Networking 101

Hello world, my name is Sara Cooney. Here's my business card. Hope to hear from you soon.

Need for speed: Speed drawing pose practice

I've always thought that speed is a skill that is very important to comic and manga artists. Meeting deadlines and also being able to continuously create new ideas isn't something that can be done if you spend 30 minutes perfecting each character's pose. This is my problem.
To remedy it, I've been trying to make the habit of practicing 45 second drawings on Posemaniacs.com It's a great website that I was introduced to in college for my drawing 101 class.
I've been doing sets of 10 as recommended by the website. Within only one week I can already see improvement in the completeness and structure of the poses.
It's an exercise that I recommend any budding artist add to their regimen. It only takes about 7 minutes for a set of 10, 45 second drawings, and onlly 5 minutes if you do the 30 second drawings.
That will be the next step up for me.

My first bout.

Today's practice.

You can tell that the drawings are much more complete.

I'm very happy about it. I hope if you've never heard of posemaniacs you will check it out. It's a great resource. 

Church Notes 2

The night before church and I got the karaoke bug, so I went and sang from 12:00am untill 4:30am, went home, slept for a couple hours and then went to church at 8:30...
The fight to stay awake was so real. Before service started my roommate and I went to the nearby shopping mall for breakfast and I got a sketchbook to aid in the struggle. It worked! I managed to stay awake the whole time.
And here are the notes:

There's Something in the Water.

Last night I was slumming around and talking to my roommate about how tired I was. The meanwhile I drew this. 

I thought out loud, "Why do I always draw scary things?"

Eri said to me, because you draw to relive your stress right? You're just expressing that stress. 

(In Japanese)

Oh, duh. *facepalm*

Reunions

 

Today I got to hang out with my old friend from college. We had a great time catching up, talking art and even had a little painting party. 

It was good to see ya Alex!

My little brother made his first painting, a knife sharpener that he modeled in Minecraft.

 

Alex painted me. 

This is what I drew. It started out as a little hedgehog but turned into a hell-dog.

It was really fun.

My Church Notes

Something about singing worship songs with my congregation and listening to a good message from my pastor just puts me in the creative zone for drawing. Usually at that time the only paper I have on hand is my church notes. Oh well, here's the picture I drew.

Launchpad (dejavu)

So, I've started a new website! http://www.parapearl.com/
I really want to connect in the art circles of Japan and one thing that everybody has and needs here to connect... business cards.
That's right, I made the website to put on my business cards. Laughable, I know, but the experience of re-designing the site, thinking about my statement and image, as well as revisiting my portfolio and art documents really was a good thing.
Having finished my first comic, Oh Israel, I went into the frenzy of thinking, "What's next?!"
...
Well, I've taken a step. We'll see what the next one is together.