Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Some dude

Little head sketch that turned into silly nonsense. No real explanation here.


Monday, December 8, 2014

Zoo Sketches

Earlier this year I sold my laptop and used that moolah to help fund a cintiq companion. I had mainly just been using it for digital coffee shop sketching, but recently I took it out to the zoo and it was a blast to use. I quickly learned I need to draw more animals to prevent them from looking so amorphous and without structure, but it was loads of fun!


Saturday, December 6, 2014

Forest studies

Creative block = time for studies.




Influence Map

I've seen a bunch of people do these over the years but I never really got around to it. Lately I've been kind of confused when working concerning what I'm working towards and putting this together seems to give me some ideas on what I enjoy in art and what I'd like to emulate and develop personally.

Looking at this image as a whole, I can come up with 3 definitive influences I'd like to focus on more:
-Clean, bold, and painterly strokes/shapes
-Vibrant, harmonious, and deliberate color choices
-Believable and dramatic lighting



Wheee more practice!

Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Star Dork

Started just as a sketch and developed into some rim light practice. I learned I really need to practice different lighting conditions more than anything else. This was fun though!



Thursday, November 27, 2014

Some Silly stuff

Started as a basic uninspired sketch of a tomboyish baseball girl, but after coming back to render most of it I started playing around with making it more supernatural this came as a result.


Dinosaurs have become my default boredom doodle material. I'm totally ok with this.


Thursday, November 6, 2014

Flatiron Study & sketches

Living in Colorado I get amazing mountain views every day. I did this study off a photo I took earlier in the summer and I'm fairly happy with how it turned out. Working on getting some good brushwork in my digital work so it doesn't feel so...bleh.


Doing some style and cartoon exploration.


Tuesday, November 4, 2014

BW Figure

Doing more figure practice and gesture drawing. Decided to sit down and do a proper figure study since it's been a while. I made ample use of the mixer brush tool this time around and it REALLY allows a level of polish I didn't know how to achieve earlier! So cool! I'm not too thrilled with the hands so I'll probably start doing more direct hand studies.


Black and White Studies

Value studies are always awesomely fun. I used to do them a LOT more when I was out in San Fran and somewhat forgot how useful they are. Focusing on values really is so crucial and something about not having to worry about color is damn relaxing. Kept these pretty short.

I'm now noticing the background is a bit too bright on mine  and the right foreground could probably be darkened up a bit. I love the atmosphere in this one though, the enveloping light, humidity, and warmth are super cinematic.

I went through a bunch of photos I took in Japan and decided a lot of them would be great study material. Expect more.

Friday, October 17, 2014

Sketches

Masters of Anatomy book has some great art in it! Got me pretty pumped to just do some sketches. Here are a few. Bottom left one...I don't even know. 


Monday, October 6, 2014

Ship designs 1

I have very little experience drawing mechanical/sci-fi stuff despite it being one of my favorite genres. To take a break from the environment work as of late I'm forcing myself out of my comfort zone to get some sci-fi design practice in.

I started off with a bunch of silhouette ideas and I'm fairly happy with the bottom-most six. From here I took those few that I think are the strongest and did a few iterations on each before moving on to final designs.

The iterations with minor details here were actually quite difficult. I tried to stay initially loose and let the ideas come from the marks themselves. 

After poking the brains of a few friends I further refined these 4 as I found their overall design/appearance/function the most fun. Ultimately I moved forward with #3.

Linework is pretty tough when working digitally but with the recent discovery of Lazy Nezumi Pro (google it) I found it MUCH easier than the previous times I've done linework.

And....final color/render work! I think I'm going to rework this to make the materials look more accurate in the near future. I found a few great tutorials so I'll likely post an update to this if I can spruce it up a bit!



Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Game Grumps Animated - Explode For No Reason

It's been a long time since I made a cartoon and even though this one was super short it was a lot of fun to get back into it. I used ToonBoom Animate for this one now that my Flash days are finally over. I can't believe it took me so long to start using proper animation software!

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Environments 1

I finished up the environment thumbnails that I uploaded in the last post. The last one was the thumbnail I had the most fun with but it was the biggest challenge to actually complete.
Time to start another set! These were fun!

