Drip

I did this really quickly, like..10 minutes tops. I used the Wacom tablet and a photo a snaked from Flickr. It's so fun using a tablet in photoshop - it's as if my sketchbook has layers. My girl has been borrowing a very fine violin and passionately fawning over the qualities of it - so when I was drawing this I was expressing the exact same thing.

Figure studies

I finally got around to posting the figure studies from the class Scott and I have been going to. Every class goes the same, an hour or so of hating art and not being able to draw at all, followed by an hour of being bored and finally like 20 minutes of decent work, or something like that.The first here was really stressful because he started shaking after around 5 or 10 minutes and after that it was a white knuckle, sweat drenched, bomb-defusion ordeal. I like how the back turned out though. I am trying to get my contour lines to merge better with my shading - right now they seem like 2 different styles stuck in an unhappy marriage.


I'm moderately happy with the way this one turned out. I really like the knees - I live for little areas like that. I also got lucky on the hand - even though it looks a little wooden and small - I still like the structure of it. I also really like the way the shading and contours came together, especially on the leg.





Check out that hair clip and hair texture! It looks like a real illustrator did that part.
The rest is pretty dull and uniform. I am constantly getting stuck in these angles with no discernable tonal variation - why is it that figure drawing classes always insist on turning on ALL the spotlights, ALL the way around the model??? Why not leave a few off on one side so we can get some cool shadows and gradients.

This one is pretty decent. I may go back and watercolor it. The little shading contours didn't come out so well in the pic here but they give the figure a neat wet shiny look. The foot looks too small - I dunno. I spent a lot of time working out the proportions on this one.


Well, Overall I like the studies and I could feel myself getting incrementally better a few times but overall it's more humbling than anything. I would love critiques on any of these and sorry for the poor photo skillz.

Canyon

I drew this at a pseudo mexican retaurent called qDoba. I think I got a southwestern influence sitting in there. I seem to be getting a little better with rocks. Some foreground rocks would have been interesting but that requires planning or layers or something.

I'm going to go back and color this tonight.

Fish

I've been going to figure drawing classes lately (I'll probably post some of those later) and it seems to be making my mental images more vivid. The other day I kept seeing all these cartoons in my head and they all had this dead fish eyed look.

So here's one - it has elephant feet. Notice the recurring halo / aura / ten thousand burning buddha thing above the fish.

Claire loves the sea horse.

cloth study

This is a study for a painting I would like to attempt. Scott (who never posts) and I found a collection of shelves that we decided would make a great base for a collection of paintings. If you look with a careful and heartless eye you can see the errors in proportion when I went from the thumbnail to the full size sketch. Hopefully these are the kinds of issues I can now avoid when i go to the 11 x 40 shelf.

Anyways, the big cloth drawing took about 5 hours to do. Typically when i draw tight things I need to get up like every 15 minutes and go do something else, but this time i was really driven to keep with it till it was finished. (street fighter 3 matches not-withstanding)

Oh also - adding the white was amazingly fun.

Unfinished Scultpure

On the left side of the face, even with the nose/mouth, there is a wonderful little shape. It looks like a drip. I'm proud of that mark.

Not much

If you look at the little lines in the glasses extrusion you can see this stupid mistake i often make. when going around a shape i often forget wich angle i am supposed to be extruding on and the angle kinda slides....looks stupid.
i like the look of the glass despite that though.

I also struggle with the part of the bottom eyelid that touches the top eyelid when the eye closes..but i love drawing tear ducts.

I think the scratchy nature of the groupoard actually lends something to the drawing.

corel painter 8

My neighbor turned me on to this application, which seems to be very promising. This is a painting I spent no more than a half hour on, with one brush etc.

Sermon on Mount Crab

Here's the Crab Lord rallying troops or something.
I wish the groupboard had a watercolor brush and layers...

I heard about a program called opencanvas that might have what i want but for some reason i haven't checked it out yet.

Tree

Here's an Ent.
Merry Christmas.

Bug lord

Here's another one fomr the board. This time i've included some of the insightful chat wisdom so oyu can see what i mean.

oh and i have this habit of putting big flowery backdrops on my pseudo deities..i got that from buddhist paintings where they have like a thousand flaming lotuses behind buddha's head.

Meteors sent to impale Anime

Again with the groupBoard.
i have a confession. i go to this thing more than i should...looking for someone interesting to collaborate with - but what really happens is that i start mouthing off to 14 year old girls who write like "dis and dat" and scrawl the worst Anime humanity has ever witnessed.
so this is one of my reactions.. a radioactive apocolypse from above.
i think this is the best color scheme i've ever come up with - wich is funny because i tihnk it's actually drawn from a subset of the web safe pallete. i could never come up with this in photoshop.

anyways - nathan has been messing with a tablet and corel paint and has done a really cool self portrait but he is procrastinating with the publish.