I’m toying with grabbing freeze frames from movies and trying to adapt the compositions to comic panels. This here is a shot of two incidental characters in Casablanca. One thing I hope to get better at is figuring out how to make backgrounds in black-and-white white art that are detailed but don’t conflict with the foreground action. I want to cross hatch, but I think I need to heed the advice of the Famous Artists Cartoon Course, and stick with mostly solid blacks and whites:

I’ve had a Donald Duck model sheet as my desktop background for ages; this is my favorite, somewhat surprising pose.

Who has flat feet and has posted to this site daily for a full year? [Awkward roundhouse kick] This guy!!! On the left are some drawings from 2011, 2012 on the right. So my improvement has been…subtle. If nothing else, I’ve improved my ability to draw quickly and with less frustration. My painting skills are noticeably better. So is my gesture drawing ability. Animation, sadly, has fallen by the wayside, but only because it’s so freaking time-consuming.

Or as the makers of Clip Studio call him, lunch. I drew this from start to finish in that software I was raving about yesterday. I had nothing better to draw, so this one’s in honor of my niece, who, when she heard I live alone, suggested I get a fish!

Why is this man smiling? Well, besides a night on the town with good company and alcohol, it’s because he impulsively bought a really cool piece of software. In fact, it’s so obscure, there’s not even an official English version at the moment. Clip Studio Paint Pro comes from Celsys, a Japanese company that also produces a piece of software called Comic Studio, which is marketed in the U.S. by Smith Micro as Manga Studio.