Sketchbook Stories, 4

Faces and Force.  Those are my main focuses as of right now.  After all the faces I've drawn, I am nearly forgetting on how to draw realistically, but I don't want style to take over.  I was inspired to start practicing hair because of this post by Darik, a soon2be co-animation student.  I seriously can't wait for life drawing to kick off again.  I'm almost done reading Michael D. Matessi's Force, and I simply can't wait to do some practice.  Posemaniacs is the place to be!

Of course, I'm still practicing hands as well, but I was unable to keep that one sketchbook dedicated just for that.  I also seem to have some odd proportion issues lately, so I'm still working on getting those out of the way too.

Enough text.  Here is three pages:

Walk Cycle

I started working on this roughly two months ago, but I finally finished it last night.  It didn't even take that long... oh well.  I'm happy with the way it turned out, however I wasn't expecting it to be this "laggy".  Since I wasn't motivated to continue, I didn't make the character take four steps, as previously planned.  I'm actually looking forward to doing more rough, life-y animation, so that's probably where I'll put my focus next.

Sketchbook Stories, 3

Here's another random few pages from my sketchbook that I'm (partly) happy with.  I hope you like 'm too!  I'm finally pushing myself to draw more full-body poses, although you'll still find lots and lots of faces in here.  Oh well, I'm enjoying myself.  One more month until September!

And here's the page I'm currently most happy with from my hands-sketchbook.

Then With a Roar that Shook All Narnia...

Hey everyone,

Last week I came up with the crazy idea to do a digital painting: not a simple practice painting (although it certainly taught me many things), but one that would challenge me a bit more.  I wanted to paint something that I would enjoy working on.  I'm happy to say that it most certainly fit that criteria:

So this is what has kept me busy during the last week-and-a-half or so.  As the painting came closer to completion, I became more and more eager to work on it.  I used an image from The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe as a reference for the painting.  The biggest problem I had was that I was painting this on my laptop monitor.  Everything looked great, but not on different monitors.  I compared the image on a bunch of different computers.  I found out that I didn't like the colours on the majority of them, hence the colour-correction of the final image.  It now looks more like the painting I initially painted on my laptop.

I figured it would be nice to post my steps through the painting process, so here goes:

A simple sketch: the origin of the whole thing.

I added the basic islands of colour and experimented with the background colour I liked the most.

I moved the head up slightly, just to give the roar that extra bit of power ;)

The rendering begins!

I did some other minor corrections; mainly the tail.

This is where I had saved the best (worst!) for last.  The mane...

They proved to be an interesting challenge, but I'm happy with how they turned out.

 A few corrections in colour, contrast and detail.

 Here I started working on the rocks.  This provided me with some challenges.

 

Some final changes before starting to work on the sky.

And that's it!  I really liked painting this, and I might actually do another one in the near-future.

Digital Sketching

I decided to give the sketching software that came with my tablet another try.  I got both Corel Painter Sketch Pad and Autodesk Sketchbook Express.  When I opened Sketch Pad it allowed me to continue working on the image I left off with the last time I used the program roughly 1.5 years ago:

 Uugh... It's so bad!  Look at that anatomy!  FAIL.

... Anyway, I decided to try sketching a new image on a new page, and it proved to be quite an interesting experience:

I don't really know what this is.

Now that I actually know how to sketch, I had a lot of fun trying out different drawing tools within the program.  For some reason the program created horizontal lines on the image every now and then.  I don't know why, but I don't really care either.  Anyway, I'm going to continue sketching in the program for a bit, and I'll probably post some more stuff later.  I'll also fool around with Sketchbook Express a little just to see which program I prefer.