More Life Drawing...

2nd batch of cherry-picked sketches...

Life drawing scribbles

A break from the usual norm, some life drawing stuff from the past couple of months.

John Carter of Mars

*click the picture for a BIG version.*
And it's done. I'm fairly happy with how it came out, with the exception of John Carter - no matter what I tried, I couldn't find a pose that seemed like a clear cut solution. I think next time I come across a problem like that I'll find the solution, it's just this time it eluded me.

Done mostly in Painter, with some Photoshop tweaks.

Where my time has been going lately...

This, pretty much. I'll be posting the final a little after Thanksgiving, and hopefully some life drawing stuff before that.

Lost in the Woods...

Here's an illustration I just finished earlier this week. Ancient hunters always had to contend with traipsing into some lesser deity's forest, accidentally killing their sacred animals...

Done in photoshop and Painter. If you want to see the Step by Step of it, then head on over to Deviantart, where I've posted it up. Here, I'll even provide a handy dandy link for you!

"Lost In The Woods Step By Step" - Deviantart

Sculpts and Doodles

It's like a bizarre art version of Snakes and Ladders! Just a bit of a sketchdump and a recent zbrush sculpt. The scales weren't hard to do, but were a bit time consuming. I'm still trying to find a way to put out a nice render of my zbrush stuff, since all I'm using right now is Zbrush's built-in renderer.

The Usual.

Lizards, monsters, and studies from life.

Heads and other things.

Here's a set of head studies that I did in an attempt to push my sense of color, along with some new sketchbook pages!

Finally sat down to scan stuff in...

Got a moment of time finally from all the stuff that went on in the month of August to upload my backlog of sketches. Enjoy!

Quickpaint

Currently between hopping from one wedding to another, so no time to really scan and upload anything...instead, here's a quick environment paintup I did during lunch today. Done in Painter.

More Analog Sketchbooks

This time of cars, tiny aboriginals, and Game of Thrones stuff.

What Kind of Hippotamus?

Gothapotamus, that's what.

Analog Sketchbooks!

Some pages out of the regular sketchbook...also, I realized afterwords that the Beatles song is "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill"...NOT Buffalo Bill. Kinda puts a whole new awkward spin on it.

Dragon Lair - Final

So! Here is the final of the Dragon Lair.

I had a few false starts with this, and after trying to start it from scratch I ended up just upscaling the color comp and working over that. It was my first time attempting that method, and it took a bit of elbow grease to get it to a polish I was satisfied with, but in the end it proved invaluable - especially with all the little color subtleties I got in the color comp. No need to replicate them!

Now that the environment is out the way, it's time to move onto the Dragon itself.

Dragon Lair - Value Study and Color Comp

I went with the last thumbnail originally for my final piece, but I quickly realized it was a poor composition and didn't show off much of the scene. So I went back to my thumbnails, and picked this out as my favorite. After doing a little bit of clean-up and expansion, it was ready to figure out values and colors.

I do these steps separate - when it comes to stuff like I currently figure out my values first, then apply washes of color over it to figure out my palette. To achieve the color without ruining my values too much, I used a combination of multiply, overlay, hard light, color dodge, and normal layers.

I should point out for the color comp I didn't keep multiple layers - I usually stuck to three layers - one that was the main layer, another that was the lineart, and finally my "temporary" layer, where I would make changes to the comp before committing it to the main layer.

It was a lot of trial and error to achieve the look I wanted, and once I had it, it was time to move onto the final.