Illustration Friday - Myth

Here's another drawing that I'm working on for Illustration Friday, doing with one of the other weekly suggestions, Myth. Wow, did my mind go wild for this one. I was thinking of all sorts of mythological creatures and beings for this one . . . but not mermaids. I don't want to repeat myself with the same subject.
In order to level out my thoughts for this one, I considered what kind of mythological creatures that I've seen recently to get inspiration. For this I looked at what books I've read, what movies I've seen, what kind of art that I viewed recently. In January, I went to see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey with a few others and I kinda enjoyed it. I don't think I need to toot my own horn, but I thought the dwarves were awesome. So I thought to myself, dwarves have been in mythology since forever in Tolkien's  mythology and in Germanic mythology, so I thought that would be a good way to start it.
Click Here for Dwarf Article.
To begin, I started with a rough drawing of a head and sculpted out how it would look. Dwarves usually are very hardy, strong and live in mountains but short and have rather long lives. I drew the head to be somewhat old, but have strong characteristics like a strong chin and a round bald head. I later added in his nose, heavy eyebrows, flat lips, the old ears with big earlobes and baggy eyes to flesh out his face. Then came the beard, that's where I was having the most fun. Filling out all of the hairs on the chin face and how they would rearrange was very free-flowing, lust letting the strokes take shape. Lastly, I added some embellishments to his ear by adding an earring, bushy eyebrows and a few scars for decoration. When I scanned it, I changed it to grayscale since all of it was done via blue drawing pencil. Light blue doesn't really show that well when scanned in.

After doing the rough, I went to the next stage and started to clean up the original. Here I erased the chin and jawline to the dwarf and continued to flesh out the hairs on the body. When you see someone with a full beard, it hides his jawline with all of that hair, unless the hair is very fine. However, for this dwarf, he has a thick, long and almost bushy beard to stand out with. In the left hand corner, I tried to write 'dwarf' in Tolkien's dwarf language, but please excuse me Tolkien fans for my negligence for keeping up with his lore and proper dwarf language.

With the clean-up done, I went on to tracing him. I taped a page of tracing paper over him and started to drawing him out with ball-point pen. I always felt more comfortable doing ink drawing with ball-point pen since it doesn't cut into thin paper and I would like that I don't ruin the original drawing with a blot if ink. With that in mind, I added a few more embellishments to the dwarf, like wrinkles and moles to his skin. Seeing that he has a scar on his right eye, I made his right eye blind and white with the left one normal to give him a cold unusual look. Now my dwarf is done!

NOTE: Please leave a comment after reading this article. I appreciate any and all feedback on my artwork and any helpful tips from viewers. Spamming and trolling is forbidden.

Creative Fridays - Ocean

For those of you who don't know, I tend to follow Illustration Friday to help apply my creative edge to making some of my artwork. For those of you who don't know, Illustration Friday is a blog where people from all over the world design art that follows the 'Word of the Week'. The word for this week is 'Myth'.
To look up on Illustration Friday website, click the following link here.
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I sat down and thought about it for a moment on what I want to do with this design. When I was thinking about that ocean, I started thinking about ancient gods who had powers over the ocean. One of them was Poseidon, the ancient Olympian God of the Ocean. I wanted to keep him in the similar style as my Chibi Hermes pictures (that's what I've been calling them to myself), since I would like to continue a series of drawings of Greek Gods an Goddesses. Here, I drew Poseidon riding his seahorse chariot through the cresting waves. Since antiquity, Poseidon has always been portrayed with a trident, a tool used for fishing. I made Poseidon's hair and beard long and wavy to mimic long waves. I hope to make Zeus and Hades in the future, who are also depicted with long hair and beards, but they will have different styles to tell them apart.

After creating the rough drawing, I taped a page of tracing paper over the image to make a cleaned-up rough for scanning into Adobe Illustrator. Here, Poseidon is more structured and without all those pesky rough lines.

On a new layer, I traced out the picture with the pen tool. Some of the lines that I make the first time seem a bit off at first. I'll be adjusting them accordingly as I add the flat colours in the next stage.

I did some more line refining with the direct selection tool to get out some bad curves and kinks in the line work. With that done, I added in the flat base colours to the picture. These will eventually change when I get to making the highlights and shading on the next layer but this is a working process so eventually, things change throughout production. I want to create this picture with colours of the ocean and sea life to match with Poseidon's godly powers over the sea. I'll look up some different seahorse pictures to find a colour that'll go with them nicely and not mesh into the waves because of their similar colours.

