100Days: Day 003- 006

Days 003 - 006 of the 100 Days Project

So what have I found from completing almost a week of doing a digital ink sketch a day. Well I was behind after only two days but after that first hiccup and even with a pressing client E3 deadline I have managed to catch up and keep up with doing one of these a day.
The trick I have found is, as with anything, in the starting. I use those spare moments during the day where I could just be staring out the window in a sleep deprived, slack-jawed drooling state to instead pootle away and find an idea amidst the chaos. Once the idea is found, it's actually not that hard for me to want to realise the image and see how it stacks up.

So after a week down. Only 94 days to go!  I'm loving the free design that comes out of the purely and totally random nature that I have of generating these.

My tablet has a record feature on it for the sketching app, but it isn't in an easily exportable format so once I figure that out, hopefully I'll be able to show the completely anarchic nature of the process. This is the creative process unbridled...and I'm lovin it!

003

004

005

006

100 Days : Day 002

Day 002. Already one day behind. Lol

Hundred Day Project: Day 001

The hundred day project officially started today (and boy did it creep up on me quickly) Despite some initial technical issues with their website they are all sorted and now there is no excuse to not get going. What will follow will be a hundred consecutive days of sketches. I've been wanting to practice my digital inking so this is what I'm going to do...for a hundred days in a row....if I can. 

Having done quite a few monthly daily sketch things I know how hard it actually can be to be that consistent, so the hundred days will be really pushing it. I'm gonna take up the challenge and do my best...and probably come up with a lot less than that for much of the time, which brings us to the lowly offerings for Day 001.
Sigh. Well at least I intend on getting better....look forward to that.

CGMA week 3

I have been taking the CGMA - Environment Design 1 course taught by
the awesome James Paick.
So far it has been awesome fun and with each week I am pretty sure I have been
improving both my skills and my workflow.

The general format of the class is a lecture and demo released each Wednesday.
At the end of the demo we are given the assignment for the week and are given
a week to submit. For this week (week 3 of 8) we were asked to submit one full
blown grayscale environment concept using the prompt, "Scale, Space". That was it. 
After the previous two weeks of just
practicing our fundamentals (value, lighting, perspective) in thumbnail form
it was good to test out the next level up in detailing.

I decided to do some development thumbnails beforehand:

I liked both A and B as did a others when asked for feedback but I eventually decided to go with B. As a side note, I also saw a new composition in A with a serendipitous sidewards look at it. I thought it was a more interesting viewpoint using the same composition and I'd be keen to develop it when I get some free time.

A couple of stages of development and one good crit check later set me straight as I had
started to go astray with the complexity of shapes as well as diverging quite
a bit from the original values. I also had to try a couple of different things
for the foreground that just didn't end up working. So after a couple of hours of banging away I scrapped them and went back to the original thumb and reworked up from there. It came together much quicker after that.

The "final" submitted value sketch. It ain't perfect and I was far from happy with it. James suggested lightening up the background values even though it is in space to get the ship to pop (agreed) and really paying attention to internal perspective angles within the ship (agreed)

The process really reinforced to me the fact that in art you have to be willing to dump hours of work and backtrack if it just isn't working out. It's quite easy to get stuck in the rut of doing something and as creatives artists can often be quite stubborn and we think it is ruthless to just keep bashing on with things in the hope it will come right. But sometimes being ruthless is more about being flexible and open to accepting when you're not getting anywhere. Doing this and breaking out of the rut is a hard but necessary thing to get comfortable doing...in both art and life.

100 days of doodles

I work an almost full time job (4 days a week), I commute 2.5 hours a day, I am working on a 20-something page comic book including the writing, scripting, drawing, inking and colouring,  I am also doing environment concept art for a video game and am signed up to an online environment course that runs for 8 weeks. Oh and I'm supposed to be renovating my house for sale in 3 months.   Last week I got  an average of 5 hours sleep each night...including the weekends. I know how unhealthy that is for me, but there just isn't enough time in the world.

So of course if that wasn't enough, this week I decided to take part in the 100 days project the motto of which is this: One thing. Every day. x100.  You can read more about it here: http://100daysproject.co.nz/about

I'm probably nuts, and it remains to be seen how I will pull off the juggling act but recently I've been doing quite a few daily sketches in a sort of "comic inking" style on my Galaxy Note 10.1 and I figure I can do it.  Incidentally this puppy has built-in wacom technology which means that it basically functions as a souped up digital sketchbook. It's awesome and it's so much better to actually be able to draw digitally on screen rather than off to the side like on a regular wacom.

