Shading Tutorial

I have a new video tutorial! It's a very basic lesson on shading, using the rose drawing from the previous tutorial I made. Hope you like it!

Prints for Sale!

Really, this has been a looooooong time coming, but we've finally got a small library of prints up for sale at ebay and etsy. Currently, we're offering 8 1/2" x 11" sized prints, but we'll soon have 11" x 14" prints as well.

Prints come on 120lb Eames Canvas Cover paper in either Pure White or Natural. This is a great heavyweight paper with a neat canvas-like texture. Pure White is true to the original color while Natural has an antique look.

Check out ebay and etsy for a listing of prints, I'll be listing more every month.

Eraser v. Eraser

In my last video tutorial I recommended using a pliable, or kneaded eraser for the drawing we were doing. I wanted to be more specific about why this type of eraser is so good to use for drawing.

Here I shaded four test boxes with a 2B graphite pencil.

Pliable or kneaded eraser

As you can see, our kneaded eraser can be molded to fit any shape you need. It's also very thorough in its erasing. These shaded boxes are holding a lot of graphite and the eraser still pulls it off with no mess.

Pros:
- flexible and mold-able
- clean and thorough
- bounces when rolled into a ball

Cons:
- will eventually become sticky and useless





Here we have a basic rubber eraser in cube form. I worked at the test box using a good amount of elbow grease, and still it does a weak job removing the graphite. Also, look at the mess left behind (these are tiny fragments of rubber).

Pros:
- easy to get your hands on these for cheap
- they will eventually erase

Cons:
- extremely messy
- not particularly effective at erasing
- awkward shape

Ah, good old Red Rubber. This type of eraser is very similar to the rubber above, but it is slightly firmer and therefore slightly better at erasing. On the other hand, it's just as messy.

Pros:
- most common type of eraser
- pretty good at erasing, especially large areas
- reminder of the good old days

Cons:
- again, quite messy
- takes a lot of effort to get it to work in fine details

This pencil eraser made of vinyl, is pretty excellent for erasing tiny details. However, it takes so much elbow grease to erase that I find I frequently have to re-sharpen the tip, quickly ending up with a tiny stump of a pencil. Vinyl erasers tend to be cleaner than rubbers, but they also tend to glide on the surface of graphite, smearing it rather than erasing it.

Pros:
- slightly cleaner than rubber
- pencil tip gets into fine details

Cons:
- not necessarily excellent at erasing




I think you know where I stand with erasers, and what I recommend and prefer for myself. But you know what they say about opinions. Every eraser will have its place at one point or another, and you should experiment and see what works for you. 

And of course, enjoy drawing! No one says you have to erase anything anyway. Drawings that show every line of progress are extremely fascinating. Go for it!

How To Draw a Simple Rose

I've been wanting to make drawing video tutorials for some time now. It seems my most practical education has come from watching other folks' video tutorials, and I'm so glad to finally get to give it a shot.

Bradburnnegut

For Brad's birthday this year I made him an original t-shirt with a graphic reminiscent of two of his favorite authors:  Ray Bradbury (with his face, signature and something of this style of drawing) and Kurt Vonnegut (the image inspired by his famous self portrait).

1) Again, I hand-painted the line drawing onto a piece of a piece of acetate (projector or clear plastic paper), after I made a pencil sketch.

2) I coated a silk screen with photo emulsion fluid and used a 200-watt bulb to expose the image onto the screen (if anyone is curious about the silk screening process, I can do a tutorial as well as provide links to some excellent videos/articles).

3) After washing out the positive image on the screen and letting it dry, I set the screen face down on the shirt to line it up (without proper equipment this is a little difficult) and ran some blue ink through the screen.

4) Letting that dry and washing and drying the screen of that color, I did another run of black ink slightly offset from the blue to give the print some dimension. I let that layer dry and set the ink with heat.

To be safe, wash your shirt once before you silk screen and turn it inside out every time you wash it. If you set it with high enough heat, the ink shouldn't budge, but hang onto your original drawing just in case (don't learn that the hard way like me)!

And if anyone is interested in getting this shirt, feel free to email me at novastuart@gmail.com.

Samurai Drunk Poster

I created this poster for the local improv group "Samurai Drunk." I seem to call them "Drunk Samurai" equally as often, which really puts my mom's habit of calling everything by a weird broken name (including her precious "Little Miss Kitty" collection) to shame.

1) I started by creating a graphic logo on a piece of acetate which I silk screened onto a handkerchief.

2) Shopping around for a cool little bottle of sake to make the Molotov cocktail, I found them either too large, too expensive, or both. I did, however, love the logo for the Tentaka Kuni "Hawk In the Heavens" sake, and honestly it wasn't that expensive. But I knew it wouldn't really be my cup of tea to drink and I could find an alternative (aka Photoshop!).

3) I ended up pouring out a bottle of Kikkoman soy sauce and stuffing my handkerchief into that (yes, I smelled the sauce for hours) then photographed the bottle in a light tent with matches strewn about. The soy sauce was great to work with, it loved trying different daring poses.

4) Finding this image to be my favorite, I tweaked it in Photoshop a bit by pulling out the contrast on the logo and layering the Tentaka Kuni label atop the original label (to add interest and skirt copyright infringement issues). I also slightly blurred out the edges of the light tent but left enough to keep it a little rough.  

5) Since this was meant for print, I created a standard size poster document in InDesign with bleed, and exported as a high-resolution .pdf file. I also made a smaller sized .jpeg for sharing, which is what you see here.

 I hope if you're in the area, you'll check out Samurai Drunk. They're an incredibly smart improv group and fun to watch as well.