Putting Pencil to Paper: November 2018
Published on Nov 30, 2018
Paper by FiftyThree is a drawing and sketching app for iPad and iPhone, and one of my great loves in this life. Each month, I start a new Sketchbook in Paper and set its title as the current month. At the end of each month, I’ll post a retrospective here of everything I drew!
Nearing the end of my first year of sketching! Of course, I only started in September. A good variety this month, and a heavy video game theme, especially towards the end! Dive in and take a look for yourself…
A good start to the month, inspired by my finally acquiring a SNES Classic. The Super Nintendo will always have a special place in my heart, being my first (and for a while, ONLY) Nintendo console as a kid. I always loved the SNES’ boxart as well, and I tried my best to do it justice here.
Here’s an abstract piece I made to play around with Paper’s handling of “dotting” or “stippling,” which is something digital art applications have not handled well in my experience. It worked great, and I got a cool, upside-down mountain & moon scene out of it.
Well hey, here’s a good plug for my monthly email newsletter, the Eganworks Monthly. If you’d like to subscribe, here’s a LINK!
As you might imagine, there’s a story behind this one. My girlfriend and I were hanging out on the couch one night, and I wanted to draw something. So she gave me the prompt of, “What’s the difference between an ostrich and an emu?” As it turns out, ostriches are all big and feathery, and emus are robots who vape.
Gameboy pattern! Paper has a super simple copy/paste function that makes this kind of thing easy. It’s a cool way to make new wallpaper!
Another abstract piece, this time just to play with color. From a certain angle, I can see a mouse with a sack of money beating up a man in a hunting cap. See anything interesting?
This one’s probably the best pattern I’ve made so far. I took another crack at a Gameboy pattern, this time with the paint roller tool, which made for a much cleaner effect!
Kirby! He’s pink, he’s round, he’s shaped like a friend. And now he’s wallpaper!
More Kirby! This time, of the flying variety!
The video game hits just keep on rolling this month, with a character I used to draw a TON as a kid, Miles Prower, that is, Tails from Sonic the Hedgehog. I haven’t drawn Tails since the third or fourth grade, and yet all the muscle memory came flooding right back when I started drawing.
And here’s some more Sonic!
Aaaaaaaand some more Sonic… This one’s based on the Blue Sphere bonus game from Sonic 3 and Sonic Mania, which I played a ton of for this video.
And…well…look, you all know who I am. This one’s actually based on a Sonic tattoo design my buddy Olly came up with. If you’d like to see some of his work, he’s got an instagram just for that! Thanks for reading another edition of my monthly sketchbook roundup! If anyone out there has picked up Paper for themselves, I’d love to see what you’re up to!! Til next time! - Mike