Robert Knepper

Haven't posted anything in a while, but that's because I haven't worked on a drawing since Emma Stone - except for the Robert Knepper one.
I said I was gonna do one for him to sign at the London Film and Comic Con on July 9th. And I managed to finish a drawing of him by then, AND I gave him a copy of it...
This is the one which he signed:

"To Connie - Beautiful! Thank you! Robert Knepper"

How awesome is that? :D
After I shook his hand, I told him that one of the prints I had with me was for him, and that it was a drawing I had made for him, and that the other one I wanted signed. He picked it up, looked at it, and asked if all of it was drawn, pointing at the hair and all of it. I said yeah, and that it was done in photoshop, all from scratch - not a photomanipulation or anything. Interesting, he said. Then asked me about something that had to do with Diana in the Royal wedding, that someone had made it look like she was there, by photomanipulation or something, so it was like it was a ghost there, like "you're not suppose to be there". "This is what this feels" he said and gestured to the drawing. I laughed and  said "so basically, you're freaked out by it?" and he said "no no, it's very interesting." Must be a word he fancies :P

As he was writing, he asked if it was a hobby or a career, and I said it's just a hobby for now. He again said it was very interesting. And after finishing signing it, he said I should make it a career. :D I shook his hand again, thanking him, saying it was SO nice to meet him. He said thanks back and nice to meet you too, and I left, leaving him to the long line of waiting fans.

A moment, I hope I'll never forget.

What a sweet, fantastic man he is! He is the -complete- opposite of the roles he plays in Prison Break and Heroes, and... all those other bad-guy roles he's doing - which makes me respect and admire him SO much more , cause that just proves how wonderful an actor he really is.

I hope that someday I can meet him again, and then maybe I'll have an even better drawing ready for him. Hahaha!

Anyways. Surreal. So awesome. And hopefully unforgettable. Got a photograph with him as well:

:D

Ok, so, now over to the drawing.

Took me about 6 hours to finish the whole thing. Did it in black and white as you can see - not risking anything since it was gonna be signed by the man himself. Hehe.

Sketch up. Took about..30-45 min I think

Just filling in some of the shade and marking the eyes a bit. 1 hour + in.

 Marking the nose, putting in some of the texture in the beard. More shade around the eyes.
About 2 hours in.



















More texture. More work on the eyes.
About 2,5 hours in.

More shading and texture.
About 3 hours in.


















Started working on the hair and the ear.
About 3,5 hours in.

More shading and more detail, especially on the ear and the face.
About 4 hours in.

Finished the shirt and added some of the background to see how it goes with the rest.
About 5 hours in.

  

Done. Blurred out the background a bit, added more shade to the face. Though it still looks a lot lighter than the original photo, but it doesn't need to be THAT dark :P
All in all, like I said - about 6 hours, and I'm pretty satisfied with the result. I am NOT satisfied with the wrinkles by his left eye though, I am struggling -so- much with that.. but, oh well. Practice makes (almost) perfect, so, I'll just keep practicing. :P

I am so much more satisfied with the printed copy with his autograph and everything on though. Looks -so- much better with that on it. And I hope that he did bring his copy with him and that maybe he took another look at it after the convention as well. Hehehe. He seemed to appreciate it, and that's what I'm gonna keep thinking - that he liked it.
:)
This will definitely become a hobby though - drawing celebrities and try and get them to sign the drawings.
What an awesome collection that would make! Hehe.

Anyways. Hope ya'll liked it, and feel free to comment :)

-Connie

Emma Stone

Have you seen Easy A? If you haven't - you should. That girl cracks me up, so funny. Without her, the movie would be nothing. Hehe. She's in Zombieland as well, and I'm guessing most of you've seen that one. Of course, she's awesome in the other movies she's in as well :)
Anywho. I had to draw her, since I'm suuuch a big fan. Hehe.

