Warm-up this morning, painted @nelliibug!

For a warm-up this morning, I painted my friend @nelliibug!

I do a lot of quick drawings (5 minutes each) of faces to get a feeling for structure and proportion, but I know I could benefit a lot from more sustained studies, so I'm trying to get into the habit of drawing one of these every day.

another advantage is that it's giving me a better sense of color, since I've been almost exclusively working in black and white for the last year.

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/1MywtGV

Doodling again. #copics #zebrapen http://ift.tt/1PzaHUn

Doodling again.
#copics #zebrapen http://ift.tt/1PzaHUn

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/1kmlhTu

A motivational li’l something for those of us who need it.

A motivational li’l something for those of us who need it.

My friend had a bad day at work, so I made this to hang up in her cubicle. No one will mess with her now!


via Tumblr http://ift.tt/1MgVTFq

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.

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.