Figure Turnarounds - Now with muscles!

Here's a study done for figure class, continuing on the turnaround trend but now trying to put muscles on them as well. It's pretty tough, but we're gonna start working on studying muscles in class so these should improve pretty quick, I need to go over all the origins and insertions again.

As far as this particular one is concerned I'm pretty happy with it for a first attempt, I botched up the arms and lost the swoosh of his pose, but I think some of the bigger masses are working well. As always, practice practice!

Thanks to watchstock on dA for the reference!

Anatomy Study - Neck

Here's some studies done during figure class today, working on the muscles and forms of the neck and trying to get the head situated on to the body properly. I'm feeling pretty good about them, but the jaw on the one in the lower left is still throwing me off. Practice practice!

Exaggerated Figures - Dumpy

I'm sure you'll all thoroughly enjoy this subject matter and can appreciate it for all its artistic beauty.

But yeah, this is another part of our assignment for figure class, to create an ideal couple and two exaggerated couples. Hopefully obviously, this is one of my exaggerated couples, the short and dumpy variety. The next ones will probably be elegant and toned and wispy, which will probably be somewhat more appealing. But in any case, enjoy the fatties and their fatty skeletons.

Master Copy - Rockwell

Here's the final Rockwell copy, had lots of fun rendering this guy out and learned a ton. I think this is probably one of my most successful oil paintings to date, both in the form, color, and drawing.

This one was super useful to study to learn some stuff about color, and Rockwell's form is so clear that it's really great to study to learn facial features.

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Master Copy - Rockwell WIP

Here's a new image for today. Apologies for not updating over the weekend, I was out of town visiting with family, teachers, and tasty oil paintings, and I figured your inboxes would prefer to be asked forgiveness than permission.

Anywho, this is the beginning stages of our latest assignment in head painting class, which is to copy a piece by the great Norman Rockwell. Needless to say it'll be no easy task, but I'm looking forward to it.

I tried to focus a lot on this drawing, cause most of my portraits so far have fallen apart in the drawing more than the painting, so I worked this all up in perspective, made sure to compare distances between features and wiped out and repainted any errors I could find. I think it was definitely worth it, the likeness isn't perfect but I think the structure is solid. There are some issues with the eyes and nose that I fixed but didn't get a chance to photograph, so it should be in pretty good shape. We'll see tomorrow when the rest of the painting goes down!

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Figure Drawing 4-21-11

Here's a figure drawing and muscle/form analysis. I'm starting to feel more confident with placing muscles on the figure, especially in the forearm, I think I'm finally figuring out how to orient it properly so the muscles can be figure out. The secret is in the ulnar furrow, which is the line of the ulna from elbow to little finger that's subcutaneous and separates the flexors and extensors. If you know where that is, it's easy to figure out where the flexors, extensors, and supinators should go, which makes forearms pretty simple.

Still gotta work on getting the forms down solidly though, Dean Cornwell's charcoal studies are great to look at for that, he was a master of form wedging for sure.

Thanks to justmeina on dA for the great reference!

Photo Journalist Story

Here's a project for our Visual Narrative class. This was a pretty crazy ride, the assignment was to do an 8-page comic and base every single panel off a photo by a provided list of photo journalists. It was really challenging cause as soon as I felt a good idea started to flow I ran out of related photos, so it changed gears from epic story to random comedy pretty quickly, haha. But it was pretty fun regardless and I learned some good stuff.

Oil Portrait - Feature Studies

Here's the completed study from yesterday's post, added a Rembrandt mouth and an eye and mouth of one of his contemporaries, Pickenoy.

Overall the Pickenoys were easier to replicate, his forms are much clearer and defined, Rembrandt has such extreme subtlety that it's hard to see where or how to put the paint. I learned a lot from these though, I think it's gonna benefit my portraits a lot.

Oil Portrait - Rembrandt Eye

Here's a quick study I did of a Rembrandt eye today, it is nooowhere near as subtle as his and my forms and values need a lot of work, but some of the color variation, though a bit too extreme, is working pretty well I think. Gotta keep workin 'dem oils!

Composition Studies - Booth

Here's another composition study, this one's a lot more general than a lot of my previous ones, which was nice cause it allowed for more focus on the big overall shapes. The others are good for picking up the subtle nuances, so it's good to do both.

