Illustration: Fierté 2024 (1)

Pride was sort of a bust this year. The parade was cut in 2 by protestors which made it seem like it was only an hour long which made a huge part of the crowd leave early and not see the second half. On top of that the usual people coming late and just standing in front of those who have been there a coupe hours making it impossible to take photos or even see what is going really got to me. It's too bad, I might not go again. I like the march and I like to take photos of the dancing people for reference in drawings. There are not many chances for that. 

That said this was not from a great photos. he was off to the side and at first just walking with 2 other guys when he broke ahead and started dancing, twerking... getting the crowd going. He was also, like his pals covered in solid gold glitter paint which if know that I think explains the shading in this drawing. I wanted to use pen and ink, black and white only - no tones - like my older drawings on paper. It's an artistic challenge to simplify to two colours but since I use stipple to represent skin and this guy was ALL skin the cramping in my hand was constant! 

I am also including the sketch because I decided to not make a super detailed sketch as a guide for the inking but instead use it to see if I could keep the "aliveness" (is that a word?) of the pose by using something less rigid as a guide. 

Illustration: Yoga - single handstand

 

Drawn with procreate over a couple months. I thought I would have time at the end of the day etc to do this but I never really did and was able to finish it today only because I had a contractor here for hours fixing my bedroom ceiling after a leak from above. It's Montréal Complétment Cirque in a week or so so maybe I will have more acrobat references to work from soon. 

Illustration: Hottie in Sunglasses

 

What else would I call this? This was from references of acrobats reshow this summer. I made it in Affinity Photo on iPad and desktop by saving the file I was drawing  with in Dropbox so I could open it on either and pick up where I left off. I worked really well and I can see me doing that with other work in the future. Though photo is still missing good colour blending options (Procreate has the same issue for me) it forces me to try other methods to get something I like. 

illustration: Yoga toe grab

 

Probably has a real yoga pose name but I don't know what it is. This was only a 2 day project so it's not as detailed maybe as it might have been. Two days is fast for my but I am also not sleeping which frees up lots of drawing time! I like the skin tones, I lucked out guessing what the best base colour might be. Drawn in Krita on the iMac which I really enjoy. The iPad and procreate are really good but but a 27" 5K screen is so much nicer to work on! I still like the Krita brush options the best too. particularly the blending brushes. 

Illustration: Louis swim trunks

 This was another from my now dwindling amount of old photo sessions I am using for drawing inspiration. It was done in 90s for a friend who wanted a career in adult films, so not all the rest of the photos are this family friendly. He was in a swimsuit so I thought it would be good for my athlete series of drawings. Why not? He was a very thin and very pale guy as I think you can see. I did not like the lighting in the photos it was was too harsh and the multiple lights were poorly positioned so I made up a better lighting set up in my head. The hands were a real problem with this one. I did several practice sketches just of the hands and when it came time to do them for real, it still didn't look right so I had to paint over them a few times each until I was happy enough with them.

Drawn in Krita and I used some brushes I hadn't thought of before which helped me make corrections much easier. This was a fast one, it only took about 8 hours of work which is pretty fast for me.

Illustration: Michael stretch

 Procreate, digital pen and ink with digital white pencil. Another from the vaults. I went back and forth over keeping his tattoo and decided it added to the drawing. There are many more little dots in this than you can possible imagine. I also tried the smudge tool in procreate which I have had issues figuring out. It's good for blending colours as I have found out and that was the missing piece for me to try a colour painting in Procreate. So... I guess I should try that soon.