compulsive compartmentalization

It was brought to my attention that I never talk about drawing, or music, or Sarah, or much of anything other than memories I have or things that have happened to me recently. The more I think about it, the more I think that’s true and so I’m making an effort to branch out and write more about other areas of my life. Consider it an excercise in De-Compartmentalization.

So I thought I’d start with drawing. And since at the moment I’m working on an ebay commission, I thought I’d take you along on the process that I like to call…

Brian whores out his skillz. (also known as, Brian needs some quick money)

The first and most important step is getting someone to win my auction. Sometimes people take the bait like Pirhana…sometimes it’s hard to get a nibble. This time around the winner was a guy I’ve worked with before and apparently he liked my stuff enough to bid again. I have found that many people who bid on commissions have a “thing”. By that I mean their requests usually focus around one theme or character. In this case, it seems this client likes established characters taking on the form of fairies. The last commission I did revolved around a supporting character from Wonder Woman named Artemis who had been turned into a fairy and wasn’t happy about it. So my task was to create Atremis as a mischievious fairy.

This time around there’s a character from what I think is an old show called Reboot that once again he would like turned into a fairy. So, with that request given the work begins.

As of now I’ve spent about half a week just sketching different poses. That’s all I’m worried about now…getting the form and the pose just right. So far I’ve done a bunch of crap and three decentish sketches. So I email him really rough sketches of the character flying (okayish), one of her standing (eh, not much going on there), and one that’s more of a dramatic, forced perspective of her (my favorite).

With these in the mail, I’ll doodle a little more and wait to hear what he thinks. I usually give myself 3 to 4 weeks to finish an ebay commission (okay, so the money isn’t all that quick). But I like to keep myself in the ebay pot of artists, so I post auctions every month or two. The first week is spent just getting the sketch right and the rest of the time is the final inking and coloring (which takes the longest).

But those are other posts…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 25th, 2004 at 9:28 am and is filed under art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.