Spheres, Weapons, Vehicles and Rocks

 And the day after I whine about having nothing to post and renounce my updating daily status, I have 5 things to post. Ah well, such is the way of life. But it's cool, I think I like these less-frequent-with-more-images post... plus I can update during the day instead of at 2 in the morning. But anyways, art!

These are some sphere exercises we've been doing in entertainment design class, just doing surface studies of different materials and trying to capture their effects accurately. It's ridiculous amounts of fun, and super educational. Really gets you thinking about what you're seeing and why.

 Thiiiiiiiis one is my final weapon for Industrial Design class, I took the model I made in sketchup, took a quick screencap, and just painted over it. Overall I think it turned out pretty cool, I'm pretty happy with the design and rendering, just gotta keep pushing my ideas more so I can make stuff that's actually interesting and doesn't just look cool.

 This puppy's a speedpaint exercise we did in Industrial Design yesterday, our instructor gave us a song [Link] and told us to design and paint a vehicle in 1 hour based on how the song made us feel. I thought it gave a pretty epic sort of, "I'm gonna roll around and pummel you all in slow-motion while roaring in a masculine way." so I went for a dune buggy with a big ol' minigun. Was good practice for sure, might make this a regular practice whenever I have a spare hour.

And lastly here's a Bill Cone study and re-light I did this morning as a warmup, they're about 15 minutes each, the one on the left is a study of the original, the one on the right is a re-light from imagination. Lots of fun, and great color practice.



And that's it, yo! Have fun

Dead Dudes and Figures

Aight, here's some more stuff. It is with somewhat sorrowful but also not really and kinda excited feelings that I've decided to relinquish my 'updating daily' title. It's obviously been untrue for a little while now and with half of our classes being mostly unpostable work for now I just dunno if I can keep it up. So I'll probably switch to updating once or twice a week with two or three higher quality images. I think ultimately it'll be a good switch, you'll get higher quality work in larger chunks, I'll get to stop freaking out over not having to update and losing sleep feeling obligated to update before bed. :D

SO with that out of the way, here's some frikkin art.

This one's an ink drawing I did of a grim reaper type dude, which ended up being pretty interesting. We had an art show at the ATX Pod last Friday with the Vigil studios and students were allowed to put one piece in the show, I was swamped with homework and didn't plan to put anything in but on that Thursday I got some free time, so I started thumbnailing this guy at 11 in the morning, spent an hour and a half buying bristol and a frame at like noon, and then worked on it until like 12 literally while we were tearing down the studio for the show, haha. And rather spiffily it actually sold the next day, first showpiece evar! Aww yeah.







And this second one is just a 3hr figure drawing done during Saturday's session. Just messin with pastels and having fun, not much to it. :D

Peace out yo!

Figure Painting - 9-21-11

Here's a figure painting for class, a master copy of a Jeremy Lipking painting. I think I'm starting to get a better handle on soft modeling, got me some synthetic flat brushes and they're much easier to blend with than the bristle filberts I was using before.

My colors are still not as sophisticated as his, I actually made my painting much too neutral than the original which is usually the opposite of my problem, but I think it still turned out good and I learned a lot. Oils are superfun, can't wait till I'm as comfortable with them as I am digital. There's gonna be some sexay canvases going on when that happens. Need moar practice.

God of War Weapon 3D

Holy crap 4 days without an update; my most sincere apologies. Silly life has been consuming art time, and the art time it hasn't consumed has been spend on obligatory and unpostable work, herpderp.

Hopefully I'll solve that problem this week though, I want to start doing 30-60 minute warmups every morning before getting in to official work. I think it'd be a great way to prep for the day as well as make it feel like I'm not doing school all the freakin time, so I should be able to throw those up if there's nothing better and keep the daily updates rollin, yeauah!

On the subject of this, it's just the next step in the process. We had to model out our weapons in 3D and for next class we'll be painting on top of all of them for our final images, which should be a blast. I've been having a lot of fun messing about in 3D lately and have learned a lot, now I just need to learn how to do it in 3DSMax and make some legit usable geometry. Funtimes!

