Been a long time, here are some sketches.

Haven't updated in a while. Usual excuses of too busy with school and whatnot. Some pages from the current sketchbook, will finish it up soon. Now with sketching,  I've more or less found a process that works for me to draw my ideas relatively quickly and convey them well (more on that in a bit) so what I can really focus on is coming up with original ideas (except for Yoda).

As far as ideation goes, for me its about finding a mass of resources to get ideas from, either from other art or just from things I see in my day-to-day life, and then quickly filling up page after page with enough lines so that I can remember what the idea for a drawing was in order to go back later and render it out. The drawings all look a little "fuzzy" on the edges as I tend to throw down a lot of lines exploring different shapes and such before fully committing to darker lines.

 Some great advice I got from my friend Carlton Tomlin (smoothaseggs.blogspot.com) is to leave some edges lighter, keeping in mind that solid outlines all around will flatten an image, and to always think of forms as three dimensional and to picture my marks "wrapping" the forms. Granted, I only implemented this in the final two pages of this post, but its an excellent approach to keep in mind when drawing.

Mass of Sketches

Been tied down with schoolwork. So many personal paintings I've sort of started but been unable to finish. Thankfully, sketchbooks are very low commitment endeavors, so I've been sketching a lot.

Owl be Back

Participated in a challenge over on Crimson Daggers. The goal was to take a child of Zeus and make a painting depicting them that included a background and the deity's symbol somewhere in the piece. I chose to do Athena, and was oh so subtle about the fact her symbol's an owl.  Still playing around with trying different workflows, but what I did for the gorgon seems to be working so far.

Gorgon Illustration

Had a lot of fun working on this guy. Figured out a better workflow, and found out some ways to apply filters and layer settings to get this funky color variation going on. Plus, I finally made a character with a background that wasn't sloppily done fast!

Sketchies!

About halfway through with my current sketchbook, here are most of those pages. Biggest focus has been in drawing original content and working from observation, and I've mostly been using the brush pen. Need to learn how to use graphite properly, eh, someday...

Lev Lagorio Study

Disappeared from here for a while, the semester started and I just got a bit lazy. A lot of what I've been doing lately for school is traditional, which means of course I have to scan/photograph to upload work. I'll get to that soon...

Rah Rah Photostudy!

Photostudy. Using techniques from Shaddy Safadi for the overall process, and then for the fun subtle color wonkiness, I'm using a texture brush set to a low hue jitter and using warm colors for light areas and cool for shadows, then setting the layer mode to soft light. Adds a little more "oomph" to a piece.