EoW 167 - Final

Here's my final for EoW 167! It was a ton of fun working on this, definitely gonna try to get in on more of 'em!

I still need to work on the ideation and set set dressing side of environments, but I think I'm starting to settle in to a flavor of executing them. Funtimes!

EoW 167 - Re-do Pt. 1

I decided to ditch the sketch I had for the water EoW cause the composition wasn't really floating my boat, so I switched to earth instead and started this up today, feeling much happier with it so far. It's still quite WIP, there's a lot of messy shapes and brush strokes and unrefined elements that'll need to be cleaned up, and it might need some kind of iconic element besides the tree bridge to push the idea, but we'll see.

I feel like I'm making some good discoveries for markmaking on this one too; my composition teacher was scolding me all semester for my mushy digital painting, and I think I'm finally starting to understand what he meant and crispen things up, as well as group and mass values. So I think this is gonna be a fun breakthrough piece when it's done.

Scupltris - Male Torso

Edit- Added a rendered shot of the back view.

Here's some more experimenting with Sculptris. I spent the whole afternoon putzing around with it and having a blast, and this is the result. I was gonna do a copy of the Belvedere torso, but decided it'd be more fun and less tedious to just make one from imagination, and I'm pretty satisfied with the result.

It's a lot of fun to mold and sculpt everything out, Sculptris is really intuitive. I think it definitely helped solidify some anatomy troubles I was having too, it's quite easy to figure out how all the forms are wedging together when you can navigate them in 3D space and don't have to worry about a bunch of overlapping lines. Definitely gonna try and do things like this every now and then.

After I was through sculpting it (which took about 6 hours), I brought it in to Kerkythea for final rendering, which I think I'm starting to figure out. I had a few mishaps and had to re-position my light due to me not paying attention to what objects I was moving halfway across the world, but I think the final render turned out pretty lifelike, so that was fun to experiment with.

And oddly, I think anatomically this is one of the most accurate things I've ever done from imagination, which has gotten me to thinking that I've got enough knowledge to draw figures from my head, but have gotten stuck in muscle memory formulas that I need to get out of, hopefully all these Bridgman studies will help with that.

Sculptris Squid Demon Head

Here's something new, a voyage in to the world of the third dimension! I downloaded Sculptris today, which is a free program made by the same folks that made Zbrush; it's basically just a simplified version of Zbrush from what I can tell.

But yeah, I just started messing about with it for about an hour and this is what came of it, surprisingly fun and very intuitive to use, especially since this is my first time trying organic modeling of any kind. I can see it being very useful to use for studies and see just how well I understand forms, which should help a lot with 2D work. I want to try doing a full figure sculpture sometime soon and see what comes of it.

im in ur 3d space, explorin ur frontier.

EoW 167 - Pt. 1

Here's some work on my EoW piece, getting the composition figured out, gonna do one final check on it and then start bringing in reference and color and try and get it looking fancytastic. Gonna try to incorporate some more ideas in to it as well, but mainly I just want to make a successful environment as I've never really done one that turned out good before, hah.

Pastel Portrait

Again sorry for not updating yesterday, this time it's cause I went to a wedding, so nyeah.

But anywho, here's a 3-hour portrait from today's figure session, done in nupastel. As always, the drawing is the worst part of it, I really need to punch myself in the face and stop rendering and coloring everything and just spend the time getting the drawing as good as it can possibly be. Should probably just go back to charcoal for a while in figure sesions.

But regardless I think there's some fun stuff happening with the design and color, 3 hours reasonably well spent. Plus it was fun.

Environment Sketch

Sorry for not updating yesterday, had a really tough day as I had to put my dog of 14 years to sleep. You wouldn't think it would be such a big deal to lose a pet, but it's hard to come home and know that he's not there, cause he was always there. Maybe I'm just sentimental.

Either way, here's a sketch I did yesterday to vent the mood, I dunno if I'll finish it, but perhaps.

Have a good one, and remember: life is short, take nothing for granted. Everything is borrowed, and one day we'll have to give it back.

Bridgmania - 6-21-11

More Bridgmania, got to the section on heads today, which is pretty sweet. Bridgman heads are pretty much the best thing ever to study; they're so clear and planar, I think I'm finally starting to understand how the plane breaks of the cheeks work. Didn't get through as many pages as I would've liked today, but ah well, I've got time.

EoW + Bridgmania

Here's some sketches for Environment of the Week #167. This'll be my first environment in a while, and my first EoW ever, so I'm pretty excited. Got 10 days to get 'er done, gonna need to do a lot of research and referencing. Should be pretty fun!

And then just continuing with my Bridgmania, I filled up 7 pages in my sketchbook and drew 71 figures today, still learning a ton from it. I smell some improvement on the horizon, woohoo!

It's nice to be able to draw all day long.

