Thursday Sketches

Still struggling with landscapes and backgrounds, but I'm forcing myself to do a little bit each day. I haven't finished a piece in a while since I tend to put a lot of time into overworking things and they still don't work out. So lately I've been just experimenting to see what happens with quick sketches and practicing on really looking at my source material.

Unfortunately the last one there looks like something I would've done in high school. I lost track of the values and over saturated all the colors, so back to the drawing board...

2 minute poses

1 hour from reference

45 minutes from reference

Wednesday's Sketches

60 second poses

1 hour sketch from reference

Tuesday Sketches...

All from reference.

60 second poses

Some Cave - 1 hour

Female Knight In Armor - 1 hour

Everything's Green...

Breathe Deeply...

This 30 minute landscape concept sketch is about the only thing I have to show today. I'm still putting time into a work in progress and tried a hair tutorial that turned out hideous. That's all the time I had to work on anything today...sigh. Tomorrow is another day, or so they tell me.

Landscape Sketch

I spent about 2.5 hours on this one. I blocked in the shapes and then started getting more specific with it, eventually zooming in pretty tight to get some areas to read a bit more. Looks amateur as hell, but I'm definitely out of my comfort zone with this sort of thing.

The thing I've been looking at with other artists is how to convey the "idea" of bricks and structures without adding every single shape and block. In this case the strokes looked pretty plain and flat and my attempt at suggestion didn't really work out.

Finally, the perspective is wonkier than I thought while I was working on it. I don't think my underlying perspective grid was what I needed, but ultimately it was just an oversight on my part to keep track of the perspective. The poor thing looks like it's about to collapse in on itself.

Finally Over The Plague...

That was a wonderful week of sickness. Now the nonsense is over and I can get back to work. Here's some sketches.

I'm trying to force myself to do some landscapes and things that really intimidate me.

Thursday Hour Sketch

Mr. Smooth-Face

Another orc. Limited myself to an hour for this sketch since I've got some kind of plague.

Quick Wednesday Sketch

Another Orc...

Tuesday Sketch

 Sketch after Serge Birault.

Chocolate Dragon Fairy

Yummy Chocolate Dragon Fairy

Saturday Night Last Minute Quick Sketch

Ha Ha...JUST missed publishing on the 10th.

REALLY quick block sketch using the awesome 12 brush set from the bad-ass concept artist Shaddy Safadi. His YouTube tutorials are pure gold.

Also: DETHKLOK. That is ALL.

Cute Monster #4

Warm Up Sketch

Wednesday Sketches

Tuesday Sketches

I finally broke out my trial version of SketchBook Pro to see how it worked. Here are a few quick sketches I did with it.

For a $60 program, it does a much better job of approximating pencil, ink, and real brushes than Photoshop. It also has some neat features like a steady-line tool, a symmetry tool, and the ability to rotate the canvas on the fly.

Here's a horrible free sketch I did on a single layer with one of the default chalk brushes in Photoshop. I worked it for a while but couldn't bring any values out of it:

Cute Monster #3 Final

Happy Birthday Brad!

"None Shall Pass"

Brad and I met during my freshman year of college, so next to my mother, he's the person I've known the longest so far.

Apart from the usual college pastimes in which we partook, we also had a mutual love for Monty Python. Once we got rolling, we were those nerds at the party you couldn't get to stop quoting them.

There's such a rich amount of Python material to draw from that I had a difficult time choosing this loony, but here he is.  Hope you have a great birthday, buddy!