Yepp, back to Black&White again. What I'm most comfortable with. I won't give up on colors though, I just wanted to do another b&w one.
So... Photoshop again of course. Don't think I'll ever go back to Gimp when it comes to drawings.. I'm in love with photoshop, and its awesome brushes.
Took me about 6 hours, and I think... about 4 of those I spent on the hair alone... I'm not sure, but the hair was.. yeah, most of the work on this one. It was... a pain, BUT I had fun with it. Fun pain. Haha!
No, really, it was really hard to do - doing long hair is so much harder than short. Doing those long strokes without making them look like ¤%&/(€$£@ is way difficult.
The rest wasn't that hard compared to the hair, but of course, that's not perfect either. But I'm getting better :)
So now for the progress pictures. ;)

Sketch. Not sure how long it took me.. 20-30 min maybe.
Haha, my sketches are getting better as well. You can sort of tell it's her in this one. You couldn't really tell who it was on my earlier sketches... :P

Starting with the eye after filling in a little of the grey here and there.
45 min in.

Other eye, a bit of the nose and the lips, and a bit more shade put in.
1,5 hours in.

And so I decided to start on what I knew would take me the longest.
Just got in part of the base... stuff.. haha. Where most of the shadings were in the hair, and how it moved.
2 hours in.

Making the brush smaller, I started putting in more of the  the fine strands of hair.
2,5 hours in.

More shading. And then I took a break from it for a few days.
2 h 45 min in.

Starting to look right. Gotten in most of the highlighting, shades and the finer strands of hair. Also blurring it on the right side a little.
Added a bit of the background on the left side to see the contrast between that and the hair there.
4 hours in.

More or less done. just a few more highlights and shadings. And fixing the background and yeah, a few final touches. And of course my signature. hehe.
About 5,5 hours in here. What's mentioned about I guess took 20-30 min. I wasn't paying attention much on this one..




And the result you've already seen, on the top of this page.
It was fun to work on, and I enjoyed working on a black and white one. What a pain it would be to do a color one. Haha.
I hope I'll be motivated to work on a Robert Knepper drawing next, cause I only have about 3 or 4 weeks to finish it so he can sign it.. hehe. *fingers crossed it'll turn out good enough*
Anyways. Hope you liked this one.
Please comment :)
-CW-

Captain Jack Sparrow

Finally. After 8 or 9 hours, I finished it. I loved and hated working on this one, and how, I'm just glad I'm done! Haha.

Click on the picture for bigger view.
So, it's not my best work so far (that would be Dean and Sam Winchester), and I know, that that is because of the COLORS. I'm  no good with it, but I AM getting better at it. It is by far my best colored drawing so far, so I should be more satisfied with it than I am right now. I worked hard on it, BUT I could've worked harder... there are a lot of details I could've done better, and texture here and there and.. especially the hair on the left side. But I AM satisfied with the dreads on the right side. hehe.

Anyways - I'm gonna show ya'll the so-far..progress..pictures for this one. I've got LOADS :P
Started out with a sketch of course.

Actually took me 45 minutes to do the sketch alone... the drawing was huge, and I tried to make it as accurate as I could, using a grid.

Then I just added like, the base coat of the colors, so I would know better where to go from. Or something.. lol. 1 hour in here.

Then adding the details on the eyes. I always start with the eyes first. Always have, and probably always will. I often go back and work more on them as I work on the rest. It's best to get some distance from some of the parts of the drawing so that I don't draw myself "blind" on it. :P

Then I started working on the facial hair, which I thought I would -hate-, but actually, it was a lot of fun! Surprised me :)

about 2,5 hours in here





Then.. after finishing most of the facial hair part, getting all naive -thinking the rest of the hair would be super fun after that ( I was WRONG) - I started working on the hair on the left side.
I thought that since the braids in the beard was fun to draw, then the braids in the other hair would be even more fun.
Nope.
It was hell.
Too many colors. Anyways. 3,5 hours in.

Still working on the left side. This was when I started not liking it so much, and I was pretty sure I would hate doing the dreads on the right side.
(4 hours in)

Trying to add some more "basic" colors and shapes to the rest of the hair. And more detail on the.... decorations on his bandana thingy and in his hair.
5 hours in.