Bridgmania - 6-19-11

Summer break hohmahgosh! And so begins the Bridgmania, I'm gonna copy every drawing in Bridgman's' Complete Guide to Drawing from Life in the next week or two, which'll be about 25-50 pages a day (usually 3-5 drawings per page). So far I've gotten through 40 and had a blast, learned a ton, and am already feeling more confident with the figure form-wise. Gonna keep doing this, and try to apply it with some studies of actual figures, then when that's done probably go through Stephen Peck's book.

I am so ready to not suck at figure drawing.

Figure Drawing - 6-18-11

Here it is again after our third session, so it's 9 hours in now. I think I managed to fix a lot of the issues it had after the last session, the forms and values are working better I think, but dear gravy my handling of paint is still pretty bad. I can do chunky, and I can do smooth on a portrait, but getting it smooth, the right mark, and in the right spot on such small forms is really challenging. Gonna need a lot more practice, but I look forward to it cause this is way fun. And, if nothing else, I think this turned out better than my last oil figure painting, so woohoo!

Cast Drawing - Finishing Pt. 4

ALMOST done. The tone in the cast is all smoothed out now so it's 95% finished, I just need to go back and add all the little cracks and details, double check all the terminators, make sure all the edges are working good, and then the cast part is done, then I just need to smooth out the background (which is a big task in itself) and this thing will be dee oh enn ee done. About 80 hours in to it, 5-10 more to go, the light is at the end of the tunnel woohoo!

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Figure Drawing - 6-16-11

What do you mean all I've posted is figure drawings for 3 days in a row? Don't you like figure drawings? Geez gimme a break, I just figured you'd prefer this to cast drawing updates every day.

Now that that's out of the way, here's the results of the second session of our 3-session 9 hour pose. I transferred my graphite drawing from the previous session on to a canvas, inked it to preserve the lines, and then painted on top in oil. My main goal was to see and apply the color really well, and although it got a little higher chroma than I intended I'd rather be able to see it and go too far, then learn to reel it back in to a more realistic range.

Next session I'll probably try and focus on getting the forms to work better and hopefully it'll turn this in to a pretty decent study. Really enjoying the process so far though, it's much more successful than my previous two figure paintings. Practice practice!

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Figure Drawing - 6-15-11

Here's some sketches from a surprise figure session we had yesterday, starting off with gestures and then doing specific studies of hands, feet, legs, and head. It was definitely helpful and showed me a few key weak areas in my figure drawing, so I'm looking forward to starting my Bridgman rampage next week and fixing them and hopefully by the end of next semester I'll be able to draw a near-professional figure from imagination, just in time for character design class.

Figure Drawing - 6-14-11

Here's another figger drawing, this one's still in-progress. We're doing a 9 hour pose down at the studio and I'm probably gonna do it in oil, so this is the first 3 hour session and I focused just on getting the drawing in place using graphite, then I'll transfer it to canvas and do the final painting in oil, so that should be pretty fun.

Overall I think it's in a good spot, I'm happy with how the structure of the head turned out, and some stuff in the body is working pretty well I think. Still gonna need some tweaking, but it's a start.

Next update ->

Little Nemo Final

Here's my final Little Nemo comic for Visual Narrative class. The assignment got changed near the end to only having to take one page to final due to pretty much everyone still being in thumbnail stage a week before the deadline. But regardless, I'm pretty happy with how this turned out.

Definitely learned a *lot* of stuff I didn't know in that class, it's amazing how much work is required to make a decent comic, not just in crafting the story and the vast amount of drawing, but designing the panels individually, the page as a whole, and the comic as a whole. It's very much structured like you would structure a painting, but on a massive, sequential scale, really mindblowing stuff. I dunno if I have the capacity to do comics or not, but it's definitely something I'd like to explore when I'm not so crushed by deadlines, haha.

Figure Drawing - 6-12-11

Here's an hour-ish figure done today, again trying to push some economy in to my brushwork as well as exploring some new digital markmaking. I actually quite like how a lot of it came out and think with some more experimenting this could lead to some nice painterlyness in my more finished work, gonna mess around with it for sure.

Thanks to vishstudio for the great ref!

Sketchbook - 6-11-11

Here's some sketchbook shenanigans. Figure doodles, gestures, turnarounds, naga guys, movement studies, a weird ice castle thing, and some Zerg as a result of playing SC2 today.

Not much to report otherwise, took my first day off in a long time today so that was pretty fun. Looking forward to summer break, planning to do a bunch of bridgman studies, as well as some animal and environment studies. The goal for this summer is to try and get my drawing skills at a similar level as my painting skills, we'll see how that goes.

Cast Drawing - Finishing Pt. 3

Plugged in another 8 hours on this baby today and got his raised arm and pec pretty much finished, tone smoothed out and transitions going. Some of it is a little too hard-edged yet, but that got fixed and I just didn't have time to photograph the latest version.

