Bloom: {Black Cherry} Blossom, and few other things

Finished this Bloom piece a while back but, after all I went through with it, I wasn't completely happy with it. Nonetheless, I don't know where to take it from here so I'll just call it finished for now. I learned soooooo much doing this one. In fact, I spent so much time on it that I felt as if I had been neglecting sketching. Just good ol' sketching.

So I've gone back to doing that and I'm having a blast. Of course, half of it looks like doodles but that's where it all starts, right?

I've also decided to share some other stuff I've scribbled/doodled/painted in the past few weeks with you all.







Thanks for stopping by! Have a great weekend and Happy 4th of July to all my American friends!

Creepy Icky Ugly... in COLOUR!

Well, I've been having trouble finishing the next 'Bloom' piece. It's been a serious learning experience for me, but you'll see why soon, I hope.

At any rate, I've been wanting to try a digital painting in colour rather than starting with greyscale. A daunting task for me, really. I figured it would be interesting to try and figure out ambient lighting and all that in a complicated shape/figure.

The issue, at that point, was what to paint. Well, I love checking the awesome blog of Axel #13 where he posts a lot of his character sketches and little tidbits of how he goes about doing things. Unfortunately for him I comment there regularly, asking questions and, most likely, bugging the hell out of him. Bless him though - he answers (thanks for your patience, Axel)! After taking things he's said into consideration I hit my sketchbook and came up with a couple designs and chose this one to paint.

On a bit of a side-note, you ever go to sites/blogs where the artist will post something terribly awesome and then you see something like, 'Did this while walking to my car from my front door on my iPhone.'? Well, those frighten me. I end up worrying whether I'll ever get to work as an artist considering how long it takes me to do anthing (except procrastinate). So I did this piece today. Yup. A day. Mind you I was doing other stuff as well (playing with the baby, spending time with my wife, eating, passing gas, e.t.c.) but I took a day.

That's a record for me. Yay!

Please let me know what you think and thanks for stopping by!

Bloom: Lilyth

So here's my second 'Bloom' piece. It may not be as impressive as my first to many people and I can understand, I suppose. Thing is, I don't do too many digital paintings and that's for many different reasons. The top one would be that I feel I stink at it. I feel as if I take far too long to blend my tones and all that. In fact, this piece was completed because it was a fairly simple composition (that is to say, no background or anything like that. Just a portrait.).

Still, I am very happy with this piece because I did it completely digitally. Again, no great feat for most, but I usually start with a good ol' pencil drawing, scan it, then start digital work. No so here! So that's progress, right? I'd like to think so. As time passes I hope to get much better and not become so frustrated with myself. Clearly a painting would take longer than a pencil drawing, so what's my problem, huh?

Please let me know what you think. Honestly.

On a different note, while I've come across some very good short scripts, I've decided to develope a short story of my own and see if I can get it done before the fall semester. Nothing fancy, mind you, I'm not a writer. I do think, however, I can pull off a simple story with no real meaning to turn into decent sequentials... at least I can try!

Thanks for stopping by and have a great week!

Bloom: Welcome home, Domina.

So... what is 'Bloom', you ask? Well, even if you didn't ask, here goes:

'Bloom' is an idea I had for a series of illustrations based on mixing the female form with flora and fauna. Well, when I hatched this idea it was really to keep myself busy over the summer break from school while waiting on the fall semester to start. Not only would a set project keep me busy artistically, but I felt it would also give me the chance to experiment with various mediums. Since feel most comfortable with what I've learned in school I figured that I'd stick to black and white pieces primarily, but I do plan on fooling more with color.

I'm not quite sure how many pieces I'm likely to get done by summer's end, but I would like to aim for six, at least. I'm also using my time off to try my hand at sequential work (something I've only done in my perspective class in the last few months!). I have an odd relationship with comic book work now; I love doing it but (there's always a 'but')...

Most scripts I've been lucky enough to work on with friends don't necessarily push things I would like to improve upon. Sure, there are awesome stories, the characters are marvelous and everything in between. However, I find that some writers don't approach comic books as a 'team sport'. Some scripts I've looked at seem to be the writer pushing the visuals to a point where my head starts to spin.

For example, one page has anywhere from 6-10 panels. Each panel has entire scenes in them, not just a couple head-shots here and there to show emotions or a shot of an artifact or whatever else - full scenes! Sometimes with 3 or more people involved.

Now, I'm certain there are MANY artists out there who could handle these feats but... I'm not one of them. Scripts like that do tell me that the writer has a pretty clear vision BUT (here we are again with a 'but') I think comics need to be handled as a storytelling medium through script and visuals. If there's a 'need' to cram 4 characters into each shot of the 8 panels of the page perhaps things need to be trimmed down. In comics I feel that by marrying all the elements, from the script to the art to the lettering, you can maximize a story without going overboard.

That said, I'm browsing the net for a script that does a fair job of marrying the elements so that I can destroy it with my hideous art!

Any of that make sense? No?

Perfect!

Anyway, above is my first 'Bloom' piece. Done on bristol board with graphite pencil. Please tell me what you think.

Thank you very much for stopping by and I hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

Aesthetically Beautiful Drawing...?

So... we were given several photos of models and were told to take any two, put them together and create an aesthetically beautiful drawing. We were also told that we could add props to help it along as we saw fit.


I had a much better time working with the toned paper for this assignment. Thankfully, the demos in this module made sense of using the highlights. I still don't think I got it right but it's better than my previous attempts. I feel as if I should have been able to put more into the figures, however, given the sizes and my design, I was hindered (given my current skill) in that area.

Oddly enough, I spent a lot of time trying to 'ground' my figures. Currently, they just seem to be floating due to the lack of shadows but, after several attempts that left me sighing and saying 'Ugh!', I side-stepped the issue entirely. Looks incomplete, I know. Trust me though - the alternatives I was cooking up were worse!