Who would've thought??
The dreads were SO much fun to do!!
I didn't think I'd enjoy it as much as I did, and I certainly didn't think they'd turn out as good as they did, that's for sure. Might be the best part of the whole drawing. HAHA.
All I did was use a high opacity and only 1px on the brush and just doodled around like a kid would on a large piece of paper, only I did it more.. eh.. controlled and real.. small.. :P 5,5 hours.

.Added more shading and stuff to he hair to make it look better on the one about this one (Something screwed up my blog entry, dunno what, can't write next to the picture above this one)

Then I added some detail to the bandana, which was... not as bad as I thought it would be, but still pretty hard.
And of course far from perfect lol.
7 hours in

 Then, final one.
I see now that there are some parts of it that I forgot to... fix. Haha, But I DON'T CARE right now, cause right now.. I can't wait to start another black and white drawing. Haha :P
This is probably as good as I can get it right now. If I had chosen to work on it even more, I'd probably just make it look worse. :P Cause that's typical me :P

Phew!

So, I hope you all liked this one. I'm happy with myself, and even more happy that I get to start a new drawing now :P

Please leave a comment, and feel free to suggest who I should draw later on :)

Cheer out (Hahaha! Only a few will get that one..:P)

-CW-

Where does patience come from...??

So, I was thinking that maybe I shouldn't post another... post, till I finished the drawing I'm currently working on - but.. as it's taking so damn LONG to finish it (!!) - I guess I'll just post some of my old drawings (again) on here, so that I don't end up giving up on this blog-thingie before it's even started.
So far I've been working on this drawings for... 6,5  hours or something. Maybe more. Not sure. And... there's too much left. I reckon it'll take me another 3 hours (at least) to finish it. Reason: It's just TOO DAMN HARD TO DRAW! I don't know what I was THINKING! And of course, I'm doing it in color. I'm brilliant.

Yeah, so.. I'm trying to stay patient. There are SO many other portraits I wanna do!! I've got this looong list on my post-it-note-thingy on my desktop,most of them are celebrities of course, and some of them, are requests from friends, and, I just wanna get started on them! Not sit around working on hair and the details on a bandanathingy for hours and hours... But oh well, if I just stay patient, I know it'll turn out to be my best colored drawing so far, so.. Yeah. Hanging in there. Dunno how some people do it... colors... *cursing*

Alrighty, now... what drawings should I post... How aboooout, some of my other black and white drawings. Hah, black and white <3 :P *singing michael jackson's song*

I'll start out with a drawing I did of my fiancè, Luke, all bloody after a wrestling match... years ago. It was pretty fun to work with, my first proper drawing with photoshop, and I -really- enjoyed playing around with some of the texture brushes.

Hehe. So, I got his face all wrong. It's too... round. Makes him look like a little kid. This, of course, was before I started using grids. But other than the shape of his face being wrong, i was pretty satisfied with it. And he used it as his facebook profile picture for quite some time, and that made me more satisfied with it :P
Took me about 3-4 hours.

Alright sooooo.... My second proper photoshop drawing was Orlando Bloom (Will Turner in Pirates of the Caribbean)

 

Which I was very satisfied with after I finished it. Hehe. Again - No grid. Wonder how it'd look like if I used that.... Took about 3-4 hours as well (What??? :P)
Then, Keira Knightly (Elisabeth Swann from the same movie)

Turned out alright I think. Took about 4 hours (again - WHAT? I thought I didn't have the patience to work on a drawing for that long before...)
Ok so, yeah, Pirates of the Caribbean. I was on a roll, I though, and I was planning on doing Johnny Depp - CAPTAIN Jack Sparrow as well, but never ended up doing it...
But then - dun dun duuuuuun - I saw the 4th movie last thursday - (spoiler alert. spoiler alert! Nah, not that anyone's reading this blog anyways. hah :P) and I started working on a drawing of him, finally. But of course, this is the drawing I still haven't finished... cause of his damn hair.... and believe it or not - the dreads - was NOT the hard part! That was actually easy and a lot of fun to draw. But it's the braids and the wavy part of his hair, and his bandana thingy that's what's taking me so long. Plus - I dunno what to do with the drawing, so dreading that part.. Lol.. dread..ing... (Lame, I know)

Ok, so, ending this blog now.
I'll post Captain Jack Sparrow as soon as I finish him.

