Mars

Just started another painting, trying to do a cool shot of the surface of mars. I skipped the sketching stage and went straight in by blocking in the big shapes with simple values, then throwing on the color and texture. I think the piece still has a ways to go (conceptually and finish-wise), but once it's done I think I'll have something worth selling as a print.

Bette and Dot

I'm a huge American Horror Story fan, so I've started up some fanart of Bet and Dot. It's good portrait practice and I'm all over a chance to draw conjoined twins.

Self Portrait (finished)

Finished that self portrait! I've done a new self portrait each year for a couple of years now, and you can see a huge difference between each one in terms of skill. It's weird because each year I think "this is it, I'm finally getting good at this whole art thing." but when I look back at it a year later it looks terrible. I wonder what I'll think of this a year from now.

Value Study

 

I'v read in about a million different sources that you should do a value study before diving into a painting with color. Historically, values tend to be my greatest weakness. I've spent 12 hours working on an image just to stand back and realize everything's a dark grey, aside from a puddle of white near the bottom that draws your attention away from the focus. Basically  I'm trying to get my shit together.

I'm super jazzed about how this is turning out so far. I'm toying with the idea of using it on a business card once it's done, even though my hair is going to grow out  a lot faster than I can hand out cards. I don't actually have a business, and I'd have to leave my apartment to hand out business cards (very unlikely), but I've been told that I should have them, and I do like the idea of having a bunch of wallet sized cards with my face and contact info on them. Maybe I could use them to hit on people?

Caricature in progress

I just started working on a digital caricature of myself. Final version will have super realistic textures and color, but the same exaggerated features as a caricature (which I'm super excited about). Exaggeration has always been my weakness as a caricature artist, so before diving into the final portrait I made a few different drawings with different exaggeration.

For the final painting I'm going to use the top sketch, but I sort of like all of them. Maybe I'll do a series of selfies.

New painting app

I recently stumbled upon a new drawing app for my iPad called Procreate. I had to read their online manual to figure out all of the gestures used, but for the most part my skills in Photoshop carried over pretty easily. It has a lot of the same tools, dozens of brushes (and you can make more) and it has a built in function that records your brushstrokes, so once you finish a painting in the app you can export a video that shows the whole drawing process.

This is a video of a quick drawing I did for a children's book idea I've been mulling over. While it's hard to pick up the details while it's being played back 20x faster, but you can easily see the different brushes available, less obvious are the different blending modes for layers, the useful selection tools, and their cool new paint bucket feature. Procreate costs about $6, which is expensive as far as apps go, but for a drawing program that's so versatile it's worth the price.

Caricature Work

Earlier this week I sent in an application to a caricature company, and I have a try-out tomorrow. I hadn't drawn caricatures in about a year, so I made a facebook status along the lines of "like this and I'll draw you" so I could get some practice. 50 likes/carics later I'm starting to feel ready for the interview. Below are a few of my favorites.

I noticed that all of these exaggerated features have started to leak into my other work. I was at a figure drawing session yesterday and I noticed I was exaggerating the curves and shapes in the  model without even thinking about it.

Finished Landscape

 I finished my painting from yesterday. I decided to throw in some traveler and his pet moose making their way up the mountain. I was really happy with how it turned out, and decided to reformat it a bit so I could use it as a facebook cover photo, and I like the cover photo version better than the original :/

This probably means I need to spend more time messing around in the initial thumbnail stage to make sure the composition is worked out before I go in and start rendering.

New Landscape

Started a new painting today! I mostly focused on color, which I'm pretty happy with. I'm starting to understand why painters can get really excited about selective use of greys.

Composition-wise it could use some work, the original sketch had a building half-way up the hill-thing, but I couldn't get it to look right. When I have trouble with something in a painting, I can never figure out if it means I should try harder or back up and try to think of something else, so we'll see what I do after a night's sleep.

Storyboards

Did did some prep work the other day for a story idea I had. I don't think I'll do anything with it, but the process work is kind of cool.

Photo Studies

These are a few  studies I've done of photographs I pulled from a nature photography blog. All of them took about 20  minutes each to make, and my focus was on getting the colors right. If you look closely there aren't any textures or details used, and I restrained myself to a basic round brush, but the thumbnails of the images look fairly realistic.

(this is the only image that wasn't pulled from that photograhpy blog, my friend posted it on facebook and liked it)

So I just need to do 1234567876546856745 more and I'll start to develop a solid understanding of how color works.