... and with all this the feet are a little too big as is the head of the figure on the right.

:(

Head Studies

These did not come out as well as I had hoped. I was focusing on keeping within the 30 minutes time limit but I still should have focused more on the overall shapes before going into any rendering.

That's what I get for rushing, right?

Thanks for stopping by and I hope you're having a great weekend!

(Stinky) Feet & (Grubby) Hands!

It's been a little while since my last post - my apologies to the 2 visitors to this blog (Hi mom!!!). Things have been a little hectic with the school semester coming to a close and everything else happening. Here are some quick hand and foot studies (roughly 5 minutes for each). It's interesting that, as I did these drawings, I was forced to create 'shortcuts' for the forms. It was really interesting and fun to see that happening! That old saying about practice making perfect isn't just talk!

Here is the homework piece I did for this lesson. The background is quite dark, but I thought it would force me to go darker with my cross-hatching. I still don't know if that worked, to tell you the truth.




Thank you for stopping by and have a great week!

Muscles of the Arm.

I think I'm getting a better hang of cross-hatching. The highlights in pastel, on the other hand, are proving to be a bit tricky.

The top drawing was a 60-90 minute drawing which, oddly enough, doesn't look *that* much more developed than the two drawings below (done in a 30-40 minutes time frame).

Digital foolings.

What the title says. Nothing more. If you knew how long these took me (and none of them are even complete!) you'd laugh your head off.

Thanks for stopping by and I hope everyone's having a great week!

Lower Leg anatomy (and more cross-hatching issues

I've ordered my toned pad but it had not arrived by the time I wanted to start these pieces. That being the case, I decided to keep chugging along. This time, however, I decided to flip back to working in charcoal for one of my drawings.

I'm decently happy with my first piece. I think I was able to show the various muscles to a fair degree but I did not seem able to convey the correct placement of the patella even though it's under all that skin. My piece has it looking like the patella is in an anterior view despite the rest of the leg being more in a 3/4 view.

I had an especially difficult time with the second piece. My charcoal wasn't cooperating at all so my lines are too thick and I think I lost a lot of subtleties in the muscles because of it.

My awesome Breese Award

I can't believe it but I was a recipient of a coveted Breese Award. What's a Breese? Well, quoting from the excellent, and incredibly talented Mr. Peter Breese's blog:

'The coveted Breese Award is given to six inspirational individuals...These six should be a collection of bloggers that have helped you, either directly or indirectly, to stay creative.'

Head over to his blog to see the list. I assure you that when you do you'll wonder how on earth I ended up on it. Let it also be known that Peter is a great person who always has great things to say no matter what - and he can toss in a great bit of humor too. The guy's tops. Seriously.

So now I have the honor of bestowing a 'Breese' on six people who have inspired me. Please know that I visit many blogs, some of which have already received a Breese award so this list doesn't mean I'm not drawing great inspiration from other places:

Mirella
CirOlmo
Fabian Martinez
Francisco Martins
Giulia Adragna
Ko-Shiatar
Nora Moretti
Bella Sinclair

Okay, so that was eight people instead of six. Also, that last link, for Bella Sinclair, doesn't really count because she already got a Breese - I think she needs another, so there! This clearly shows my inability to either read or follow rules... or both!

To the recipients:

please select six new inspirational folks, give them a shiny new Breese Award –clean off any Champagne or similar celebratory stains – and keep the awesomeness moving along!

Even more crosshatching (Leg muscles) and poorly sized heads!

I decided to run with the same process from my previous pieces and add a blue coloured pencil to help put more dark tones into the pieces. It's still too light but a little better, right?

Right?

No...?

Yeah, you're right.

Thanks for stopping by and have a great week!

Illustration Friday Topic: Subtract (two posts in one day?? Madness!)

Take 1 guy and subtract 3 huge bullet holes and you get... ?

A guy with 3 huge bullet holes in him.

I wanted to try colouring this piece (funny how I keep flip-flopping 'colour' and 'color', eh? That's my British-based English education versus my American surroundings, I guess) but I decided to focus on blending with my tablet.

The background looks really childish but I was a) running out of time since I have other things that need to be done today and b) not too focused on the background to begin with.

The character's left arm looks too long now. The figure's perspective is off too... what was I trying to do there? Oh well, I'll try harder next time!

Thanks for stopping by! Have a great day!

Muscles of the Pelvis

I've decided to change my approach to these exercises. I've toned my paper with one of the sepia toned pastel chalk pieces and then developed the drawing with red colored pencil. I found that I'm a lot more comfortable than when I first attempted working with colored pencil and the overall look doesn't look too bad.

I'll be implementing blue colored pencil on the next module's pieces to give a bit more depth to the darker regions. That should be interesting.

For my tensor fascia lata exercise (above), while I looking closely at the photo, I think I emphasized the muscle too much. The result is a leg that looks almost alien. Trying to retouch it didn't work out too well because the colored pencil didn't lift particularly well.

I did my best to be less uniformed with my hatching in that first one as well and had a few slip ups (looks at the torso). The second one I tried to be more methodical but I think I went back to being a little too uniformed.



Thanks for stopping by and have a great day!

Fooling with colour again.

I'm getting better at using my tablet (I think). I decided to sit down this evening and 'figure out' an approach to digital painting that mirrored my charcoal work. I started off with a simple shape and then moved on to something with a combination of shapes then on to the unfinished face. I think I have a better understanding now. I also discovered the 'liquify' filter in Photoshop. Fun stuff!


This piece below was a quick sketch and a quick colour job in photoshop. I was listening to Alanis Morissette's 'Tapes' when I started the sketch. As to why she's topless is anyone's guess.




Thanks for stopping by and have a great weekend!