<- Previous update

Figure Drawing - 9-15-11

Yet again spent all yesterday working on unpostable stuff, so no goodies to show, but here's some funtimes from our figure session today! The whole session was devoted to drapery studies which was a ton of freaking fun, it's probably the first time I've really carefully and observantly drawn drapery, which I should definitely get in to more often cause it's an area I'm lacking for sure.

I also need to check out the clothes section in Drawing People by Barbara Bradley; I randomly bought it a long time before TAD and one of my teachers says it has the best info on drawing clothes that you'll find in any one book, so I'mma investigate that and maybe do a few cloth studies on my own.

It definitely seems like it's something that wouldn't be that complicated to figure out once you understand the basic structure of it; I can already tell where things are pinching and creating force and how they radiate out and roll over form, I just need to learn more specifically when and why it happens and how to tell what kind of folds it would make. Cloth is probably one of my favorite things to look at when it's done really well, even more so if it's in motion which I unfortunately can't do, but it's still freakin cool. Definitely gonna be worth studying.

Have a good'un! Keep droarin!

Figure Drawing - 9-13-11

Here's some of the better drawings from tonight's figure session; it's been a while since we've done gestures instead of long poses, was quite fun!

On the upper ones, I was trying to do my best to identify and distribute the weight of the figure naturally, which is what all the vertical lines and ellipse ripple things are; I was looking at the model and trying to find both the center of gravity and which parts of the body were bearing most of the weight. I think that's gonna be something I try and keep practicing in gesture drawings, cause as always my ultimate goal is to draw mostly from imagination and I think the posing is one of my weaker areas; just articulating anatomy and muscles is getting pretty easy, ultimately it's just match and figuring out where things are and how best to define them, but putting together a figure that feels solid and alive is another challenge entirely.

funtime figure droaring!

Figure Painting - 9-12-11

Here's some paintingk from today for class, the assignment was to use a limited palette of Titanium White, Yellow Ochre, Alizarin Crimson and Lamp Black (I used Ivory herpderp), which is a variant of the Zorn palette.

It was a good exercise, but personally I prefer how we approached it last time with Cad Red instead of Alizarin Crimson; crimson is hard to work with for flesh cause it's pushing close enough to purple that you can't get any orange or brown tones out of it in combination with Yellow Ochre, it's missing a transitional tone. So pretty much all the stuff in the skin has to be handled just with the ochre, cause adding too much crimson makes it look bruised.

But nonetheless it was fun and edumacational and I'm pretty happy with the final outcome, I got too dark with some of the modeling in the chest, but it still holds up alright. Also I weirdly managed to remove the wide-angleness of my reference photo and made it more in-proportion. I dunno if that's good or bad. xD

And speaking of, the ref was from characterdesigns.com which is a spiffy resource for figure ref.

Have a good one!

Warhammer 40k character Pt. 2

Here's some progress on my Warhammer character, took my pencil sketch in to painter and am just shapefudging the heck out of it. I've never been much of a lineart guy, so hopefully I'll be able to work out some nice shapes and then pull out some forms from this mess. Still need to finish working out the rest of his equipment and his backstory though so I can get all the little quirks and details right.

Looking forward to working more on it though; it's been a while since I've just painted something for fun and not had to worry about making it modelable or anything. And I'm having some fun with this painterly process, incorporating some color in to this initial values stage is really enjoyable I think, start setting up temperatures right from the get go. Black & white underpaintings might be going bye-bye for me, aww yeah. Good tiems.

<- Previous update

Figure Drawing - 9-10-11

Herpderp, nothin yesterday cause I drew unpostable stuff and then made music for fun. I'll post up the music sometime if it turns out to be awesome.

In the meantime, here's a figure droar! Had some fun with this one, it's not quite as successful as Thursday's I don't think but I like some of the forms going on in the stomach, and I played around with some color which was pretty fun. I've enjoyed hoodling back to my pastels with these last couple, it's pretty fun to just paint with shapes and such.

Yay figures!