I think the rest of it will go faster now that I've gotten used to it, and discovered that smooth tone is much easier with hard charcoal that doesn't fill in as quickly, so over this next week I'm gonna be polishing the whole cast like that shoulder and hopefully in another 10-20 hours this thing'll be dooooone. Having a ton of fun with it still though, this is the fun part, not so much because of the work itself but because this is when it starts actually looking real. Excite!

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Figure drawing - 6-9-11

Didn't get too much drawing done today, but here's a quick figure drawing from ref. Had some fun with this one, trying to get some economy in my brush strokes, gonna need a lot of work, hehe. But I think it came out pretty good, gonna try and do some more stuff along these lines, I need to do less zillion hour paintings and more quick studies.

Little Nemo Page 2 WIP

Here's the progress so far on my Nemo comic. This is page 2 of 4, but I probably won't be posting the other ones since they changed the assignment to only require one page to be taken to final and the others are just crapsketches.

Just gotta work out the color on this one and try to get it looking finished and spiffy, playing around with some flat storybook coloring and liking the results so far.

Dreamtellers

Here's the final for the Dreamtellers piece, took the watercolor from yesterday and finished it off with Painter. Overall it was a really fun technique to mess around with, having the watercolor texture underneath the whole thing really adds a nice feeling, and I pretty much only painted with transparent layers so all the texture was preserved.

Surprisingly, Painter 12's new Real Watercolors ended up being very useful for this. I always kinda dismissed Painter's real brushes as gimmicky and stuck the more standard ones, but I think combined with paper textures they're starting to have some serious potential for natural looking markmaking. It's still nowhere near the power of real watercolor, but it could be quite useful for making digital pieces feel less sterile and perfect, definitely something I'm gonna explore.

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Dreamtellers Watercolor

Here's some progress on my Dreamtellers piece, our final project for Composition 2. I decided to have a gander at a new technique with this one, starting in watercolor and using that as far as it'll take me and then finishing it off digitally. Our teacher comments a lot on how sterile digital markmaking can be, and ultimately I agree, so though this isn't much of a watercolor painting it should provide some nice color and texture for the final image! I plan to work with multiply and screen layers to get the values and colors where I want them, and ideally there will be no opaque painting so it'll stay looking pretty traditional. Should be fun!

I had a blast messing around with the watercolors too, this was my first real attempt at making a painting with them, and I love some the effects they produce. Definitely gonna keep practicing with them and see if I can gain some Sargent / Homer / Dulac powers.

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Figures & Sketching

Here's today's shenanigans, making some more interesting stuff to go along with those figure couples I posted a couple days ago. I started with the rendered ideal male dude, and I wanted to do one like that for all 6 characters, but I think it'll take too long to be able to turn it in on time, so I'm gonna do more gesture sheets like the second image for the other ones and maybe do some rendered versions if there's time. I think I made some good progress on learning how to wedge forms with these though, feeling much more confident about things.

And then the bird lady is just a random in-between-things sketch that I kinda liked.

Vanquish the Evil

Here's the final illustration of the snippet I posted a couple days ago! It's for a special TAD assignment, to create an illustration for the WoW TCG, based on one of three scenarios that were provided in the brief.

This particular one is of a Draenei Priest striking down a Flesh Giant in Icecrown. I got a lot of fanjoy out of this since my main for quite a while was just like this, haha. But what's really exciting is that the senior AD at Blizzard is coming in next week to review all the pieces, so I'm excited (and somewhat terrified) to hear what he'll say. It's an awesome opportunity either way though, and I had a blast doing it. It's gotten me super excited for next semester as well, when we're getting in to our majors and will start worldbuilding!

So yeah, hope ya dig it, have a good one!

Figure Couples

Here's the final and clean sets of characters for our final figure project. The first two are the ideal couple, the next an exaggeratedly dumpy couple, and lastly an exaggeratedly muscular couple. Hopefully I'll have some time to make some nice posed drawings to go along with these to submit for the final project, but for now these will meet the requirements of the assignment. Had a lot of fun with these and learned a lot about how to figure out which muscles are overlapping which.

Beauty and Nightmares

No update yesterday because of 20 hour work day woohoo. To make up for it, two paintings today!

Here's a collaboration between Carl Knox and I for the Beauty and Nightmares competition over on CA, and it conveniently doubled as an assignment for Painting class. The assignment was basically to do a Diptych (Two separate paintings that go together) with the theme of Beauty and Nightmares.

It was quite the long haul, this things probably gotten 40 hours of work poured in to it, if not more. It was quite the challenge to plan and collaborate two pieces and get the design working separately and as a whole, all while trying to maintain a consistent style between both images. Learned a ton in the process though, and that's the main thing.

Hope ya dig it! And before anyone asks, no this was not inspired by PotC, we started this two months ago so curse them for making this idea mainstream before the contest deadline, haha.

Have a good one!