Sketches #34 - Sticks and stones will break your bones

Hi there, occasional reader of this erratic blog!
I didn't draw much since last summer, and backwardly enough the desire to sketch came back after I fell and broke a bone in my hand a few weeks ago. It came back to me as I was waiting at the ER for a doctor to check my injury, and yes the swelling was pretty bad too ^^.
Drawing is the one thing that can take me into a world of my own because of all the concentration it requires from me and that was very much what I was looking for at the time. So I picked up my smartphone and launched a sketching app and used my still valid index and thumb to scribble a few hours away.
At first it felt like a desperate move, drawing with your fingers on a quite small phone screen isn't the most comfortable experience. But it did get smoother eventually (see the examples below after a couple of hours of getting used to it).

I'm currently still recovering (hopefully at 100% in a couple weeks) and drawing with FireAlpaca on my old Intuos 4 tablet. I'm quite happy to be sketching again, it's well worth the little pain - those bloody ellipses are the worst though.

See you soon


#Anime watch recommandation : Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust

and here's the sketches from the phone :
Requirements : a smartphone, most will do but the bigger the screen size the better (tiny fingertips might help too!), SketchBook Express from Autodesk (free app btw), a couple of hours to kill.
The second one is a bit more refined because by then I had figured a zoom in/out way around

Sketches #33

sketches #32 - Dwelling upon FireAlpaca

It's been 3 full months since I have last touched the tablet to draw some stuff. Getting back at it was incredibly thrilling but also exhausting since I couldn't stop drawing weird random stuff until way too late in the night.

I'm testing a new app which seems like the perfect choice for broke artists (costs 0$) looking for great line control. It's called FireAlpaca and it has everything I loved about MangaStudio for sketching and it's even better depending on what you're looking for (for instance I really hate how the undo command in MS will go back and drop so many distinct line strokes considering them as one action that is SO annoying! FA only goes back 1 step back at a time and it's a blessing). I just spent 10mn setting up the shortcuts and it was good to go.

It is no MS of course, but what it does, it does really well and it's using only a fraction of the RAM MS does while doing so which is nice especially if you're working on a small config as I do most of the time (laptop).

2 first done with FA (last one is MS from April)

sketches #31

It's been a very busy while since the last post with little time for sketches. Here's a couple pages from this week's  effort to perservere drawing despite the lack of time and energy. Also trying to incoporate more mangas traits to the characters' faces, liberally adapted from some Capcom character designers that I really like.

Sketches #30

Sketches #29

Sketches of the week #28