Figure Drawing - 9-8-11

Here's my drawing from tonight's figure session. I had a pretty frustrating day so I went back to pastels for the first time in a long time to just play with shapes and values and form and just have fun and not worry about studying something specific, and I think it turned out pretty successfully.

My initial plan was just to use the brown and light yellow, but as always seems to happen I got ancy and busted out a warm and cool pastel to spice things up, which I think in this case turned out to be a good decision, I like some of the more saturated linework set against the more muted forms inside, it's something I'd want to play with for sure, maybe see if I can get some of that effect in to my finished works.

I was also trying to do a decent composition for possibly the first time ever in a life drawing session, and I think it worked out alright. The flowy white cloth was added from imagination and I think overall the piece ended up having some nice elegance, lots of fun for sure.

Hope ya dig!

Warhammer 40k character concept sketch

Here's the result of some of today's doodling; me and a few other guys at the Austin pod are kicking off a 40k campaign and it's gonna be pretty much epic. At the moment I'm probably going for a Cleric, so this is just a relatively quick sketch to get a feel for his shapes and gear, which was a lot of fun for sure, 40k has a nice mix of fantastic and sci-fi elements in it.

Still need to work out a backstory and name and pretty much everything for this dude, but I like the direction he's heading in and maybe I'll get time to paint him up all fancy sometime, we shall see!

Next update ->

God of War Weapon Final Again

No update yesterday, what?! Obviously, yesterday was labor day, so in honor of such a laborious day I did no labor. But, then, a day off is good every once in a while, raite? raite?

Anyways, here's an updated version of my God of War weapon design after getting a critique last class; it's not a major change, the main thing is that some of the elements are a little bigger and bulkier and burlier and all those manly B adjectives, so it fits in a little better with Kratos' character now, hopefully at least. Weapons are funtimes.

Aaand it seems like I am at a loss of description, so that's it and have a good one!

<- Not for realz final - Next update ->

Figure Drawing - 9-4-11

Sorry for the lack of updating yesterday; had a pretty much non-stop day with crits, figure drawing and D&D, and by the time I got home it was like 3am and I had to get up at 7 so the blog was shuffled to the side, haha. But it was a good day, and I got this drawing done which I'm quite happy with!

It was a bit of a media experiment, I tried using white charcoal on toned paper for the first time, as well as some pretty swag charcoal pencils (that I broke like 3 times sharpening). It was quite a fun way to work; generally I prefer to go from midtones out, and the charcoal is easy to blend on this particular paper, so this might become my technique of choice for 3 hour poses... at least for a while, haha.

Gotta keep pushing my faces, hands and feet, but I think some other areas like the forearm and forward-most knee are working pretty well. Funtimes!

Figure Painting - 9-2-11

Here's yet another figure painting, the final for the drawing I posted up yesterday. Had a lot of fun with this one and feel like I'm finally starting to make some progress in understanding with these silly oils. Slowly but surely my mixing knowledge and control of color is improving, I'm really excited to see how much this helps my digital work cause I won't need to rely on overlays and glow effects nearly as much since this is forcing me to learn how to create those effects just by using the right colors.

And as far as that's concerned, I'm actually pretty happy with this piece; I think a lot of the color variation is working, and it's getting closer to having the effect of light I've been trying to achieve, and I think I managed to pull off a little glow in the background around her hips. So I think, for the most part, I can cross color off of my list of things to stop sucking at with oils. Next up is edge control, after that brush work. Then the ever-present problem of actually drawing a decent figure to paint on top of, gonna be pushing that forever, which I thoroughly look forward to.

Hope ya dig it!

Figure Drawing - 9-1-11

Holy September, Batman, it's September! Where has the time gone? Didn't school just start like yesterday? How can I be nearly half done with TAD? Is Elvis really an alien?

These are questions that must be answered. But for now, here's a figure drawing! As usual, practicing anatomy blah blah herp derp, this one's gonna be a figure painting which I'll probably do over the weekend, I feel like I've got some good failures to re-attempt from my last couple paintings, notably with the background and getting relative chroma right. We'll see, I'm excited to work on it.

Droars!