On the new layer, I created the shading and highlights to the objects on the image. I changed the seahorses to an orange colouring so that they would make a good complimentary colour to the waves and help stand out more. Another change of colouring was to Poseidon's hair, which I made 5% darker to help the white highlights to show.

Finally, I used the layer below to create the background. I made a nice sky gradient in the background with a starburst pattern behind Poseidon, his godly glow shinning upon the cresting waves. All hail Poseidon, God of the Seas!

NOTE: Please leave a comment after reading this article. I appreciate any and all feedback on my artwork and any helpful tips from viewers. Spamming and trolling is forbidden.

Emotional Labour - In My Words

Behold! Another post in what seems like forever since visiting blogger! Still, I have no loyal followers at the moment so I'm not disappointing that many people; mostly myself for being neglectful of my blog. However, I think it's mostly due to the fact that I haven't that much to "blog" about to . . . anyone. Scary, isn't it?

But I digress . . . What is emotional labour? ((Just so you know, I'm Canadian and I spell labour with an 'u', so don't judge)) We all think labour is the same in our minds: simply put, it's work. Not all of us like to do work because, well . . . you either like it or don't, depending on what kind of work it is. Many of us don't like the same kind of work because of different interests, but what is the kind of work that links to all of us, despite different situations of labour found throughout the world? That would be emotional labour: the labour of love put into one's own work. Something that you put all of your effort into something that you love to make something out of it. It's what drives individuals to achieve what they wish from themselves, to be that which they want to be, to be genuine to themselves and their dreams. Emotional labour is what make artists to produce art, what makes writers write, what makes inventors invent.

I felt as though I've been lacking in that department of emotional labour for a long time . . . longer than I hope it would last, that I felt dead without. That I haven't the time to be me and pour my soul into things that I enjoy to do and want to do for a living.

I draw, I write, I create . . . but for a while it was never for me or for the sake of creating art, just for impressing others. For a while I felt as though I haven't been good enough to produce something that people not only like, but enjoy to look at no matter how many times they want. It's something that has been hindering me for a while. For some years, because of schooling, I had to hold off some of my written works because of other deadlines or for other reasons. There are things that I still want to learn, but there are other things that people force me to learn instead of letting me learn on my own. I want to break away from it all, but I get punished for lack of commitment.

Still, I want to put that emotional labour into work and play. I want to find out how to incorporate it so that I can feel that satisfaction of my creations, whether it be for work or for my sake. I want to be able to write again with the vigour that I had for my stories. ((I might not post written works up here in fear of someone trying to plagiarize my work. However, I'll be posting pictures and movies on here in the future)) I want to be able to enjoy drawing and creating again by pouring my essence into my work. I want to reach out to others and be able to share my ideas and make connections.
I want to be remembered . . . not as another name engraved into a tombstone, but as someone who "did something".

I tend to be active around such websites like deviantArt and YouTube. I like things that interest me, but my interests tend to grow from my curiosity of things that I don't know about or catch my interest. Surprisingly enough, I tend to go to Wikipedia on an almost daily basis for news and for some research materials onto such subjects of interest. If I like something, I tend to return to it in hopes of someone replying to me. I browse on certain severs collecting artwork for reference material or for inspiration. My deviantArt favourites is pretty massive at this point for a referral. Link to deviantArt Favourites I also follow this blog of one of my favourite teachers who is a constant spring of knowledge and advice on art and is who I inspire to model myself after. Link to blog Despite this, I also enjoy a good laugh now and then, which YouTube constantly provides. Through a friend, I came across the Swedish Youtube sensation PewDiePie, who records himself playing various of scary games. His reactions are very hilarious, but a warning to people who don't like scary games or videos to be aware. I don't want anyone reading this to be responsible for getting nightmares from watching his stuff. He does tend to play funny stuff if he gets tired of playing too many horror games. Link to PewDiePie's Youtube page Don't worry though, he speaks English throughout all of his videos. Rarely do you hear him speak Swedish, but it sometimes slips out.
There's a written podcast about emotional labour on the following website if anyone wants to know more about it. Link to webpage