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Have you ever tried working with krita? It's opensource, developed mainly for anime artists and has a lot of (wacom) pen power under the hood... :wink1:
I use it a lot for drawing simple illustrations for school purposes (not even close to your skill level).
My daughter used that she's done anime for a while and has just started with drawing tablets
 
Your daughter does great work!

Yeah, I've got 2 Wacom tablets that I use. One is a Wacom Cintiq 13HD, which allows me to draw directly on a screen like it was a piece of paper, but it requires external power and doesn't have touch features. The other Wacom tablet I use is an Intuos5 touch tablet, which doesn't have a screen, but it comes with full touch capabilities that are super useful, and it's portable. Both are a bit old now, like my computers and Adobe software, but they still work like a charm and are more than enough to help me flesh out my designs.
Those Wacom wires are a hassle if your gear isn't stationary, like mine. The latest iPads knocked my Cintiq back into it's box. Adobe apps have simplified UIs on iPad, there are tons of competing art and animation apps. The M1 chip+AudioUnitV3 also allows me to run DAWs like Beatmaker so I can draw and compose without connecting externals. But I too keep my pencil sharpener near. Love your sketches!
 
Have you ever tried working with krita? It's opensource, developed mainly for anime artists and has a lot of (wacom) pen power under the hood... :wink1:
I use it a lot for drawing simple illustrations for school purposes (not even close to your skill level).
My daughter used that she's done anime for a while and has just started with drawing tablets
I don't think I've heard of Krita before! Can't say I'm much of an anime guy, but I looked into the program, and there was something about it that caught my eye: apparently, not only can it be used as a substitute for Photoshop, but you can animate with it and export your work as a video! Granted, it's raster-based frame-by-frame animation, so apparently there are no motion tweens or any other vector-based features you get in Flash CS6/Animate CC or some other animation programs, but it still sounds like it'd be fun to play around with either way.

I might just download Krita and try it out on my PC. That said, I'm pretty comfortable using Adobe's software, though I should mention that I use Adobe CS6, the last perpetually-licensed (and in my opinion, actually good) version of their software.
Those Wacom wires are a hassle if your gear isn't stationary, like mine. The latest iPads knocked my Cintiq back into it's box. Adobe apps have simplified UIs on iPad, there are tons of competing art and animation apps. The M1 chip+AudioUnitV3 also allows me to run DAWs like Beatmaker so I can draw and compose without connecting externals. But I too keep my pencil sharpener near. Love your sketches!
Well, I'm used to working in Adobe CS6 at home, but I do use an older MacBook Pro and my Intuos5 tablet when I'm on the go. That iPad idea sounds great and all, but I can't afford an iPad right now, and I doubt I could run my older Adobe software on it anyway. I'll keep all that in mind though when I decide it's time for an upgrade! Thanks!
 
No new updates on anything bicycle-related at the moment, but I do have a small art-related update for those of you who are interested.

I had the idea to create a simple animation based on a sketch of an International Harvester Metro bread van I drew a few months back. I whipped up this rough storyboard animatic of my idea in Photoshop CS6 last night, and I like where it's heading. I've been meaning to brush up on my animation skills, and this little van would be a great way to get back in practice!

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First is this 1952 Schwinn straight bar I got at the Haysville, KS bicycle swap meet earlier this year. Odds are this'll just be a quick and easy build, as I just plan to wire-brush it down to bare metal, give it a satin clear coat, and throw on most if not all the parts I had on my previous 1952 Schwinn straight bar I built last year.

Next, for a trip on the wilder side, I'm building this 1958 Schwinn cantilever frame I got from another bike friend up in Missouri. The main reason I'm throwing this bike together is because I want to learn how to spray paint a bike.
Looking forward to checking out these builds!

Your artwork is amazing! I love your hot rod/custom car aesthetic. Do you have an Instagram? Or a webpage where you showcase or sell your stuff?
 
Looking forward to checking out these builds!

Your artwork is amazing! I love your hot rod/custom car aesthetic. Do you have an Instagram? Or a webpage where you showcase or sell your stuff?
Thanks! You can find the threads for both bikes here and here.

Thank you! I have an Instagram account, but there's not much on it right now. I'm still learning how to use Instagram at the moment. I also have an online portfolio on Artstation, though most of what's on there is from my college days over 5 years ago. I'm hoping to update both pages with a lot more fresh art soon. I don't have a store page yet, but I'm working towards having some stuff to sell either on Redbubble.com, or at my dad's shop in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, Gasoline Alley Classics.

