OK, let me start this off by saying: Kelsey and I are both just fine.

Now: We were in a one-car accident this morning.

Road conditions around here have been fairly consistently treacherous for the last week or so, and this morning Terry told me there were black ice warnings. I told her I’d be fine — I’m a very careful driver anyway, and I figured that most of the roads I’d be traveling on between the house and the office would have been traveled enough to have warmed them up.

Problem is, that didn’t apply to the road right outside our neighborhood.

Kelsey and I got in the Jeep and headed off for school, turning left out of our neighborhood. Fifty yards later, I hit a slick of ice and started sliding. My first thought was “Hey, y’know, no big deal, I’ll stop sliding here in a second.” But I didn’t. I fishtailed back and forth for a few seconds before shooting off the right shoulder, into a drainage ditch and headfirst into an embankment — given that the mud we drove through probably slowed us down a little, I’m guessing we hit the embankment at around thirty miles per hour.

As soon as we were stopped, I turned around immediately to check on Kelsey (all I could think once it became obvious an accident was coming was “Kelsey Kelsey Kelsey Kelsey”)… who was perfectly fine, and only upset because the impact made her drop the fuzzy little frog she was playing with.

I called Terry as soon as I was sure both Kelsey and I were physically okay, but I had to cut the call short because of some unexpected help (Terry has her own version of events which describe that far too short phone call, so I’ll let her tell that part of the story). I complain sometimes about where we live and talk about missing Boston, but I’m fairly sure what happened next wouldn’t have happened had this accident occured up north: not sixty seconds after the accident, a guy pulled off the side of the road in his ginormous Chevy truck and helped drag me out of the ditch. And the state trooper who showed up to check on us was my neighbor — who thankfully didn’t write us up for having expired out-of-state tags (a situation which was fixed this afternoon). Terry called a tow truck (thank you again, Beth, for the AAA membership you got Terry for her birthday)… and we waited for quite awhile, since the tow trucks around here were quite busy this morning. Supposedly there were numerous accidents all around our area; the tow guy had trouble navigating the roads himself to come get us.

The truck wasn’t really damaged, surprisingly, outside of a blown right front tire, and even that we were able to get re-inflated. I was so, so, so lucky: there was no one else on the road at the time I started skidding, and where I went off the road I managed to split right between a row of mailboxes and a telephone pole. Where I hit the embankment, I was two feet to the right of a cement drainage pipe. Even the fact that I was driving the Jeep and not my Mazda — the Mazda would have been severely damaged by the crash, and quite possibly so would Kelsey and I. All in all, if I’ve got to be in a car accident — especially with my kid in the car — this was a good one to have.

Tonight’s post is a study for a project I’m doing for a friend of mine. Whatever I wind up doing it with it, I can tell you that what you see here is not exactly what’ll end up as the final version — for one, this is just kinda off and furthermore not all that exciting (though it’s an inhaler…how exciting can it be?). But it’s a start, and it was practice drawing something non-organic and something which is made out of curved plastic rather that all hard straight edges, so it was a worthwhile to attempt even if this particular attempt wasn’t quite there.

(Estimate time: 20 minutes.)

And as a bonus tonight, I can now show you the results from yesterday’s purposefully-sketchy drawing, though I’m going to put it under the fold so as not to spam you with too many images at once:

Read the rest of this entry »

I almost don’t want to post this one, just because it’s a precursor to something else, but I also don’t want to miss a day’s posting, especially when I actually did draw something today. (And by my own rules for the project, if I don’t post it today, I don’t get to post it at all.) So the following picture is purposefully cartoony and kind of sketchy and using only one line weight. But I’m not explaining why quite yet.

(Estimated time: 20 minutes. On this part, anyway.)

More to come on this one in the next few days, I hope. But if you’re burning for something a little bit more complete, you can go check out my newest image up over at Deviant Art. It might look a little familiar if you’ve been following along with this project.

Also: Go Patriots! Official Knee-Jerk Prediction: Patriots 42, Giants 19.

For your extra Saturday enjoyment, I give you a piece I just finished coloring in Photoshop. I know I’m not allowed to draw Superman for my 3×5 Project anymore, but this isn’t part of that — in fact, I didn’t want to draw Superman at all, but Kelsey pretty much begged me to, so I did. And since it’s not part of the project, I decided to take it further and finish out the colors digitally.

Superman by ~AllenHolt on deviantART

The coloring in this piece was mainly me trying to figure out a process for digital coloring/painting that’s going to work for me. I’m not all the way there yet (which I think is obvious looking at the final piece), but I’m getting closer. The original drawing was done in pencil, inked, then scanned and manipulated in Illustrator; the coloring was then done in Photoshop. I learned a lot putting this piece together and I hope to be able to learn a whole lot more about using Photoshop as part of my artistic process soon.

Also: I went and got myself a Deviant Art account for posting my stuff. If any of you happen to have accounts there, feel free to let me know!

Since I punked out last night and didn’t draw anything yesterday, I took advantage of the commitment-free afternoon to put a little bit more effort into today’s drawing:

(Estimated time: 90 minutes.)

For those of you who don’t read comics or watch cartoons, the fellow above is J’onn J’onzz, the Martian Manhunter, longtime staple of the Justice League.  (I find it mildly interesting that all four of the superheroes I’ve drawn for this project have been members of DC Comics’ Justice League.  I’m going to have to switch over and draw some Marvel heroes at some point.)  This drawing, as you can probably tell, wasn’t finished in ink but rather just in pencil — I got some new soft leads for my favorite trusty lead holder (mechanical pencil) yesterday and wanted to see what I could do with it… and discovered that, surprisingly, I’m happier finishing these drawings in ink right now.  I say “surprisingly” because ink has never really been my forte, but I’m getting more and more comfortable with it and getting happier and happier with the results.  Yay practice!

I can see things I think I could have done better, but I’m pretty happy with it overall.  I definitely feeling like I’ve improved since the beginning of the month, and I think most of that improvement has come from being more engaged in the process and putting more of myself into what I’m working on.

And with that, I’m going to go watch my kids play in the snow!

Went out to dinner and Barnes and Noble with the family; too tire to do a proper card tonight, but didn’t want to let the day pass without posting one.  (On the plus side, though:  picked up America: The Book by Jon Stewart et al for seven bucks in the budget section at B&N!)

Believe it or not, even though he’s the Official Mascot of this site, I’ve never once in my life tried drawing Yoda.  So here he is.  I’m not 100% satisfied with it, but I’m, say, 85-90% satisfied, and that’s pretty damn good for me.

(Estimated time: 1 hour.)

Another experiment with color tonight, this time with some brush pens I picked up at Office Depot yesterday. And much like my last experiment with color, I’m really not particularly happy with the results… but I never imagined that every entry in this project would be astounding, so I post the stuff I like (the last two entries) with the stuff I don’t (this one).  Back to black-and-white/pen-and-ink tomorrow.  (I do intend to work on some coloring with Photoshop later on, but not just yet; I don’t want to get away from drawing, which I’m enjoying too much right now.)

Don’t ask me what the deal is with that stripe thing in the back is.  I honestly couldn’t tell you.

(Estimate time: 35 minutes.)

Trying to draw something non-organic, which I haven’t done much of lately, and something with a little bit of texture on it.  Not perfect, but not too bad considering.

(Estimated time: 45 minutes.)

Since I was so unhappy with the way my post from Saturday turned out, I decided to try another take on the same kind of thing, but without color.  I also tried a couple of different techniques during construction and inking, most noticably the use of thinner lines overall, which I think helped the final product considerably.  I actually really like the way this one turned out.

(Estimated time: 40 minutes.)