Ranger Sketch

Here's a drawing I did today as an example for some character commissions which I'm offering over on dA. If you care, feel free to check 'em out: [Link]

After doing some character thumbnails, little 2-inch doodles in my sketchbork, I worked up this pencil sketch, just getting everything set in place and making sure the character is looking how I want it.

After I was happy with the sketch, I went in with some dip pens and sumi ink and lined the whole thing, clarifying some stuff and adding additional details here and there. I prefer dip pens to standard pens simply for the added line variety you can get out of them.

After the lines were done I pulled out my trusty brush and a cup of water and went over the whole thing with thinned down sumi ink washes. This is probably my favorite step, I always love adding tone and wet media makes such gorgeous abstract shapes. Plus this reminds me of the B&W drawings found in game manuals which I just love.

And finally I went in and did some digital color washes in painter, just to spruce it up a bit and play off the lovely stuff made in the ink washes.

Oil Portrait - Zorn Palette Extended 2

Update on yesterday's portrait, went in and added all the bangles and jangles and fangles. They didn't turn out as metallic as they should be, I need to take more care when mixing up their colors and values, but overall I'm satisfied with how this piece has turned out, I think the flesh is working well and the thin paint in the background is sitting back in space pretty good.

Some things that'll need to be worked on will be getting a more accurate likeness to the reference, getting more color variation, and making some more interesting compositions. Slowly but surely getting more comfortable with oils, though.

WIP Oil Portrait & Sketches

What do you mean I forgot to update yesterday? Preposterous!

Ok maaaaybe I missed it, had a pretty weird day, pretty much all our scheduled classes didn't happen and we were gonna pull an all nighter but I didn't so everything was crazy and I forgot but that's ok. To make up for it, here's a double dose of stuff!

First off here's a work-in-progress of a remake of Monday's oil portrait, I spent a lot more time working on the drawing and focused much more on trying to render the forms accurately, it made a big difference and I think it's much better in terms of handling color and temperature. Gonna go back in to it tomorrow probably and add the bangles and jangles and all that business, should be pretty fun!

And secondly here's some random sketches and scribbles from the good ol' sketchbook. It's been a while since I've just chilled out and drawn like this, been so busy working on full-on homework stuff, but this was really fun and quite relaxing so I'm gonna try and make it a point to spend 30 mins or an hour a day just sketching for fun.

Composition Studies - Wang

Here's another comp study of a piece by the ever-awesome Wei Wang. I really liked the abstract design of this piece when I first saw it, and the more I worked and dug in to it the more awesome subtlety I saw him putting in to it; there's soooo much care and thought in his shape design, it was really cool to explore. Obviously this is pretty detailed for just a comp study, but I was having a lot of fun with it and did learn some stuff about subtlety that I wouldn't have gotten if I only took it to the big-shapes stage.

Oil Portrait - Zorn Palette Extended

Here's another oil portrait. Like that Steven Assael copy, this was the extended zorn palette, which is titanium white, cadmium yellow pale, yellow ochre, cadmium red light, alizarin crimson, ultramarine blue, and ivory black. Despite only having 7 colors, it's a pretty complex palette to work in, when you learn about using relative grays to get warms and cools with just the 4 colors of the zorn palette, adding more chromatic colors and a real blue gives soooo many possibilities that it's hard to decide what to use, and we're still nowhere near using a full color palette, haha.

As far as this particular painting goes, I'm kinda on the fence with it. I like some of the color and handling of paint, but my drawing is way off and it's not working too well compositionally. The reference also had really crazy light so it was hard to tell which planes were which, so my lighting ended up being somewhat inconsistent. But, practice makes perfect I suppose.

Composition Studies - Tangled

Here's a quick study from one of the concepts for Tangled, which I saw today and loved, probably some of my favorite visuals in quite some time, especially this scene and how it repeats itself throughout the film with different lighting and totally different moods, half light and half dark in the beginning, dark in the middle, and light in the end.

Animated films are so good to look at for sequential art, seeing how compositions and colors change and are exaggerated to create mood. Love it love it.

Form Wedging & 3D Bridgman

Here's a quick figure sketch from imagination today to practice form wedging, as well as a cool project I'm working on, trying to turn a bridgman drawing in to a 3D model in SketchUp.

