I'm just messing around today. It's good to do that every now and then.
I've started doing my Boo at the Zoo tour this week. As of Thursday, I'm up at the Zoo four days a week, drawing kiddies (and some adults) in costumes, often in the cold. It's a fun time, if a bit draining. The Thursday and Friday drive out to the Zoo through Cleveland rush hour traffic is the worst. It doubles my time to get out there, and cuts my normal workday short.
But the event itself, and especially the people, are great. This is my fifth year doing Boo, and I don't see it stopping anytime soon.
After the movie last night, I met up with Brothers #3 and 4 in the Series, Robert and Michael, and some of Michael's friends to see the re-release of the 3-D version of Nightmare Before Christmas. I love the movie, although I actually haven't seen it as many times as you might think. The art and design draws me to it more than anything else. Which isn't to short change the story or the music, which are also very good. It's just, well, the design is what causes me to get things like my Nightmare baseball jersey. (Sah-weet!)
It was a nice time, and always cool to get time to spend time with the bros.
All of that is to set up today's drawing. You might not think this makes sense, but I don't think I do enough drawing sometimes. I'm doing work stuff, and Love and Capes, but you need time to experiment and hone your craft. I'm usually so booked with paying work that I don't always have time to play. And it's the play that keeps you fresh and trying new things.
So I decided to play in Adobe Photoshop today. For those of you not in the field, Photoshop is the Swiss Army Knife of image creation. You can do the same thing six different ways, and like the myth of the human brain, I think people only use ten percent of what it's capable of. I wanted to do more, so I started playing around with the brushes and wanted to draw something completely digitally. So I drew Sally from Nightmare.
There's lots of little experiments in here, from the rendering to the brush strokes used, to just being able to draw without any scanned pencil sketches. It's also done mostly from memory, which is why everyone's favorite rag doll is probably wildly off model.
I think it's a nice attempt, and I found some new tools that I can put in my Box o'Tools. Now to get better with them...