Lump

[c_nordlander]

Very good so far, as usual. I like the simple look of her dress.

[kaspired]

Well, lots going on. February promises to be a busy month. Netflix has announced several good shows. "Sword Art Online" season 4, "Kid Cosmic" season 3, a few other new shows that look very promising. But the best? "The Dragon Prince" will be returning also! Yeah! But all that doesn't matter. "Disenchantment" next season is due out also.

Oh and this... as hinted at, the finished drawing for "Last Duet". I tried a different approach.

Pastels! I like pastels, they're so much fun. Plus up-close and personal.

Last Duet 2

Last Duet 3

Meet Kaori, from "Your Lie in April". This is one of a hand full of shows that still bring tears to my crusty jaded eyes. She is a violinist and plays duets with a certain pianist. I don't want to let any spoilers slip but there is one of those long agonizing illness and required death scene. But the final duet she plays is, just, simply, a total tearjerker. It worked.

Where are my tissues?

Last Duet

The other tear jerkers?

Spoiler

Futurama: Thanks Seymour! Monster Musume vol 9 where Lala (who is the resident "Death Incarnate") befriends a girl with terminal cancer. Violet Evergarden, the movie. She got me twice in one movie. And this duet. While the pianist is playing a recital, she is having life-or-death surgery. During the recital he imagines her standing on stage playing violin with him. But I think it's her ghost...

[kaspired]

I'm still on the "Miss Kobayashi" story. Here's my latest.

Kobayashi took the gang on a day trip and somehow ended up at Lick Observatory, on top of Mt Hamilton just south-east of San Jose California.

Why Lick Observatory? Well, the blue Audi is mine. I took the base photo a couple of years ago but never did anything with it. Until now.


First a character study, I wanted to make an educated guess on everybody's height. Then I go and change the perspective so all that work didn't really matter. This is three separate pieces of paper that I taped together and had commercially scanned.

Day Trip Sketch

Un-cropped version of the final.

Day Trip Unedited

Which lead to this:

Day Trip

[c_nordlander]

The "last duet" drawings are lovely. Just beautiful eyes.

I like the character chart a lot, too. Everyone has a unique build and stance.

"Day Trip" looks absolutely great. As usual, you draw awesome cars, and the characters and architecture are excellent.

And since we're comparing tear-jerkers:

Spoiler

For me, all I can think of is Mufasa's death in The Lion King, and Vader's redemption and death in Return of the Jedi (hmm, I see a bit of a pattern here). And yes, I had to try very hard not to cry over Seymour.

[kaspired]

I've been thinking about attempting this for a while and decided to actually do something about it.

This is the very first drawing I've ever posted. Anywhere. (Rewind back to 2008 or maybe possibly 2009.)

Original Idle Hands

That drawing was done on an 8 1/2 x 11-inch piece of printer paper with colored pencils (that was all I had). Also I was dumb. I came from a fine arts background, not graphic arts. I drew her using normal human proportions. It never crossed my mind there was such a thing as cartoon proportions. All I did was stick a cartoon head on a "normal" human body. Back then I never used any kind of background, just white of the paper and barely bothered to sign my name to it.

Away back when, one fateful afternoon I was bored and channel surfing. Guess what I found? My first thought was "Oh, that's that Simpson spin-off." There was the entire group (less the red-haired guy) standing in a room, when a purple haired cyclops walked in, pulled out an axe and proceeded to chop everybody into tiny bits. After I put my eyebrows back on, I was back the next day for another episode.

Fast forward to now...

Idle Hands Redeux

This drawing is done on 11 x 14-inch Bristol board and (only) 39 Copic colors.

Of course the practice sketch:

Idle Hands Sketch

[c_nordlander]

I love the concept of redrawing your old art. Eye-opening stuff. I think the old version was already good (though the hands are very idle lazy), and the colouring is simple but good, but your redraw is much more on-model for the Groening style, and the colouring is amazing. (Interestingly, as with a lot of your Futurama art, I think the sketch is actually more on-model than the coloured version. But they're both great.)

Me, I didn't have Futurama in my country back in 2000, so when I became friends with Graham I asked him to send me a VHS (I feel like I'm dating myself with this) with the first few episodes. The first one I watched was "Love's Labor's Lost in Space", and I was hooked from a couple of minutes in.

[kaspired]

Me, I didn't have Futurama in my country back in 2000, so when I became friends with Graham I asked him to send me a VHS (I feel like I'm dating myself with this) with the first few episodes. The first one I watched was "Love's Labor's Lost in Space", and I was hooked from a couple of minutes in.

VHS? Not Beta?

Oh yeah, super episode! I keep wondering "What if?". What if those episodes were something lame (Yes, there are several) like for example "40 percent Iron Chef". Would we have kept watching? To be brutal, for me, the answer would have been a simple no. Meaning the 'present' would be very different.

Let's hear it for the randomness of fate!