Drawing

The Candy Bar from Jimmy Neutron

/ Drawing, Process /

I took an online course on illustrating with Posca pens taught by James Chapman. He has posted lots of his sketchbook pages to his Instagram.

I had a couple Posca pens for a few years, but I hadn’t done much with them. I saw this course and thought it would be a great way to practice with Posca pens.

The course covers how to create a pencil sketch to get the composition down. Then it explores various color schemes to determine how to color the illustration. I especially like the challenge of limiting the number of colors used.

I like the process I learned in this course. It takes me several hours to finish an illustration, but I really enjoy the time I’m spending learning and practicing. I’ll share my illustrations here as I finish them.

The course encourages choosing a theme that will motivate you to keep working on sketches. I chose places in movies, TV shows, and books. First up is The Candy Bar from Jimmy Neutron.

Here’s the pencil sketch:

A pencil sketch of The Candy Bar from Jimmy Neutron. The Candy Bar is positioned to the right of the page's center. Behind the Candy Bar are buildings on the right and left.

I chose to go with realistic colors, so I used Posca pen colors that are close to what this location looks like in the show.

Here’s a progress photo, with the larger areas of color done:

Progress on the illustration of The Candy Bar from Jimmy Neutron. The sky, buildings, and street are colored in. What needs to be done includes window panes on the buildings, details on The Candy Bar building, and details in the street (like lane lines and shadows).

And here’s the finished illustration:

An illustration of The Candy Bar from Jimmy Neutron. The Candy Bar is positioned to the right of the center of the page. Behind The Candy Bar are buildings on the left and right sides.

I really enjoyed making this as my first attempt at a Posca pen illustration!

Drawing mazes just for fun

/ Drawing

On a whim, I looked up YouTube tutorials for how to draw mazes. I like this one:

I’ve been drawing mazes like this for the past couple weeks, mostly as a way to doodle. Here are two of mine:

blue maze

If you draw a maze using this method and post it somewhere online, please tell me in the comments below! I’d love to see it.

Astronaut contribution

/ Drawing, Process, Zines /

I contributed a page to the Pocket Thoughts Annual #3, a collaborative zine that features 25+ zinesters from around the world. Each contributor was welcome to do whatever they wanted with their page. I made this astronaut illustration:

astronaut illustration

I wanted to go for a collage look, but still where I made each part of it. This is what the elements looked like, before I put the page together:

I started with black cardstock and a white gel pen for the stars in the background. If you’ve seen my space-themed illustrations, you know I love drawing stars on black paper. 🙂

I drew the astronaut on white cardstock and the…cloud thing on black cardstock with a black fineliner and white gel pen. Then I cut those out.

The white strips on the left of the page are pieces of white cardstock.

I printed the text using my Phomemo printer. It’s so handy for little things like this!

And then I glued everything into place. To send it in for the zine, I scanned it, so I could send a jpg.

Making this page took a while since I created each element separately, but I’m really happy with how it came out.

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