Mars Progress

A while ago I posted an in progress shot of a Mars landscape I was working on. After abandoning the image for a couple months, I revisited yesterday and made a decent amount of progress on it. The colors were looking good, but the textures were a bit muddy, so I tried out using photo textures for the first time and was really happy with the result.  I still want to add in some sort of narrative, like a spaceship or some sort of mars colony, but feel like I should have planned for that from the beginning. As is I like it.

Figure Study

The art studio I go to for my weekly fix of figure drawing has been closed for the last couple of weeks, so I warmed up this morning with a 50 minute digital figure study. Normally when I figure draw I just use a pencil and focus on shape and value without taking color into account, so it was nice  to work in color for once.

You can tell that I spent most of my time on the upper torso and arms, I was really drawn in by all of the shadows and highlights the back and arm muscles were forming,

Morning Warm Up

To warm up for work this morning I spent about an hour doing hand studies.  I tried to focus on using line weight to describe the light and dark areas, so parts of the had that are in light have a thinner line than the ones in shadow, which helps hint at where the light source is.

Even though I've spent a lot of time studying human anatomy, I still haven't fully grasped (pun?) the structure of the hand.  Practice sessions like this go a long way towards understanding building that knowledge.