Geek Speaking of Drawmelts and the Legend of Captain Sexy

Geek Speak

Shock and Awwww Yeah!

This strip was interesting to put together. There was text in the last two panels, but after I had added it I looked at the strip again and realized the reactions I'd created for Mark and Steve sold the joke better than my actual joke. This is something of a first as I consider myself a writer first, and my natural inclination is to have dialog.

If I'm being really honest this is the result of watching Penny Arcade's series Strip Search. In the judging of elimination round five Jerry Holkins, the writer of Penny Arcade, points out that one of the strips created by someone who was up for elimination worked better with the text removed. That seems to have happened here. I liked my joke, but it didn't work as well as a couple of panels of straight up reaction shots. 

It's fun to see Steve (the short bald one) and Mark (tall with lots of hair) utterly dumbstruck. Steve especially as he's the one who tends to run at the mouth.  

The next time we see these characters I think I might play with their humanity a bit. We'll see.

Sweet Fancy Moses!

Wow, so someone out there must really like me! Or my mom is checking my blog two hundred times a day from at least five different computers. That seems somewhat unlikely so I'm just going to be really excited that I've crossed the line into twelve-thousand page views! That means since the end of March/beginning of April when I started blogging like a computer-literate honey badger the traffic to my little corner of the Interwebs has more than tripled! That's awesome!

Pirates of Meltdown: Legend of Captain Sexy

Monday was another evening at Meltdown Comics for Drawmelt. This has become something that I really look forward to doing once or twice a month. I don't have the time to do more than that, and I can't really afford to go more, but the time I get is more than worth it. The benefits of drawing from a life model are huge, and it seems like I'm getting better each time.

On the Monday the 20th I changed up what I had been doing and went to Drawmelt unaccompanied. I might not have gone on Monday, but as it happened the model they'd lined up a male model for the evening. For some reason it seems like the majority of the modeling done for these things is done by women, so this was a special enough opportunity I made the decision to head down on my own. 

It is with an artist's professional detachment and pure aesthetic sense that I say, "holy crap this guy is good looking!" As I was drawing him I just kept thinking that his absolutely the leading-man hero type. He is also the first model I've seen who came to the event with a character in mind, and stayed in character throughout the entire evening. He was kind of Han Solo meets the Dread Pirate Roberts. Very Cool.

Here are a few of my favorite drawings from the evening.

This was one of the first from the evening. I had some fun adding word balloons to a few of drawings when the model was switching between poses.

I thought I know what a smoldering look was...then Monday's model threw out a smolder that damn near toasted everyone's sketchbook. I bow to the superior smolder, and regret that I was only able to capture but a pale shadow of it here.

More fun with word balloons. Of all my drawings from the evening I think this one looks the most like the model. 

Drawmelting Extreme Cosplayers

Drawmelty Goodness
In extolling the many virtues of the singularly outstanding Meltdown Comics to a coworker who recently moved from Indiana and shares my enthusiasm for comic books, I discovered they have a regularly scheduled life drawing class. The class, called "Drawmelt" (drawing at meltdown comics...get it?) is offered every Monday from 7PM to 10PM. They bill it as "extreme cosplay life drawing" which immediately got my attention. How do you define extreme cosplay? Do they dress up as JRPG characters then hop on a skateboard and throw bitchin' tricks on a half-pipe?

As it turns out? No. They don't. The event is extremely chill with a model doing poses that range from five minutes up to twenty minutes. In most life drawing classes the models are nude. This is to help the artists learn anatomy and the contours of the body. That's great, but most of us who don't live in a nudist colony or who care about municipal codes against indecent exposure wear clothes. This is true in most actual illustration jobs, too, unless you're lucky (unlucky?) enough to have spent your entire education drawing nudes, and end up in a career illustrating sex manuals.

What I was really looking for was the opportunity to draw figures from live models, but I'm also keenly aware that I need a lot of practice in drawing fabric and how it drapes over the body. We've all seen illustrations or sculpture of a nude model with a sheet draped casually over a shoulder, brazenly exposing one plump breast. That's great...but who in the hell goes grocery shopping less than half dressed in a goddamn sheet? Traditional life drawing is great, but it helps if you can draw people wearing actual clothes from time to time, too.

I've been to two Drawmelt events, and both were great experiences that have already had an impact on my abilities as an illustrator (I'm really reluctant to apply the label "artist" to what I do). At the most recent event the model was dressed in what I'm calling a modern take on Alice from Alice in Wonderland. Below are a number of my drawings from the evening.

If you are an artist or illustrator living in the L.A. area I recommend checking it out.

The first drawings of the evening are fairly rough, as the model only holds these poses for five minutes. It's kind of like the artist's version of stretching before a workout.

After that the poses are held for ten minutes which is like a balance between a warm up and the actual workout. It's like calisthenics for your drawing muscles. The first of these is may favorite from the evening. Though it has to be said that even my favorite drawing of the evening does not do the lovely model justice. She had the most amazing and expressive eyes, and she seemed to be telling a story with each pose.

 


After that the poses are held for fifteen minutes. This is where you can really spend some time on details, playing with style, maybe doing a quick gesture drawing as practice before doing a more complete drawing. This is where the workout really starts.

 

The last couple of poses are held for twenty minutes. By this time I've been drawing for a while so I'm in a funny place where my hand is starting to get sore, but my drawing muscles are loose.