Please comment, cause... I dunno if I'm writing a personal diary here or if people are actually reading (or just looking at it is fine even), and if I should keep going on with this blog stuff. :P

-CW-

Bruce Willis

My latest drawing - of the awesome actor: Bruce Willis.

I've been wanting to do a drawing of him for a while now, and as I was browsing through the images thing on google, I found this one, and I just -had- to draw it. Only took me about 2,5 hours, but I'm pretty sure it'd take an hour or two longer if he wasn't wearing sunglasses and I had to do the part that's hardest to do in a portrait: his eyes.
I WILL do another portrait of him though, without sunglasses on. Hehe.

It was so much fun drawing this one. Not only because it was done so quickly but.. It was fun playing around with the texture, the shading and the lighting. And the glasses! Oh MY that was fun! :P I'll definitely do more sunglasses-portraits. Haha.

Usually when I draw, I save several "so-far" pictures of my progress, first with the sketch, then what I've done an hour later, so on and so on. But since I didn't spend much time on this one, i only saved ONE so-far-picture.. which was this one:

I'd only been working on it for... about 30 min I think, when I saved this one.
Oh well, in later blogs, I'll show more "progress-so-far" pictures I guess, to get more out of the post.

What was funny about this one.. was that as I was drawing the nose - I realized how HUGE the right nostril looks! Hahaha. But it IS like that in the original picture as well, and I didn't know how else I should do it, as I usually draw exactly what I see. Shade can make things look funny.. :P

Now I'm gonna start working on my next portrait, which is gonna take A LOT longer than this one. I'm sure it'll take 5-10 hours to finish it - so I'm gonna go fetch myself some patience and get started.

Hope you liked this one, and please comment :)

-C-

When colors aren't so impossible..

So, maybe portraits isn't the easiest thing for me to draw, but there are some things that simply look better with colors. Like my Assassin's Creed drawing, which I did in gimp:

This one I started drawing in the end of July 2010, then I just.. put it away for a while. And I didn't finish it till the beginning of February. So - it's possible to take a break from a drawing for...quite some time.
I'm glad I decided to finish it though: I'm not sure how many hours I spent on it all together, but I reckon it was somewhere between 5-8 hours. I -really- don't remember. Hehe.
I'm still happy with it looking back at it today, and I will definitely do more Assassin's Creed drawings later on. I'm sure I'll be -very- motivated to do some drawings from that game once I get "Brotherhood" at some point this summer :) Awesome games... awesome games.. :P

Another colored drawing that I'm quite satisfied with, is one of my cat Swiffer, who died in May last year... I'm still sad about it, a year later, and I know I will be for a very long time. I truly loved that cat, and I will always always remember him. He died far too soon - he got hit by a car. And he was only about... 3 or 4 years old I think. What a wonderful and funny cat he was. He could sleep in the weirdest positions, and still be comfortable, and he had such a charming (yes, charming) personality.
So, I drew this, from a picture my mom took a few years ago:

Took me about 3 hours to finish this one, and I'm happy with the result. That's Swiffer in a nutshell (well not really, it's Swiffer on top of my mom's books. lol). One of his awkward positions.. on top of an awkward place. Hehe :) this one I did in the end of January, and again: in gimp.

Another colored one I did, one of my first digital drawings actually, is of some Sakura flowers - from a picture I took when I lived in Japan (god how I miss that place!)

As you can see, the date was June 6th 2010. So yeah, one of my first. And I think it looks sort of cute. Hehe. Buuuut, I think I'm gonna stick with taking photographs of flowers.
1: It's much easier
2: It looks better
3: I can always do a photomanipulation of the photo's, which I will show you a few examples of in a later post :)

So while I'm at it here, I'll just put in two drawings I did out of my own head back in December. I was inspired by an artist on DeviantArt who always draws cats, with bubble around them, so I drew this one:

And well, it's just some 20 minute doodle I did. I like blue lights, so I put a few spots on to a black background just to goof around, and I put a cat's head in there, and my pretty new signature on the bottom. I'm glad I started doing that sign,cause writing my full name never looked that good (not complaining about my name - just my handwriting lol), so writing my initials looked way better! So I'm sticking with that one, as you can see in all my  new drawings.
The other 20-minute-cat-drawing-doodle I did, is of Swiffer again, actually:

I'm imagining this is him in heaven, playing around with some... light..ball.. But of course, I hope heaven for him is WAY more fun than that, cause that just looks... boring! Nothing but a blue light in the background and a little lightball - he'd get bored with that ball within 30 seconds, I promise you! haha.
Sigh. Nah, I'm sure that if there is a cat heaven (let me believe this, ok?? ) - he's doing great there.

