Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Once Upon A Time...

It is Hannah. That is, the elder of the bloggers. This is Sarah (my sister)'s first time blogging, so I thought I'd start it off.

Hi, welcome to Sister Sketches, the blog of a thousand reject names, including Sandwich Art, No Musketeers, and Mustache Sisters. This is where Sarah and I will be exhibiting our sketches, sculptures, paintings, and perhaps music and videos. Basically, this is a personal deviantart thing, all to ourselves with no outside... well, Sarah says "junk", but I was gonna say something dramatic that shows off my vocabulary skills. Like "unhampered desecrating interference". But junk works too.

As a matter of fact, right here - hi - is a promise not to put anything undoubtedly foul on here. Like nudity or bad words or such. That's just not even fun to draw. I can say from this moment that you will probably see, oh, fantasy, medieval, manga, dragons, elves, werewolves (or just wolves), lots of geeky stuff, movie or book cover art, and geeky stuff. Maybe tutorials if someone's interested. Whatever we're going to put on here will be original, even if it's based on someone else's work.

So anyway. For the first unveiling, I'm going to... unveil.... something. Something wonderful!

This is actually, yes, an original piece, I think from last year. (I'm very... happy with it. I was gonna say proud, but, you know, Pride cometh before destruction, and I don't want this loverly thing destroyed.)



Manga Warrior 


This was based on Trinity. Eh, was, is. There was a time... recentlyish, that Trinity was looking at a manga book that we got from the library. And on a whim thing (which is real grammatical) she said that if I made a manga picture of her with a sword, she'd put it as her profile picture everywhere.




So it began.
That sounds really dramatic, but actually it wasn't. I was sitting in bed when I started sketching it while Trinity posed with her sword, Elven Protector.
I don't know how many days I worked on the actual sketch, but I finished it while in the car on the way to Springfield, Missouri, to shop at Sam's Club. We don't have a Sam's Club or CostCo or anything bigger than a Walmart down where we live. And with ten kids in our family (actually, I think it was nine at the time) we prefer to buy things in bulk.

And as I recall, the most elegant detail of this picture is that I put the finishing touches on it as we were going through Branson, right outside a lovely, refined nature reserve,  just as we saw Natalie Portman come out of Silver Dollar City. She was pregnant at the time, but she still stopped to talk to us, and she autographed all of our T-shirts. My mom even saw the inside of her limo.


No. Actually, I finished it outside a gas station bathroom while crammed between a window and a baby carseat.

But the other one sounds better. 

So, anyways, this was the first of my pictures that was colored in Photoshop. It makes it looks good, but it's SOOO time-consuming. To put the color in properly, one must first change the picture to black-and-white to get rid of all impurities in photo hue, then make the background and all teeny spaces between the lines completely white, get rid of the smudges that made the picture look realistic in the first place, fill in all incomplete lines, remove all of the grain, sprinkle holy water on the computer monitor, fast seven days, and climb Mount Everest. 

Finally I added the shading, with that multi-purpose little tool we call the Burn Tool, and I was done. I revealed it to much applause! Trinity gushed over it, and did indeed keep it as her profile picture on Gmail and her cover photo on Facebook for around a week. Lovely promotion. This picture remains as one of my favorites, since it took so long to make, but with fantastic results.

So how was this for a first post? I try. The next one will probably be Sarah's, and feature one of her beautiful drawings... we'll try to switch off turns. So, Hannah signing out... or signing off? Roger Wilco, ten-four.