A House in Seattle.

For me, this is a study in perspective and making cartoony settings. Both of which are fairly difficult for me. This painting took me a long time to complete, I'm fairly happy with the finished product, but there's still some things that need to be refined! 

Below are the other drawings that were made in order to get to what you see above. 

This was the original concept for the house. The house is flat and therefore not very enticing to look at.

As it turned out to put that house in perspective was really difficult. So i made some sketches of a different but similar house, then i put that into perspective. The perspective drawing was actually made into a painting, but it turned out horrible. Why? The composition was very sloppy and didn't make sense. So all that was scrapped and had to be rethought. 

So I made some thumbnails trying to figure out the composition and try to get the house the attention it deserved. I moved it from the base of the hill to the top. I didn't really want to do it, but it made the most sense to do so.

Once that was done I made a rough drawing. 

That rough was scanned and i made a digital color key to figure out how it would be done, and to give me an idea if the drawing would work. All this while checking my email.

Once I approved the color key the rough was traced onto thick paper for painting.

A base paint coat was added to make sure everything still made sense.

Then i just kept painting and that's how I got what you see on the top of the page. I'm not a 'painter' by any means. But if anyone has any suggestions on improving my painting methods or would like to share their process please feel free to comment!

New.

John made a new post, so i decided to take a crack at drawing this image, It took me a while but with making preliminaries to better understand the image I got it just fine. This one was more of a challenge, so with the help of forms and line of action, i studied proportions pretty vigorously to make sure that the characters look right.
Below is the finished product.
Here are some drawings of the turtle, forms was pretty helpful but in the end, proportion seemed to dominate so i could make sure he wasn't too big or too small compared to the rabbit, it drove me crazy! I also tried some different expressions on the turtle, not sure why I did that.
Rabbit was a little trickier, in fact when i started i gave up and did some different expressions which i thought was funny. Instead of taking pleasure in how he hit the turtle I changed it to guilt and despair, "I didn't mean to hurt ya' i was just horsin' around! whaaaa!"After procrastinating with the face i decided to get down to business! what made it helpful was again, proportion, that rabbit is four heads wide, with that my line of action was more accurate, the butt goes one head high, body goes down one head, etc. The drawing on the bottom-right is him after he got shot in the face... don't ask.
Proportion, Construction, Line of Action, all helpful in achieving this drawing. I like to think that i'm also doing hierarchy but i'm still not totally sure what that is.

Day 3 - Really Getting It.

So I had the feeling that i was getting it, or getting a good grasp. So what I decided to do was think about what i've been learning and apply it to one of my characters. well 7 pages of drawings later I got it.
These are the first attmepts, we're very off but we have the right idea, the character also seems to be too fat compared to his body. I do however, like the way his shirt pops out of his sweater vest.

This one I narrowd his head a little, mostly what i tried to do was enlarge his eyes, maybe you can see the erase marks but i drew many differest shapes of eyes. Turns out that head might work if he were Asian. As you can see i did a 3/4 that i was very pleased with, that was diffenitly the look i was going for.I expanded on the 3/4, trying to break it down, it took me a while to find out what shape his jaw was and how it wraps around his face so i attempt on the profiles, not really to any success they don't make very much sense. I made a small one of the front in the upper right, i somewhat pleased with it so i work off of that for the next page.
I exaggerate the jaw in the upper right, though it was interesting it wasn't what i was going for. On this page i'm just drawing the jaw bone in different ways and trying to understand the front. I really enjoy the full body with that funny smile on him! I had to do some erasing for uploading b/c he kind of reminded me of black-face cartoons.
I really like the front on the left here, at this point i think i almost have it, when i did a view of the front looking down i realized that i didn't.
This is the page where i understood what was happening to all my drawings. I was thinking in 2d forms as opposed to 3d shapes, The whole point of this is to make your characters appear 3 dimensional and i haven't been thinking in that mind-set. I felt very silly, to think that adjusting one line would help me better understand what i was doing. it was with this i was able to get the 3/4, profile, and front to look unified, and with only a couple tries instead of many pages worth.
Everything makes so much more sense now that i have tried to use it on my own drawings, this isn't finished though, he looks a little older than I originally planned, i need to plumpen up his face a little more and try and combine my failed attempts and this completed one.

Step-by-Step?

There's a question-mark at the end because i'll be posting another step-by-step drawing and it is much easier to follow. So first up, we have some light sketches of the basic forms. A circle and ellipse for the head, ellipses for hands, weird oblong shape for the bow-tie, etc.

Here I started putting in some facial features, I started to lay out the shape of the feet and fingers, etc.finished the hands, here i noticed the his right arm is at the wrong angle, i correct the problem. i start on the hat.I finish the hat, add wrinkles in the tie, gloves and face. I draw in his wings, and darken the lines. All that was left to do now is shade in the image.
There are a couple problems with this reproduction and the original, first the left leg needs to be closer to his left hand. His left had appears to be smaller than his right hand which for perspectives sake can't be right because his left is the closest to us. And everything else would be more subtle, i need to work on the forms a bit more, and i didn't use a line of action which is also bad.