Tuesday's Orc

"Hey, I told you guys; NO surprise parties!"

Monday's Orc

Nice pauldrons...

I used one brush to fill in solid colors and one brush for the rest of any kind of blending, etc. I've found some terrific brushes online, but while I'm trying to get better with technique I'm trying to limit what I use. I started with a pretty loose sketch with a pencil-style brush and went from there.

Thanks to Sycra for the great paper texture, and to Richard Robinson at Live Painting Lessons for the incredible gamut masking tool. It helped this noob limit and hone my palette for this sketch.

Happy 4/20!

Eight months away, new and improved rig...Photoshop runs like a dream now.

Winning No Beauty Contests

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.