The Zed Word

Hi everyone, and welcome back. I'm back from my mini-vacation, the annual trip to Chincoteague Island, VA. This makes our 9th(?) trip down- always a good time, always relaxing, and always making me want more vacations. Somewhere down the line, I might post some pictures from the trip- some of them turned out surprisingly well. Others... not so much.

Regardless, I'm back. This week is going to be an abbreviated one as well- I'm only in town for two days before I'm off again- this time, back to the home territories to attend my friends' wedding. I'll try to post tomorrow and Wednesday night, but no promises.

Anyway, to the good stuff. Above is the title character of one of my favorite movies of recent memory- Shaun, as in "...of the Dead". Shaun of the Dead is a fantastic movie on a number of levels: it is a hilariously funny comedy, a genuinely scary zombie movie, a clever satire of... oh, let's say modern society, and a glorious (and gory) homage to probably a dozen different movies. And, it's also an immensely enjoyable movie in its own right. Go check out imdb.com for more. But Shaun here, as I said, is the main character.

This sketch is actually the second sketch I've done for this movie, and also my second effort at a "5-minute drawing". But, chaos being the order of the day, this gets posted first. Essentially, these 5-minute drawings were meant as palette cleansers, so to speak, after I spent a long time working on particularly detailed sketches. Instead of taking a long time to agonize over every pencil line (easily done), I decided to take less than a minute to sketch out the figure, then a couple minutes more to flesh out the drawing, hopefully coming out with a finished picture in about 5 minutes. This forces me to 1) be decisive, 2)not second-guess and 3)commit to what I'm doing. And I'm just talking about drawings- if you think these are rules for living, you're crazy. So- the main advantage to drawing like this is the spontaneity- the pictures almost always look more "lively" if I don't spend a lot of time on trying to massage the lines into a more technically correct look. Also, this gives me a chance to work on a less "sketchy" look and use more solid lines. My natural instinct is to use many short lines to finish a drawing, rather than long flowing lines. For a master of the flowing lines, see Adam Hughes. Also by using fewer lines, it gives me a chance to work on conveying likenesses and expressions with less work- which, really, is what I'm all about.

Then, once I had the picture scanned in, I decided to go in and attempt to give it some color. In keeping with the cartoony nature of the picture, I opted for basic coloring (also because I'm still learning how to use the program). The coloring was NOT done in 5 minutes...

So, there's Shaun. Were you a fan, you might guess what's coming next. Whether or not it's colored depends on how lazy I am tomorrow. Place your bets now.

I'll be back on Wednesday.

Music: "Pet Sematary" - The Ramones