Painting Experiment: A Rope of Sand.

So continues my painting/portrait experimenting, this isn't anyone specifically, just a made up face. I tried my best to give her a facial expression that wasn't just the classic dead stare of a robot (not to insult robots, I love you guys!). And secondly, give it a bit more life by tilting it, changing the angle and so forth. Hopefully I succeeded a little, but much more practice yet to come.

More sketching, to the ROM once again.

 A lot of misc sketches this week. I did a few environment sketches around town trying to use pencil instead of pen. On top of this I started working on portraits, these are just from Google image search, the main focus for me was getting likeness, and I would like to expand into making the faces feel a lot more soft and pliable.

Lastly, today me and Vic went to the ROM and I got some more sketching done there. I'm finding using the Ebony pencil on top of my HB gives me much nicer contrast, so I'll probably keep that going.

SAMURAI!!

Various sketches from the ROM

More Sketches

 Some more Sketches from the TO Zoo among other places. I am working on more paintings but I'm doing sort of a design pack thing with multiple images, backgrounds, character and machine designs, so that will be a large update, and is also taking some time.

Assorted sketches

This is just an assortment of sketches from my sketchbook over the past month. Just as a disclaimer, they were collaged together from different pages just so I didn't have like 50 pages with one or two drawings each. Basically just content wise it's a random assortment of my cats, zoo animals from a trip to the TO zoo, and some Google image practice.

The Wombat was interesting because I was using a different pen which played out a lot differently than the one I normally use.

Hydroponic Garden

So one thing I really want to play with is the visual impact of the painting itself, as opposed to finicky details which seem to have a lot of diminishing returns (not that I don't like details). So this is the first in a series of 3 I want to do featuring this ruined hydroponic garden.

Primary goal: Visual impact!

In between these I need to start doing more studies too, so expect some of those, I need to increase my know how so once I do get the visual impact I want, then I can play with details again.

A Quick Musing

So just a quick musing while I work.

It's become increasingly obvious to me to what I need to do in this learning process, is not just tackle the base concepts again, but also play with something far more important, that truth be told I never really thought about.

I don't know what to call it, I'm sure there's a term, and I'm sure I'll come across it eventually, but I what my drawings lack more then technical ability is Oomph (yeah see, need a better word).

 With backgrounds it comes down to visual impact, I'm working on a sci fi style hydroponics garden/lab right now, and I want to get it right, but I hit a huge wall. And it has nothing to do with actual technical ability. It's boring, it lacks oomph, and regardless of how many valves and pipes I add, it will still be boring. And then I got thinking even more about it, and one theme came into my head (partially induced by playing Journey), Style and aesthetic, play a monumental role, and even though I have become a much better artist since I started training way back in 2002/3, my style never fundamentally changed. Its remained based on my interpretations of how I should approach drawing back from high school and before, not now. The thing is, I know better, and I think I need to play more.

So two huge things I want to play with:

1) ensuring I follow some of the basic idea's of good art, composition, story telling, personality etc, in the pieces I do

2) Ensuring the STYLE and Aesthetic I use also has personality, story telling etc.

So its not just what I draw, but how I should draw it. I still feel like I'm just barely grasping the fundamentals of good art, but I'm glad I started looking into this. Because how I choose to draw eyes, hands etc, can really affect how my arts going to look and whats more, give it my own spice. Its not just about anatomical accuracy or proper perspective, or even gesture. All important things, but only part of the whole.