It's admittedly been a bit of a slow burn just getting back in the habit of drawing again after the last few years, but I've made a lot of progress this year, and with any luck, I'll have some stickers, t-shirts, art/photography prints, and maybe even some children's activity books ready to sell in time for Christmas.
 
Keep plugging away at your build when you can. Thanks for sharing your killer sketches. I like your style! Best of luck jumping into the biz side of your art too.
 
Keep plugging away at your build when you can. Thanks for sharing your killer sketches. I like your style! Best of luck jumping into the biz side of your art too.
Thanks! I'm happy to share my work with you guys, and I'm hoping this whole "commercial art business" pans out too. Don't worry, I'm still aiming to knock this bike out before the end of July!
 
I sure miss my XB
I still like the looks of both the 1st and 2nd-gen XBs. I used to want one of those for the longest time back when I was a teenager, as they looked super fun and easy to customize. Scion just seemed to carry that whole "fast and fun" aesthetic that 90s JDM cars had, when everyone else apparently forgot how to make fun cars.
 
Okay, this year has not gone at all like I expected. I thought I'd be knocking out bike projects left and right, only to instead switch gears completely and get back into working more seriously on my art, especially on the commercial side. Not a bad trade-off, but I still want to keep making progress on my bikes. Fortunately, I have some (belated) progress to report on The Old West, as well as an update on what else I've been working on these past few months.

Back on October 7th, I was back at the USA BMX Headquarters & Museum for the 2nd Annual Vintage Nationals to check out the scene, hang out with some friends, and cruise around on my favorite bike, Shoestring. While I was there, I met another guy, Dusty, who just so happened to have an AMF-built Western Flyer of his own! His was more on the wild, custom, BMX klunker-side of things than what I'm aiming for with my bike, but it was super cool none the less!
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Well, Dusty and I got talking, and it turned out he didn't need the original rear wheel that came with his bike (which I needed,) and I had a couple of parts that I didn't need (that he needed.) So I traded a rear basket and an AMF-specific rear rack for a rear wheel. Dusty'll use the parts I gave him on his Western Flyer, and I'll use the wheel he gave me on my Western Flyer. (I didn't get a photo of the wheel I got from Dusty, unfortunately. I'll probably show it later.)
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About a month later, I was in Dewey, OK for a swap meet. I didn't find anything at the swap meet I wanted to take home with me, but while I was in town, I picked up this AMF-built Pilot bike for $20 from someone off Facebook Marketplace.
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This bike is a near-perfect parts donor for The Old West, as it has the correct wheels, handlebars, handlebar stem, bearings, bearing cups and other hardware I need to get Grandpa's bike back in action! I took it all apart a week ago so I'd have all the parts I need ready to go.
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I'd like to get to work on this bike again soon, but it might have to wait until after the holidays, and after I finish another project I've been working on during this time... but that's a story for the next post.
 
For the past year, I'd been working on @Shrunken_Head_Pedaler's award for his bike Hellion that he built for the 2022 Rat Rod Bikes Build Off.
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Well, it took way longer to finish than I wanted, but I managed to get it done at last back in October. @Shrunken_Head_Pedaler was super cool to work with during the whole thing, and I'm genuinely thankful for his patience and feedback throughout the whole process of illustrating his bike. It was a challenge illustrating Hellion properly, but I'm glad I did it. Drawing David's bike has got me charged to draw more bikes in the hopes of putting them on stickers, t-shirts, and anything else I could throw a bike design on!
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In fact, whenever I wasn't working on David's art or any of my more commercial stuff, I was whipping up multiple concepts for custom bikes I'd like to build sometime out of all the donor frames I've accumulated over the years. These 2 pages are but a mere fraction of all the bike sketches I've drawn this year. I'm hoping that I'll get some time next year to really start knocking out some custom bike builds based on some of these sketches, but that all depends on how fast I can knock out this next project I've got in the works...
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And now for the big project I've been working on since about August of this year. After getting back in the swing of working on my art again, I decided to try making something tangible with my art that I could sell. After discussing it with my family and friends, I decided the best starting point for selling my art would be to make a children's coloring book to sell at my dad's shop, Gasoline Alley Classics Inc. in Sapulpa, Oklahoma. Dad doesn't have a lot of stuff for kids in his shop right now, so we figured that with my cartoony style, I could make a series of coloring and activity books for kids who are travelling Route 66 with their families. I'll also make some sticker packs using the same designs in the coloring books, but that's for later.

