Late January Early February Sketchdump

I've been pretty busy since Ohayocon in late January, so I haven't had as much time for sketching as I'd like.  Between painting Chapter 4 and finishing up con commissions, time for sketching was pretty sparse.  When I lose sketching time, I often neglect to do little doodles, and my work can stagnate and become stiff.  Towards the second half of this batch, I made a concentrated effort to do looser sketches- mostly value studies.

Noodling around with one of Copic's translucent marker papers.  It's not quite as transparent as tracing paper, but it takes marker inks a lot better.  This was rendered over a sketch.  I could have tightened it by reinking it, but I wanted my forms to be distinct through shadow, not through inked delineation.
 

Playing around with a trick for minor foreshortening.  This has always been an area of weakness for me, which is ironic since I'm currently working on a comic that relies on massive size discrepancies.

Recently I was introduced to the technique of utilizing a non-watersafe pen or marker to create simple washes in my sketchbook.  I use a Stabilo Pen 68 and apply the darkest hue first, and draw my lighter hues from there with a waterbrush.

Still noodling around with that technique.

WARNING:  Possibly NSFW Figure Studies below the cut.

This technique is great for monochromatic value studies with figure work.  I've been having some trouble with values in my watercolors, so I figured some practice would help with that.

One of my Valentine's presents was a Good Housekeeping cookbook, purchased for all the pictures of food.  I guess someone was listening when I said I wanted to do more food studies.

Gesture studies of my cat, Bowie.

More food and cat studies.  Since a lot of the photos I worked from didn't have a particularly dark value, I made swatches to the side to pull color from.