A Hommage to Friends

Some sketches of the group of friends I play Diablo 3 with as a way to keep in touch.

A Baseline for Figure Drawing

So as part of my art re-invigorating plan I'm planning on doing a lot more life drawing, which is definitely something I never really had time to embrace. Thanks to my girlfriends(The Flying Twinkie) insistence, I ended up at the Toronto School of Art's open life drawing today, and I had a blast. Hopefully I can attend a lot over the coming year and really explore different mediums and pose lengths.

The first thing I had to do though is fight my inclination to use hard lines. I'm going to use these drawings as my baseline as I work to improve my skills in this area, hopefully I'll look at these a bit later and enjoy how far I've come.

This was a 3 hour session involving one long pose, so I ended up with a lot of similar drawings. I'm displaying the ones that I think best represent where my baseline currently is. The first being an attempt to not use hard lines so much, the second a hand study and a short drawing, and the last is a quick gesture where I modified the pose a bit.

A Special Kind of Slug

I'm definitely a fan of anything with a shell. In the process of restructuring how I want to present my drawings, tackling painting is high up on my priorities list. I have a long way to go, but here's a step!

If anyone's interested, the steps I took are below!

Basically starting with a cruddy sketch. I find when designing something, trying to tackle both the design and an awesome drawing at the same time.... Doesn't really work. So leading to step two, I took some time to re angle and modify the sketch, decide on the kind of cave it would be in, not just a 'generic rocky' cave. As well as that, deciding on a color scheme. Then onto the fleshing it out. In the second last step there, I had something of a Disney-esque mushroom going on in the bottom right, not that I have anything against Disney, but was not my intent! so I modified it for the final version. At well at this phase I opted for some fog, which helped a lot with the depth.

In the last phase along with modifying the mushroom, I decided it would look better if I made the lights in said fog... look more foggy. I also sharpened a bunch of highlights, added a few shadows and finished up the barnacles on the right side.

As a whole I have no idea how I eventually want to stylize my paintings, I think ultimately I should probably take some painting classes to really learn the basics. There are so many cool styles out there, and a lot of fun ways I see people painting (ie speed painting). So I'll probably look into doing that in the future.