Quick studies

Here's a couple quick studies, figures and environments! Just the usual practice to keep the ol drawing arm in shape, really trying to focus on my gesture and foreshortening with the figure stuff. All between 2 and 10 minutes.

Old and New

Got a metric bundle of images for today! They say it's never too late to fix a mistake in your piece; well how about a year and a half later? The first piece here, floaty space lady, was a piece I did back in January of 2011 and it's stuck around as a favorite since then, but had some pretty glaring errors, so this week I went back in and revamped it, fixed some stuff and brought it up to snuff! Was an interesting experience to see how differently I paint now. And the second one, demon bro, was a 'gah I can't draw!' doodle that ended up being worth finishing, so that was fun! It's probably not a good thing that horrific face-eating demons are the things that most readily emerge from my subconscious, but oh well.

Then these two here are another couple character commissions for the lovely folks on dA, I think these two are some of my favorites so far! The water on the first one was a blast to do.

And to finish it off here's some sketches and studies. The first one a quick still life that I just had an idea for and had to get out of my system, the second the obligatory figure study (this time in oil!) and the third a quick study of the lovely Colorado National Monument, which used to be only like 20 minutes away from my house. Fun times!

And that's all for now, thanks for looking! There will be blood... I mean more, more artwork... and probably some blood involved in the process of making it. Cheerio!

Figures & Thumbnails

Then here's about a 2 hour figure painting done from life- we're going to start focusing a lot more on using oils in our figure sessions at the studio, I'm pretty stoked! I think this first one came out pretty good- still need to work on my construction and ability to render form with paint, but I think these are some of the best fleshtones I've done in oil.

Then this one is about an hour long plein-air painting I did a month or two ago; I was trying to capture the glow of the sun which didn't quite work out but there's parts of it that are working pretty well for a quick sketch.

And then these last two are some thumbnail development for the group IP we've been working on in class, doing character and environment design. I think the Victorian Teslas are some of my better character concepts, need to keep cranking out a ton of these thumbnails to keep working on my design sensibilities. Lots of fun!

Fashion, figures, and foliage

 Shenanigans! Here's today's image dump; first up is some crazy fashion design for our pop culture class. I had a lot of fun with these and am gonna do a few more and take them to final illustrations. It's really interesting to apply all the stuff we learned about composition for images and try to apply it to a set of objects, I think overall they're pretty successful. So excited to paint 'em up!












Next is a quick master copy for figure painting class, just an exercise in value and edge control. My drawing is way off, but I think the painting part (which was the important part) came out pretty good, oils and I are finally starting to get along.

Then here's a pastel figure drawing from last Saturday's session, experimenting with design a bit, and I changed the position of 3 of her 4 limbs which was silly but I enjoyed it.














And then after doing the pastel drawing I went all crazy and start oil painting on top, it was fun and weird and make some cool marks, might be something I experiment more with. It has potential, by jove!

And lastly is a plein-air study I did last week, about an hour and a half total. It was a lot of fun, I'd never gone plein-air painting before (except that one bridge piece which was digital) and it was a lot of fun. The weather was perfect and everything seemed to just work, definitely something I want to get more in to, and it's a great exercise for observing color and light.



And that's all! I shall go now and rest, for I am weary with toil and much sorrow.

Sketchbook - 7-20-11

Another workshop update! Still going strong, keeping busy and having a blast. This second week has been heavily focused on entertainment design so far, so the instructors, mainly Jason Manley, have been giving a lot of good info about the industry and how the process goes for making games. It's pretty interesting, and has got me thinking about careers and such and if concept art is really what I want to do; there's so much cool stuff in art that it's hard to choose, I'll probably talk with the instructors this week and see what's up.

But anyways, arts! Not too much to say about these, the first is just a flock of sketches and figure drawings that I've been doing over the past few days. The zombies near the end are some initial sketches for our second assignment, which is also a character design assignment.

Then this one is just a quick speedpainting done of my view out of the KC pod while waiting for a lecture to start, messing around with some more direct painting and economic brush work.

Ciao!

EoW 167 - Walkthrough

[LINK]

Here's a quick walkthrough for my EoW piece, which is hopefully somewhat helpful or insightful. Click the link above to view it!

I'm still pretty out-of-town so I dunno what kinda updates I'll have in the next few days, but I'll try and post up some stuff. I got like 800 photos of awesome mountain environments on our drive through CO so I'll sort through those and do some environment studies and maybe post a few of the pics, we'll see.

Have a good'un!

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.

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.

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.

Plein-air Sunset Refining

Here's an update on one of those plein-air pieces from a while back. We're focusing on color variation in Painting class, making subtle color shifts in areas of the same value to increase the feeling of light in the piece. It's a great study, and really adds a huge amount once you can start to see it, painting from life definitely helps.

This isn't quite finished yet, it still needs some clean-up of edges, some sloppy strokes need correcting, and some of the areas aren't reading well spacially, but I think it's coming along nicely.