And with this, sort of emotional state - hehe, I'll end this post, and post some more stuff tomorrow.
 Hope ya'll liked it, and please comment or tick one of those boxes down here on what you thought about it.
Laters
-Connie

First digital drawings

So, it's been a year, almost to the day, since I did my first digital drawing in Gimp, with my beloved Bamboo tablet - which I bought in Japan back in 2008.
My first gimp drawing was on 29th May 2010, and it was of my favorite animal: a cat :)
I found this picture of a cat on google and thought "I wish i could draw this!" And so I tried.

Of course looking back now, I know I could've done a much better one now, but that's to be expected a year later. But I was -very much- satisfied with it back then, and it actually took me about 3 hours. no wonder with all that.. hair. lol :P I did actually do every single stroke of the hairs in this one.. no extra brushes to work with like I do in photoshop now - to make it easier..
Anyways, I did this cat drawing in the middle of the night, and the next evening, on the same date, hooked on Gimp - I drew my first avatar drawing:

I remember that I put a lot of effort into the eye on thsi one, since that was.. well, the main part of the picture.
Found this one on google as well, like all my other drawings haha. Took me about 3,5 hours, and of course, the skin... has NO texture to it, and I guess I had trouble with smudging it properly to make it look smooth and even, but oh well. It was a year ago, and my second drawing, and looking back - I'm still satisfied with the main thing - which is the eye hehe ;)
This was back when I didn't even do a sketch before I did the drawing itself.. Dunno what I was thinking!!

Anyways. Too soon, I thought that "Oh, it's fun to draw eyes! I should do a self portrait!!!"
Bad idea...
Seriously.
I almost don't wanna post this "portrait" cause I'm a bit embarrassed at how serious I was about making this a good self portrait, and it turned out shitty! :P But here it goes:

Hahahahahahahah!!!
Sorry..but it's just funny to look like. I look like one of those deep-water fish whose eyes are about to pop outta their face!! *sigh* Well, at least I tried, eh? :P
This is also gimp of course, and even though it doesn't look like it - I made a sketch first. I don't know how long I spent on it, but it was long enough. Hehe. And yes - part of my hair was pink back then, and boy do I miss it!! *double sigh* This, I drew on 30th May 2010 (like it says on the picture), and to show a little improvement on colored portraits, I will add a pretty new drawing, of lovely Heath Ledger:

Drew this on April 25th this year, so only about a month ago, and I know - it's far from perfect, but hey! At least he doesn't look like a freaked out fish! :P Got a bit more texture in the skin, the lines around the eyes and mouth are softer, and I've added pink tones and so on in the colors of the face. Still, only a month later, looking back now (after my latest black and white Dean & Sam drawing), I don't feel as satisfied with this as I was right after I drew it. hehe.
But, it's far from my worst drawing!
I edited it into black and white - just to show the difference:

Looks a lot better in black and white. Or so I think. Hehe :P
But I'm determined to learn how to draw good enough in colors as well!
I'm currently working on a drawing by Robert Knepper (T-bag from Prison Break, Samuel from Heroes + +), which I wanna make as good as I can - in colors (yikes!!) Reason why I'm putting a lot of work into that drawing is because he will be at London Film and Comic Con - signing autographs and doing photoshoots with fans - SO I want him to sign MY drawing of him! :D (so let's hope it turns out good - the drawing)

Anyways. This was my blog for today, just showing a little from ... the past :P
Hope ya'll liked it. More coming soon :)
Please comment, and feel free to come up with suggestions on what I should draw next :)

-Connie