Point.

That's the short version. Read Natalie's post for a better explanation. I added some things too:


On a related note, does anybody know anything about oil pastels? This is my first time using them, and the effect was only slightly better than if I'd used crayons. I like the mountains, but that's about it. Any tips?

I Draw Like I Write

I've been drawing again, and every time I do it, I realize more and more how much my drawing process is like my writing process.

I drew as a kid, but stopped when the things I drew didn't come out like they were in my head. I would doodle occasionally, but no more. So I guess that's the first similarity: I quit because I thought I wasn't any good.

Something inside me still wanted to do it, though, because I bought Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain a few years ago and worked through it. I think it was that book, more than anything, that taught me one of the most important lessons of my life: I learned I can be good at anything I want to be good at, if I'm willing to work hard.

Okay, so the first thing I do when I decide to draw is I don't. I write down "draw" on my todo list and put it off for a few days. Then when I'm done with that, I open my sketchbook and stare at a blank page for about 5-10 minutes. Why is this important? It's not. It's bad, actually. But I do it every time because: I'm afraid of drawing (or writing) something wrong.

When I finally get started, I plan. When you write, it's called outlining. When you draw, it's called blocking. Not everyone does it, but I do because I want to know that everything is in the right place before I start drawing "for real." So in both: I plan until I'm confident the end product has no major flaws.

Lastly, when I write, I'm constantly going back over each scene and chapter to clean it up. This is sometimes wasted effort when things get cut or rewritten, but I do it anyway. Apparently I do this when I draw too. I'll start with maybe the left eye, and I won't move on to another part until I've got all the detail - not perfect - but good. See: I want the part I'm working on to be "done" before I move on.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that I treat both kinds of art the same way. It's me, you know? I am surprised at how much fear plays into both processes. I guess I need to work on that.