Sketch Dump: Anime

Let's just call these posts what they are.  When I picked up an artbook in March and decided to start drawing again, I had to get my last unfinished sketchbook down from the closet.  I'd tossed it in a box with all of my old sketches.  As I herniated my back getting it down, I had the sudden epiphany that I needed to clean the thing out a bit.  

It's been painful on a psychological level as well.  At some point, I had apparently stopped throwing out bad drawings.  Some drawings are easy to toss, but others have sentimental value.  Some were good, but my tastes in quality seem to vary moment to moment while going through them.  Also, I had scanned out several drawings, which is what I've been posting lately, but I'd seemingly picked them at random.  I wanted to scan everything decent.  So, I'm in the process of going through drawings to toss, keep, and scan.  Some of the drawings to scan also need to be darker, either by redrawing and/or image processing.  And I'm still drawing new stuff.  It's been a busy process.      

First up is a sketch that was not in the sketch box.  This is Musica from Robotech Masters and is a copy of a comic book adaption cover.  Now to explain the medium.  I'd put a hole in my bedroom door somehow back in high school.  My dad put up a mirror over the hole.  To my parents' chagrin, I proceeded to draw on it with markers.    

Mirrors are not a good medium to draw on.  In fact, almost impossible.  You get a reflection on the mirror producing a double image of the lines.  Trying to photograph the image, you get the same problem and have to avoid the flash image in the picture.  All that said, I'm extremely proud of this drawing and photograph just from a technical aspect.  Of course, I don't have the actual mirror and the sketch is long gone.  

Who says I only draw girls?  Wait.  That's me saying that.  In any case, I have these two examples of Mobile Suits from a Zeta Gundam technical manual.  I don't have the book anymore.  It was all in Japanese anyway.  

What?  I drew a guy?  I think this was from a movie promo image.  I'm not going to say I was a big fan of the film, but I got the comics when they came out in the US.  Marvel's Epic imprint produced them.  They were in the prestige format, read left to right (flopped), and were in color.  I know manga purists would be horrified, but these were spectacular.  

Katsuhiro Otomo's artwork was finely detailed.  The coloring made the panels look like animation cells.  Each page was simply beautiful.  Akira #1 was a valuable comic even back in the day.  I'm afraid to look now, since I sold it in bulk with a bunch of my other comics.  It's basically the only comic I miss, but if I still had it, it'd be too valuable to ever look at.  Damn. 

I like this sketch of Dana from Robotech Masters.  I almost missed it, because it was drawn on the back on another drawing.  What was I thinking?

Ah, here's Minmei from Robotech Macross.  Annoyingly, it was probably my best drawing of her.  I say, "Annoyingly," because I drew this head on top of a swimsuit model's body.  I did a reasonable job on that too.  Unfortunately, the two don't match to the point where I'm not posting the whole thing together.  

Myung from Macross Plus.  I really loved that OVA series, but the distribution of it here in the US nearly did me in.  The first three parts were released in three months (I think).  The final part was released like six months later as the distributer changed hands.  I never got the movie version, which came out much later and wasn't dubbed.  I really liked Myung's and Isamu's voices in the English version.  [And in looking up the actors, I just found out that Isamu's was done by Bryan Cranston (!) from Breaking Bad and a bunch of other stuff.]  

  

Lastly, we have some confusion.  This character is from the cover of a Newtype USA (which I don't have anymore).  I don't remember the anime or the character's name.  The confusion stems from the character's gender.  I think I found out later the character was a dude.  Maybe I should have read the article before I started the sketch.  This is pretty accurate to the cover, so you can judge the gender for yourself.