"Kick like water, my friend"

I think I got that quote right. Anyway, I spent all yesterday drawing martial arts stuff so why not end the night with Bruce?

That Sporting Life

I was looking through a folder of warmup sketches and found some stuff that I might not have been feeling at the time, but I think look kind of groovy now. First off, some sports themed sketches.

Continuing from yesterday's post, here are a couple more Sacramento Kings ... fan sketches, I guess, from earlier this year. I don't know why I find Isaiah Thomas to be a good subject for practice with distorted perspectives. The second drawing is of sharpshooter Predrag 'Peja' Stojakovic from the glory years of the early 2000's. I was probably humming John Tesh's 'NBA on NBC' theme as I was drawing it.

 

And this sketch is my attempt at drawing boxer Nonito 'Filipino Flash' Donaire in the style of Masanori Morita's 'Rokudenashi Blues' manga. As a teenager, I admired the hell out of Morita, especially how kinetic his fight scenes were, using lines to convey motion blur. But as far as likenesses go, this doesn't look at all like Donaire. 

 So yeah ... basketball and boxing. I'm hella Filipino.

They're playin' baaaaasket-baaaaaall

October means the NBA season is starting up again soon. Here's a drawing of Isaiah Thomas of the Sacramento Kings, minus his tattoos.

The Big Ol' London Olympic Sketchdump

It's several weeks late, but here are some of the results of a couple of weeks of sitting in front of the TV, trying to capture the thrill of victory and agony of defeat with whatever drawing utensils I had at hand. As you'll see here, I spent most of my time doing super quick and dirty figure sketches, trying to capture athletes in motion, as well as some caricature and likeness drawing here and there.

Badminton. Why was I watching badminton?

Gymnastics. I need to remind myself that the way these people can flex their spines is not something I should apply to when I draw normal people.

Volleyball. I swear I only enjoyed women's beach volleyball because it's a competitive and intense sport

Swimming. The 'dolphin kick' was my nemesis.

Track & Field. I think that's supposed to be Usain Bolt in the center.

筋肉ハイスクール!!

Here are a couple of characters I designed for an animation exercise that I'm planning. Let's call them 'Ray' and 'Warren'.

I found an incredible compilation of fighting animation by Norio Matsumoto on YouTube and felt compelled to attempt a Japanese style animated fight scene. Ray and Warren are based on a couple of my best friends from high school and a little comic I did back then called 'Kinnick Fighter' - 'Kinnick' being the name of our high school. It was the era when Street Fighter mania was sweeping the world and Dragon Ball Z was the must-see cartoon on Japanese TV (yes, I'm quite old) and I thought it would be fun to draw a comic featuring my group of friends engaging in fisticuffs.

No, I will not post samples from it.

Over the years, I've thought about ways to develop it into a series of some sort, with the slightly altered title Kinniku High School (kinniku is Japanese for 'muscle'). But ultimately, I don't think the world needs yet another teenage fighting series.

I've had to shove the exercise to the back burner for a bit while I deal with other things, but I hope to get it going at some point in the near future. For now, Here are some exploratory sketches that eventually led to the designs you see above.

 

P.A.C. Man

I'm one of those cranky old men who will swear up and down that video games were better twenty years ago then they are today, that today's games lack personality, and that the proliferation of first-person shooters spells the death of gaming. I'm also kind of a hypocrite, whose SNES library is composed of mostly Street Fighter clones.

Anyway, so I came up with an idea for a series of illustrations under the theme of "If classic video games were conceived today". These would be ridiculous pictures that would skewer today's games in all of their testosterone-laden, dude-bro-ness. And Pac-Man would be the first. The problem is, I'm having a really hard time making this idea look unappealing.

PAC-Man 2011 would be a first-person-shooter (of course) starring an unarmed space marine who is trapped aboard a ship infested by deadly ghosts. There are weapons hidden in remote corners of the ship that he can use to fend off the ghosts, but ammo is finite. P.A.C., by the way, would stand for "Paranormal Assault Corps" or "Planetary Assault Corps". I can see a legion of dude-bros lining up outside of their local Gamestops already ...