First things first, I had to figure out what the subject of the coloring book would be. I like drawing classic and custom cars, so the theme for this first coloring book will be all '50s Rod and Custom cars. Once that was decided, I had to figure out the art direction for the coloring book. That's where these first 2 pages come in. Most of the designs on the left were about figuring out how "custom" the custom cars would be, as well as deciding how much detail I should or shouldn't pack into a coloring book for young kids. The designs on the right were all about exploring different art styles, though I ultimately stuck close to the style of the 7th Mercury lead sled on the left page. Still, I never toss out ideas, and I'll certainly come back to those other sketches at a later date. (Especially #15; I want that design on a T-shirt!)
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Now onto the cars that will be in the final coloring book. One of the earliest cars I worked on was a '50s-era T-Bucket Ford. As you can see, I went through multiple designs before landing on #10, and even that one will need some refinement down the road. I'm used to adding a lot of detail to my illustrations, so it's kind of a challenge to take a "less is more" approach to my art, given that this art is supposed to be colored in with crayons and markers by 5-year-olds. Still, it's a fun creative problem to solve, and it's satisfying when I figure it out!
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Some designs feel like they're right, until you come back to them at a later date. That's what happened with most of these designs for '32, and '33/'34 Ford hot rods. I liked them at first, until I looked at them again a few weeks later and realized I could do better, especially after drawing other cars.
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Some cars are... admitted tougher for me to draw than others, for whatever reason. This '40 Ford Coupe proved particularly difficult to draw just right, so much so that as a way to vent, I drew the 7th '40 Ford the way I'd rather draw one, as a radically chopped, channeled, fenderless hot rod unlike anything else I've seen before. Obviously, it's not making the cut for this coloring book, but I like this sketch too much to do nothing with it later.
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Sometimes all it takes is one more try before you get it right. I just changed the angle I drew the car, lifted it off the ground, and gave it a '39 Mercury grill, and it worked!
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Another iconic lead sled: a 1951 "shoebox" Chevy fastback.
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It wouldn't be a '50s Rod and Custom coloring book without some finned '50s classics! I wanted to draw 2 of my favorite finned '50s Mopars, the 1957/8 Plymouth and the 1957/8 Desoto. The Plymouth is kind of special to my neck of the woods, given the 1957 Plymouth Belvedere time capsule "Miss Belvedere" that was buried then unearthed here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. That said, the 1958 Plymouth Fury tends to be a slightly more popular version of the same car, (and in my opinion, a slightly better-looking one too) most likely due to a certain Stephen King book and film that featured the car. So to avoid making this Plymouth one version or the other, I drew it from the side and removed the side trim, that way it could be whichever year or trim level of the car the colorist wants.
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I also made it a little less obvious if the Desoto was a 1957 or 1958, though the rear bumper is off a 1957 model based on the exhaust tips.
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The next car I drew for the coloring book was a 1956 Oldsmobile, a popular choice for lead sleds back in the day. I made this one a 4-door, partly because I own a 4-door 1964 Mercury Comet, and because I found some period photos of 1955-1957 4-door Oldsmobiles built as custom lead sleds. Even back in the 1950s, there were folks out there who loved themselves a good 4-door!
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Another personal favorite of mine: a 1949-1950 Shoebox Ford, chopped, channeled, and slammed to the ground. This one took a few tries to get the roof just right.
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#19 was the final design for the custom '49-'51 Mercury lead sled that started this project.
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Remember how I said it sometimes takes one more try before you get it right? Well that's how it panned out with this '33/'34 Ford coupe and '32 Ford roadster.
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I wanted one more hot rod to help balance out the large amount of customs that'll feature in this coloring book. It's still 5/7, but it's close enough. I chose a '37 Chevy, as it had a cool body style, and it'd help balance out the amount of Fords in the coloring book. Admittedly, it was very tempting to draw this one as a slammed-down lead sled, but I stuck with it, as difficult as it was to draw this car this way.
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And last but not least, one more Mopar to round out the customs. This time I picked a 1939 Dodge coupe, as I'd seen a few cool examples of these cars chopped and dropped. I may need to tweak this one further, as I removed the vents in the hood to simplify it, but I may need to add that back as it's part of the look of these cars.
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Sometimes you got to try all the methods to find out which one works best for you. That's what happened with the next stage of my '50s Rod & Custom coloring book.