I will post the link to my project page once I get started on June 7th but until then here are the last few days worth of sketches. By the end of the project, I should hopefully have about a 100 more of them!

89 Years to Awesome

Well after a long break away I've decided to resurrect this blog. My 89 days did not go as planned and maintaining a blog was one of the first things that I had to dump along the way. Apologies to anyone following for being so rubbish. I intend on resuming posting at least once a week to keep it manageable.

Despite my lack of posting the last 3 months have been a useful insight into how I work best (and worst) as well as in helping me figure out a better direction in terms of how I focus my time.  Basically I overdid the intense study. From now, the focus will be more on personal projects, really interesting game or freelance project work as well as constantly and consistently building folio ready pieces as I go. The study will happen, just as and when I need to apply something specifically. 

I am now back to my 4 day a week job as a cubicle commando so the time to do this in has suddenly become very limited. Hopefully at some distant hazy point in the future, preferably before I am 89, these steps will help me finally make the transition to doing the art thing full time.  Perhaps I can re-purpose the blog title to be somewhat along these lines. 89 Years to Awesome sounds about right. 

So let's get started. Here is a work in progress for April for the Gnomon monthly contest "Death Knight". The month is already over, and I have been ridiculously busy, but hopefully I can finish this within the next few days and still be amongst the judged.

I also started an online course at CGMA in Environment Design, taught by James Paick. It is fun so far.
Here are some value thumbs from the first week's assignment: 

Day whatever

A long break

I've had to take two weeks off from painting due to a medical issue that came up unexpectedly, that I alluded to in my last post. I now basically have a 4x3x2.5cm hole in my back. It's a real hole. I could keep my spare change in it, or hide the one ring from Sauron in it. Luckily for you I won't be posting an image of it here. We should be thankful for small blessings. So I don't really know what day it is, and I'm a little scared of counting because it might depress me..so onto some work instead.

So about three or four days ago I managed to paint something again for the first time in ages with only minor discomfort. It was hard to get back on the horse...very hard, so I lept onto a donkey instead and this will be my ride for a while.


I decided to get stuck into a competition. A good chance to do a more finished illustration than I would normally do and get the opportunity to not win again; those are always fun.

So the theme was for the new video game reboot of Tomb Raider. This is Lara Croft's beginning story of how she survived against terrible odds to become the heroine etc blah that we all know.  So here are my development steps.


initial development sketches. I gathered more feedback that I would normally from other people on which choices to make. It was interesting, but not sure it made my life any easier.

The composition I ended up using, was a bit of a mashup of the various options.

A work in progress. Just starting to colour up and render...obvious issues remain

The final entry submitted tonight. I actually hate the end result. This is surprising because I normally find good in most things I do. I also realised that rendering detail is drudgery. The fun bits for me are clearly in the initial to mid stages of the image making. That's not surprising at all.

A hiatus in a sabbatical

Hello!  I'm sure some of you may be wondering why I've been slacking off with the posts.  
Well over the last week I have been unexpectedly walloped with an infection on my back details of which the less said the better.  

I have basically been feverish, dizzy and in quite a bit of pain that being localised on my back means almost everything involving upper body movement is affected. I tried painting through the haze but it was pointless. I decided to give it up and wait for the antibiotics to kick in and work....slowly...very slowly.

Today was the first day in at least 7 that I was able to paint anything; A self portrait (of sorts) and it took me forever, through winces and grimaces. 

I learned two things. 

One: I got incredibly annoyed having to look at my own face for so long. 
Two: Likenesses are hard, even when it's your own ugly mug. 

Come to think of it the growth is probably more accurate than my face is.

Say hello to my little friend

Day 85-83

Well, I haven't really posted much in the last few days, not because I haven't been doing much, but because I'm coming to the realisation that posting the way I have been with a concise-ish theme to the post and honing it for readership, as well as having some nice work to show, is not going to work.

