Cast Drawing - Finished!

After many long hours, days and nights, blood, sweat and charcoal snot, it is done!

I still need to send it in for final approval, but I'm gonna be heading out of town tomorrow so this is about all it's gonna get (that also means updates probably won't be daily next week).

Overall this was a ton of fun to do and I learned a lot about value structure and subtlety of modeling for realism. It was definitely a struggle, but I can safely say that I've done everything I know to do to make it as good as it can be, so I'm happy with it.

Ultimately it's just a really good exercise, if you want to boost your finishing skills, do one of these. Not only does it teach realism and the effects of light on form, but also the patience and discipline that's oh so important to being able to create the most impactful imagery you possibly can. It's not done until it's as good as it can be; good can be various levels of polish and could be 2 or hours or 200 hours, but it's not done until it's done and that's how everything should be.

Final tally: 80-90 hours, about 2.5 sticks of Nitram charcoal consumed, approximately 15.34 miles walked between station point and drawing, 2 sore feet, 10% increased left arm strength as a substitute mahl stick, and many tracks of film scores and dubstep listened to.

Cast drawing, I wipe my hands of thee!

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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!

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.

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.

<- Previous update - <<- First update

Still Life Pt. 4

Here's the final for the still life! Gone in and tweaked a few things, cleaned up some of the cloth and flowers, and put on final adjustments and effects to make it shiny and delicious. This one was a lot of fun to do and a great learning experience, I think it's a big step forward in my understanding of light and color as well, not to mention different textures and surfaces. This will definitely become a regular exercise when I have the inclination and time, so much to learn from it, and since you're working from observation all the answers are you in front of you, all you have to do is find them.

And for your potential viewing pleasure, here are some closeups at almost-full res: [Link]

Oh, and on an unrelated note, there's a blogger glitch which was keeping my images from being clickable and enlargeable, but google rustled up a solution so all images from here on out should be able to be viewed at a higher resolution!

Have a good one!

<- Part 3

Constructive Figure Drawing Pt. 3

Here's an update on that figure drawing. It's made some progress, but is in a done-for-now stage. It's not as polished as I was hoping to get, rendering out small forms and everything with the help of some ref, but I'm pretty happy with where it's at. Might revisit it later, might not, but school's back in session so homework comes first!

The main things I did between this and the last update was strengthening shapes to make the figure feel more solid; in the last one all the shadow patterns were just squishy concave messes that followed the overall form changes. Making smaller angle changes on them and keeping them either straight or convex makes them feel much more solid, same with the contours of the figure itself. Then I did a bit of more detailed rendering in certain areas and added a bit of texture.