I tried cleaning up my line art using Photoshop and my Cintiq tablet, only to quit after 5 minutes when I realized I'd spend more time using the eraser tool than the brush tool. I then tried tracing over my sketches in Adobe Illustrator, which yielded quick results, but made my art look kind of bland and soulless. What I found worked best for me was to tape a piece of copy paper over my Cintiq tablet, and directly trace over the original sketch (or in this case, the earlier vector trace) with a fine line Crayola marker. Now the lines look crisp and clear, but they still look hand-drawn! I'll polish everything in Photoshop to really make this designs nice, but for now, this is a good start.
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I also wanted to embolden some of the lines to make my designs pop a bit more, while leaving the detail lines thinner, sort of like how some of my favorite cartoon characters were drawn over 20 years ago. That worked well for the Plymouth shown below, but once I got to more detailed drawings like the Desoto and '32 Ford, it became trickier to figure out which lines to embolden, as well as just how many detail lines there needed to be. At this moment, I'm back at the start of the inking phase, trying to find a solid art direction that'll work for all 12 designs that I plan to put into this coloring book. Hopefully I'll figure out this next step after I spend some time experimenting on it this week.
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So that's what I've been up to as of late. It's been a series of challenges between making this coloring book and learning how to use Instagram to help promote my work, but I'm determined to figure it out as I go, because I can't think of any other way I'd like to earn a living than by doing something I love.
 
As a pen based drawing software I would recommend that you take a look at Krita.
It's open source and aimed at Manga artists, so it should suit your needs pretty well.. 😉
 
Very cool. Thanks for the peek into your process, getting a book of your illustrations published must be so exciting
Thanks Matti! The process is always my favorite part, so I'm more than happy to share it with everyone! I'm definitely excited to make a book of my own illustrations, but I'm also quite a bit nervous as I've never done this before. The whole process of making a coloring book has been way more challenging than expected, and there's still a lot left that I don't know how to do and have yet to figure out. Fortunately, I've got plenty of friends and family members who can help me on those tougher parts, especially on the production side of things. This book's not been easy, but hardly anything is when you try it for the first time! That's why I got to figure out this first one, so the next coloring book is even easier!
 
As a pen based drawing software I would recommend that you take a look at Krita.
It's open source and aimed at Manga artists, so it should suit your needs pretty well.. 😉
Yeah, you mentioned Krita before. I still need to check that out at some point. I'm still pretty comfortable with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator CS6, it's just that I'm not as comfortable using a tablet as I am drawing on paper. That, and I'm a bit of an OCD perfectionist. Heck, if you look closely at the sketches (and their corresponding numbers,) you'll see that I still erase and redraw a lot of my stuff all the time!
I don't think it's the software that's the problem, it's the user - ME! 🤣

That said, I'm down to try new tools if for no other reason than to experiment, and Krita does look like fun!
 
Jeez, didn't realize it had been almost a full year since I last updated this thread.

I hit a slight snag with my current Step-Thru Build Off entry, so I'm switching gears and I'm back to work on The Old West here. I've got a family reunion coming up on October 20th, and I'd like to get this old AMF back to riding condition by then. I don't expect to have everything buttoned up by then, but if I can at least get it to move under pedal power again, then that's good enough for now. Good news is there isn't much left to do on this bike aside from cleaning up a few parts, picking out bearings and bearing cups, and just reassembling everything.

Earlier this Tuesday, I checked the frame's alignment and thankfully found that all I needed to do was adjust the dropouts a little bit.
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Later that afternoon, I took a few parts by my dad's shop to clean up using the wire wheel. I didn't give myself enough time to really do all I wanted to though, as I also wanted to check out the Tuesday Cruise-In in Tulsa that day. I took some before photos, but I'll save the after photos for when I've finished everything like I want.
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As a side note, for anyone wondering what happened with the coloring book I was working on... well, it didn't happen. Not yet anyways. As soon as I started on the linework in Photoshop, all progress came to a screeching halt by the start of this year. I only managed to finish the line art on one car and start on another before the amount of work it'd take to complete all 12 designs felt like sandpaper to the brain. I had learned, once again, that I had bit off more than I could reasonably chew. Still, I plan to continue working on my art, but this time, I'm taking it one drawing at a time.
 

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