Christmas Break Fun.

Hope everyone had a good break. I had a lot of fun with my family and friends in New Mexico. I also had a little time to fool around with drawing. I really wanted to do an epic pirate and dinosaur battle so I did this drawing. 

I was medium happy with the way it turned out. I did a bunch of test sketches first, but the pirate's head still looks weird. Oh well. I scanned it at my mom's house and worked on coloring it in as we watched movies and stuff. I can't think of any way I would have rather spent my break. I had the whole thing practically colored when Photoshop crashed. 

I had not 'saved' recently...

So I lost it all. It was sad. Just another reminder that I need to remember to save every two seconds. Anyway I took a another stab at coloring but eventually got bored with it. This is where I stopped. Once again...medium happy with it.  Oh well...just practice.

A day or two later I stumbled upon this blog and fell in love with this lady's style. So I tried to do a character in her style. I did this one completely in photoshop. No sketching first. I don't really know what he is. I was thinking a cowboy at first, but now he kinda looks like an evil little warlock with invisible pistols.  Whatever...just practice... it was fun.

Also during the break, my friend Abel talked me into posting our travel adventure website so we could use our daring antics from our year abroad to impress potential employers. Here it is again. If you haven't seen it yet, it might be worth checking out.

http://www.adventuresofmikeandabel.com/

Above is a screen-shot from when we gave the home page of our website a Sin City theme. Ahhh, I remember it well. We were in Rijeka, Croatia crashing with a cool Croatian dude who got me a pirated version of Photoshop for my laptop so I could make cool stuff like this for our website. Those were the days...

Ok, anyway... back to my break. I was at a Christmas party with some friends where I caught up with an old buddy who now works for Apple where he helped develop the iPad. I won an iPad a while ago for a children's book that I illustrated and am just now getting the hang of it. I had a lot of questions for him about apps and such. He suggested I get the Sketchbook Pro app and try that out.

While I was in the airport waiting for my flight home, I downloaded it for three bucks. As I had just seen the movie Tangled with my mom, I thought I would try my hand at drawing my own sexy blonde princess.

I did this on my iPad while on the airplane home. It was very fun and the program is very intuitive.  Ignore the big scuff marks they were mistakes that I accidentally saved. Seeing as how this was just practice I didn't bother trying to fix them.

See you all next time.

-Mike