I kinda spend more time setting up posts than I think I should and is pretty much unsustainable especially if I'm to post work every day or so. 
I've also found that the schedule I have set for myself is actually pretty hard to stick to. Not so much in terms of the number of hours, but because I am a hideous procrastinator when I have self-scheduled stuff to do. I seem to need externally generated deadlines, or just work on what I want at the time. It's a bit worrying but I figure this is an experiment so I'm going to try and shift things around a bit so I'm a bit less stressed about not hitting exactly what was scheduled.

So, this is the first day of the new regime. To coincide with my more random nature, I will be posting whatever I do during the day...wips, sketches, finished pieces and the total rubbish...No holds barred...and not much blabbing either.  

Study from weekend not posted

Horned Lizard Study

19-21/02

Morning Warm-up Sketch

Arm Anatomy study and practice

WIP Character designs

Sketch playing for a Tomb Raider competition

I might enter

Day 85 : Streams

This weekend and next are probably the most social of my 3 month hermitage. I didn't actually get a whole lot done art wise for my liking, but I did achieve a few things which might make things a bit more interesting.

I finally managed to get my own Livestream channel working. Livestream is a website where anyone can setup a streaming media channel for free. Many artists use it to stream their desktops live while they work so people can come and have a look at their process, ask questions or just have a good old chat and hangout for a bit. 

Below is the 3.5hr stream condensed down to about 5 and a half minutes. Sorry for the annoying windows popping up all the time, I recorded with only the laptop; future ones will be dual monitor so only the painting will be captured. 

I finished the piece offline and the final result is below.

A stream from a stream

Besides the sketchathon I don't often view other people's streams because, well I've got too much I need to do on my own painting to hang about watching other people paint but I can see how it could be really inspiring watching amazing work come together in real time.

Speaking of sketchathons, here is a collage of some of the stuff from the most recent one last night/early this morning. I seem to be staying up for these later and later each time. 10.30pm - 5.30am and up by 9.30am again.

Skull Island

Asian inspired Palace Entrance

Ferrari inspired Mech

Female assassin (yep female: total fail on my part)

Day 86-ish

Once again I have been stymied by life and things one has to deal with that seem to serve no purpose but to be annoying. Ok, I sound whiney. so enough of that, and just a quick post today.

This is the only thing I had time to work on today. You may remember a work in progress I posted a couple of posts back for a weekly environment challenge. This is the final version.

The ship underwent countless design iterations, and I ended up settling for something quite symmetrical and familiar despite my best attempts. Quite disappointed with it. The sun turned out pretty well i think...that study really helped!

Today wasn't a total loss because I finally managed to join up at the library as I am now able to be out during business hours!  So I got my fingers on James Gurney's Imaginative Realism book and pretty much blasted through it in an hour or so. The verdict: It's pretty good.  There is quite a bit of insight into his process which are applicable to any illustrator.  The most interesting thing for me was the in depth research and reference process he seems to go through for each painting and his liberal use of quickly built maquettes and lights to play with and determine lighting .  I'm considering actually giving this a go for the more polished pieces I end up doing for the folio. Yayy for play with clay.

Day 87: Concept World + Sketchathons

Concept World Sketchathons

I have been an admin on the deviantArt group ConceptWorld for probably over a year now. If you don't know. deviantArt is probably the largest online art community there is mainly because it caters to everybody.  There are professionals posting their work alongside pre pubescent teenagers.  While this is wonderfully inclusive it also means it can be a little random and overwhelming and have a distinctly amateurish flavour in parts, which isn't a bad thing but just the nature of the site. This is where groups come in.

The ConceptWorld group focuses on promoting deviant user's concept artwork. The goal isn't to be exclusive but we do aim at promoting stuff that hits a "decent" level of finish based on some clear criteria. We think of it as a skill based goal for the less experienced newbies to aspire to get into the galleries and judge their own progress by. We showcase art of people who aspire to be professional concept artists one day as well as the work of many who are already pros. For me personally the best thing about the group is being able to provide critique on young or starting artists' work and feel like I'm really doing something concrete to help them along their own journey. Warm fuzzies.

I generally have been winding down on my admin duties to take up this crusade of mine, but one of the great things that I still love to take part in when I can are the weekly hosted Sketchathons. These are run every Sunday using a combination of livestream and google hangouts and are hosted by the group creator and one of my first good internet-only art mates, Gagan, who goes by the online alterego gdsworld. He really deserves to be mentioned because of the awesome effort he goes to, completely unpaid, to host these every week. He's often up for fifteen hours straight making sure things keep ticking.