I really feel the lighting is coming across well in this one (better than it did in the thumbnail at least) and I had a lot of fun playing with all the warm light both cast and reflected. 

This one looks most like it's thumbnail and ended up being my favorite to work on. I'm really happy with how the cliff and grasses came out. I think I can definitely work more on shape design for the figures though.
I took a lot of inspiration from the DOTA 2 color palette and spent much more time on this one than the previous two. While I enjoy the colors and scene of this one, compositionally I don't think the white figure stands out enough and my eye feels a little confused moving around the image.

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Landscapes, Environments, and Plein air

Started thumbnailing some environments after some great videos on gumroad and came up with these three. I definitely like some of these more than others but I want to take each one and finish it since all I've been doing is rough studies lately. I want to be able to bounce around between creative work and study work and 3 paintings to work on seems like a good way to go.


Digital plein air has been a goal of mine for the past few weeks but fear of failure has always nudged me towards working from photos instead...but no more! Plein air really forces me to look critically at all colors and values in real time and holy crap it's hard. This was a short painting I did today and while it's very much unfinished I'd like to hope the lighting reads at least. It's missing mostly details at this point and the textures I put in are still very rough. I'll keep doing more of these!


Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Girlies 1

I have a hard time posting my girly sketches. Primarily because I never feel they look "girly" enough haha. I Looked at a lot of Chris Sanders' work while working on this one since he really is a master of drawing girls. Perhaps if I force myself to upload more girl sketches I'll spend more time on the girly-ness. 



Sunday, September 7, 2014

Misc Studies 4

More quick little studies. Trying to quickly capture the mood.




Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Misc Studies 3

More quick environment studies. Again focusing on color and value choices to convey the environment. I think the next batch I'll spend a lot more time on and see how far I can take the environments without killing them with too much detail.

More of a Shaddy Safadi approach here. I love having vibrant colors pop out from below, I just have to make it work better.


Just a square brush (and a soft circle for fog/clouds) for this one. Still having trouble simplifying super detailed stuff like the rocks in the foreground.


Sunday, August 24, 2014

Misc Studies 2

I've been so frustrated with figures lately so it feels nice to paint something so fundamentally different in many ways. I didn't color pick on this one but instead attempted Shaddy Safadi's method from start to finish and I think it really paid off! I'm fairly happy with the color choices I made but it's very clear I still have a lot to work on when it comes to actual painting ability.


For some reason images with far less variation of color make getting the colors accurate MUCH more difficult!


Saturday, August 16, 2014

Misc Studies 1

Just a few more studies. I like the approach that Johannes Helgeson takes so I'm giving it a shot and focusing on building painting ability first and foremost. Just gotta keep doing more of these, not much more to it than PRACTICE.



Did a quick sketch of a coworker during a meeting.


Sunday, August 3, 2014

"Her" Studies


I finally saw the movie "Her" a few weeks ago and absolutely loved it. The color and composition in that movie is astounding no matter where you stop. I scrubbed through the entire film and grabbed a handful of screenshots to study from. I'm color picking with these more as an exercise in seeing if I can get the lighting to appear correctly. I'll definitely do more of these.





Recently discovered Johannes Helgeson while looking for new art and inspiration and this guy is incredible. My goals and sights of what kind of art I'd like to make are always changing but I'm certainly going to try to implement some of the stuff he's doing with his work. Oddly enough, through his work I found out about Shaddy Safadi's Digital Painting videos which are phenomenal. Definitely worth checking out.

Friday, August 1, 2014

Back to Blogger

Comments are just too handy. Back to Blogger! Anyway, here is a dump of work I feel pretty good about from the past few months!
This started primarily with a gesture drawing. I enjoyed the pose and feel and tried to design someone around that feeling.


 Did this based off a sketch after watching the 2nd Hobbit movie (a tad late on the bandwagon).


Started this Rockwell master study earlier this year but finally got around to finishing it this week! He truly was a master of storytelling. I love this painting and hope I could do it some justice with my study.


I managed to get a process gif this time around, though the intervals vary quite a bit. I'm going to try to do this more often as I can see my thought process as I approach a painting.



Friday, February 7, 2014