Culturezoo VIII: Batman, Year One

On this week’s Culturezoo, Levi and Rosalyn back away from Star Wars for a bit to discuss the 1987 mini-series comic, Batman: Year One, by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli.

• We open with a brief discussion of the various incarnations of Batman over the years.
• We cover the plot of Year One including David Mazzucchelli’s gorgeous ink and Commissioner Gordon’s ridiculous inner monologues. Seriously he can’t shoot a gun at a target without having an existential crisis.
• We finally opine about everything that’s right and wrong with this comic and specifically blame Frank Miller for taking the fun out of comics and making them stupid for the past thirty years.
• We can’t resist indulging in a bit of Star Wars: The Force Awakens discussion to wrap things up.

More Practice-in

I am still plugging away on drawingtutorialsonline.com

I am now working through his anatomy tutorials, which has been very educational. The pelvis is super confusing and I am embarrassed to say, until I drew it I never really conceptualized the pelvis and hip joint properly. You think studying anatomy for school would have done it, but in fact drawing it helped me actually start to understand those weird ol’ pelvis and hip bones.

Ribcage and Hip study

Messy pelvis from behind

Torso-Needs some fixing/tweaking in the chest area, but I cant quite figure out what, I think maybe her whole upper chest needs to be wider…

slight angled view of the hips

This is the part I love, I never realized that little bump on the outer thigh that I think of as a woman’s “hips” is the lesser trochanter of the femur! You can see what I mean in the next picture where I add the outline.

Busy little bee

I took Levi’s suggestion signed up for drawing-tutorials-online.com. It is super cool. The maker of the sight is a really good teacher and teaches at a real art school! I like that he doesn’t have a “style”. His drawings are super photo-real, which isn’t exactly what I aspire to, but what I would need to accomplish to be a good artist. He is also really nice and has a accent that makes me laugh. He really understands what people who want to learn want and need to get better.

All that to say, I have been doing a lot of drawings that are sketches and principals, not actual “drawings”. The site has a sections called “Beginner’s Basics”, which is where I have started. It has 23 lessons, and I have been steadily working my way through those. Sometimes it is a little tedious, but I think I am learning some valuable stuff.

The only slight downside is that so far all the models are very naked, which I get is part of figure drawing. I just hope that once I get the beginner’s basics down there will be some clothed models, because honestly, my drawing goals involve drawing clothed people a lot more than naked ones.

Culturezoo VIII: Star Wars, The Phantom Menace: Act III

The final episode of our in-depth analysis, discussion, and group therapy on Star Wars, The Phantom Menace is here. Levi, Roz, and Zach tackle the four-part finale that even had George Lucas scratching his head in confusion. Finally we end the episode with thirty minutes of discussion on how we would fix the Phantom Menace and the prequels in general.

Thank you to everyone who came along for the ride on this one. Sorry we get so worked up over this. Hopefully all you fellow Star Wars geeks out there found something worthwhile in our lamenting of this film.

An Inktober Halloween Story

For my final series of Inktobers I wanted to tell a Halloween-themed story. It’s only five pages but I had fun with it.