Happy Hulk

Draw night was one person more successful than the last: Dillon Thompson joined Tom, Jon, Ryan, Derek, Rachel, Virginia, Brent, and me. I don't think Dillon knew what to think when he first got there; we all just sort of sit there and doodle. So I asked him to draw some cartoony looking dudes so we could do "real-life" versions of them, and then we never got to the real-life part. (Sorry about that, Dillon.) But the cartoony dudes were good for loosening up, and I decided to litter the bottom of the page with heads. The guy with the Amish-ish beard catches my eye because his head/neck mass is weird.

Next up, more ink barfing. Ryan and Derek seemed encouraging, telling me that my brush control seemed to be getting better, but I don't really feel any more in control. I've been trying to learn the guitar lately, and I just assume it's a little like that; I can't tell when the hell I'll be able to do bar chords and stuff, but I just keep messing with it and eventually it just starts happening. Similarly, at the end of a programming book I once got through, the message at the end was that the key to learning programming is to be really kind and patient with yourself, and this seems applicable to the brush-pen thing.

So while I was doodling and inking, Ryan was doing these killer Hulk pics (see his site) that made me laugh out loud because the Hulk was happy in them. He made the comment that you never see the Hulk happy (because he's only the Hulk when he's mad), and I thought that was astute. So I had to join in the fun and render my own version of Happy Hulk. I originally intended for his legs to be a lot smaller so he looked a little more Looney Toony, but it didn't work out that way; maybe next time.

Pose-swapping is basically an addiction at this point. I asked Ryan to come up with the theme, and he said that we should give each other hard poses with muscle-heads. Even when I draw muscle-people like Ahnuld, I tend to try to keep in mind their real bones and such, so I think my poses didn't suggest a lot of mass. The stuff Ryan gave me definitely suggested some fun mass to draw, so I think Ryan got the short end of the pose stick. I particularly liked the muscle guy on the right, who I imagined with a bit of a gut.

The next page started with the face of a cute lady, but her body started looking wrong to me, so I kinda gave up and did the guy head. Then I returned to her body and kinda mushed shapes around until it didn't look too bad to me, and I decided to make her seem all watery. I was happy with her flow in the end.

Keeping with the good feeling of flowing lines, I started the guy with the goggles. I thought his lines felt good, and I was having fun with him. Ryan saw the way I drew his arm and made a comment about how I seemed to approach it with the outer edge, and how weird that was. It didn't strike me as odd, so we got into a discussion about how we put shapes together. I think I gave him the impression that I always approach drawings with silhouettes, which isn't true, but that conversation led to foreshortening. On that topic, I found myself thinking about the Street Fighter illustrations that Capcom does, and how my favorite ones always has a body part greatly foreshortened. Sometimes they choose unusual things to foreshorten, like a knee or elbow. With unusual foreshortening thrown out there, Ryan suggested an extreme ear shot. We had the same basic angle (I'm not sure what other to try, really), but Ryan's was a truer ear shot. (I cheated with burst marks.)

Before we took off for pizza, I fiddled around and ended up with this girlie stretching gum. :-)