It's no easy task, partly because it just isn't and partly because sketchup isn't at all designed to do organic modeling, but nevertheless I spent the day solving problems and slowly but surely it started to work, I'm pretty happy with the way the refined arm is turning out, if I can get the rest of it to that level I'll be satisfied. Those external obliques are a pain though, spent a good hour fiddling with them and still couldn't find a good solution. Will work more on this and update it as it progresses.

Cast Drawing - Flat Tone

More progress on ze cast droaring. This step was to lay down a flat value in all the shadow shapes and get it as smooth and consistent as possible. This kicks off the rendering portion of the process, and it makes the shapes clearer so it's easier to see inaccuracies and fix them.

Despite being a bit tedious, this step is always fun and pretty relaxing. You've gotta go in with a super sharp piece of charcoal and fill in as much paper texture as you can, picking off the dark spots that end up on the "mountains" of the paper with your eraser. It's a lot of slow noodling, but it's easy and looks great when you get through with it. Next up will be to add 4 more value steps, blocking in all the major changes in value, then from then on out it will be refining transitions until it looks like reality.

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Figure Drawings

Here's some stuff from today's life drawing session, all 6 minutes or less. This is probably the best I've done as far as life drawing goes to date. In addition to anatomy, we've been studying comic book artists and animators in figure class, learning about how gesture, momentum and weight should affect our drawings if we really want to make our figures come alive.

We did some studies from Lil' Abner and Skydoll getting a feel for how gesture works on simplified characters and it really changed my way of thinking, and I think it really helped my figure drawing. Gonna keep practicing skeletons and studying bridgman and anatomy and all that good stuff; way excited to see what the next few months shall bring.

Figure Studies

Here's some more studying from today, doing some figure turnarounds and some bridgman studies, complete with cross-contours!

I'm reeaaaaally trying to bust out this figure drawing and do as much extra study as I can for it. Five years of wanting to be an artist, I think it's about time to get good at this crap, haha. Gonna keep doin turnarounds, muscle studies, and form studies as much as possible and hopefully get pretty good by the end of this semester.

Master Copy - Assael

Here's a quick-ish oil painting done today, which is a refined-ish color study of a piece by Steven Assael. The original piece was brought up in our head painting class last week and it absolutely blew my mind, the concept behind it is white light theory, which is that white light has a full spectrum of color in it that will play across surfaces and create a ton of color variation.

So though my piece is nowhere near as good as his, this is really exciting to me cause the lack of the white light theory is what made me dislike traditional work pre-school, cause everything I saw was just dull and local colored, it lacked the light and life I saw in digital stuff. It's really exciting to find that digital stuff is all rooted in traditional work that's been around forever, and it can be achieved without any color dodging.

Woohoo! Oil is teh bomb!

Composition Studies - Wyeth

Here's another composition study done a while back, I didn't do any post-worthy drawing today, just some analysis things and a WIP comic which might get posted in the future when it's finished.

So, in the meantime enjoy the delicious colors and glorious abstract patterns of the ever-awesome N.C. Wyeth, and hopefully my somewhat intelligent observations of them.

Fechinesque Portrait

Here's my latest dabblings with oil, attempting yet another portrait with the Zorn palette, and this time trying to emulate Fechin's way of markmaking. I think color-wise it's getting much better, but still a long ways to go, and slowly but surely my drawing problems are improving. And working with goopy, squishy, blendy oil paint is always fun, haha.

Later this week I'll update this, since we're going to be going back in to it with three additional colors added to the palette, so we'll see if the colors can be bumped to the next level and closer to full white light.

Anatomy Study - Legs

Here's a leg study I did today to supplement the stuff we've been learning in Figure class. We just covered leg muscles, so I wanted to go over them all slow motion, observing and writing down every origin and insertion to be sure it gets ingrained in my sub-cranium. Then some good ol' Bridgman studies on the right to take it out of the realm of anatomical plates and in to the world of 3D space and form, for drawing ease.

Oh how I love anatomy!

Ideal Figures Pt. 2

Progress on figure homework, corrected proportions, made a better, more form-based pelvis, and added side and back views! Now for the exaggerated couples, then it's on to posing and muscles and all that rot! Woohoo!

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