Anyway these are my sketches from Sunday's session. Each are done between thirty minutes and an hour. Everyone gets to see and comment on each other's work no matter what the skill level and basically good times are had by all. Because of the time difference with NZ I tend to miss most of it, but I only slept three hours last night because this time was a blast! Best thing is, I always feel so productive after one of these.

ConceptWorld Sketchathons

When  : GMT 9am - 10pm or thereabouts

Where: http://www.livestream.com/gdsworld

If you have a sketchy tendency come along and give it a go. 

Yawn..coffee number three needed before getting back to some painting...Day 86 beckons

Day 86 and a half:

The loss of power

I refuse to count today as a full day. 

I wake up at 6.30am after 3 hours of sleep to continue in the sketchathon and painted further till 12pm.  Lunch and a quick three coffees later I hop back into the hunched screen monkey pose, only to discover that the power is gone. I eke out a tense 20 minutes on the cheap replacement battery, hoping.  Surely it would come back? Likely it was just a momentary glitch as always. 

Half an hour passes, and the anxiety starts to set in; visions of an entire afternoon spent without the pixel arranger in operation.  

45 minutes, a bead of sweat dribbles down my  temple. 

1 hour, Horror. Panic is setting in; but just as I am resigned to doing something practical and non art related, I suddenly remember, I can draw!  

I scrabble around in cupboards flinging boxes aside. The dog watches me quizzically and joins in the hunt. He's not helping.

Finally I find it. I blow the dust off the bag that contain my sketchbooks, pencils, pens and other traditional stuff. Busting out ye old parchment and etching sticks I get down to some studies.

After producing the two monstrosities on the right, I started to get really really scared. Had I lost all my drawing skills by doing so much digital stuff? I called the electric company. 
"Get someone out here right away please and check things out." 

"You understand that will be a $145 charge if the fault is at your end? "  

"Fine fine, I don't care, my future as an artist is at stake here" 

With nothing to be done I sit back down whip out a history of Art book that weighs more than I did as a five year old and flick through to the Hellenistic period. I pick the Altar at  Pergamum and for two hours or so sit down and do a study of a sculptural detail.

Thank the Gods! This is slightly better. The anxiety lessens somewhat. 

The power comes back on.

I Immediately boot up the old ordinateur to do a digital study and get my pixel fix. A study from photo ref of Big Dog frolicking on the beach.  Isn't technology grand?

One thing this has taught me is to remember that even as a predominantly digital artist, drawing the old fashioned way in a sketchbook is really important. Drawing by wielding an implement directly on the final surface is fundamental to be able to do any kind of illustrative art work, including digital. It exercises those hand eye coordination skills in a way you cannot on a graphics tablet, and the results are noticeably different. You also end up with a unique object at the end of it and not a digitised bit form that can be reproduced with the click of a button.  
It's also tons of fun.

Day 88: Texture spheres

Texture Spheres

It is of course obvious that the moment I decide to take time off and concentrate on doing nothing but painting and drawing, a whole bunch of life-admin related stuff comes chugging along one after the other. I also got more invites and options to do social things in the last two weeks than I had in the entire year of working.  I'm not complaining....well maybe a little bit.

Anyway so with that lame excuse over with for lack of demonstrable productivity, here are some material studies. 

I loved doing these little material balls. They were fairly quick to do and really helped me get a feel for the material without needing to do a whole illustration or photo study. I did look at a bunch of reference photos before I started them, but I painted them from memory to really activate the learning centre of my brain. I assume there is one in there somewhere.

I highly recommend this process to any learning artists reading this. Expect to see more of these. Oh and that is bunny fur apparently.

I'm also working on a brief was taken from the environment of the week (EoW) challenge over at Conceptart.org.  The brief is a probe or vessel entering the planetary system orbiting the Gliese red dwarf star system.  You'll probably guess what that first material study in the line from before is supposed to be in aid of now. 
I took some liberties with proximity of the planet to the sun, but if we can ignore the ridiculousness of time travel in movies we can ignore this.  This is the work in progress as it stands. Speaking of faster than light travel I really need to engage my super-hermit drive and get harder nosed or I'm only going to get halfway to awesome.

Day 89: Hands

Anatomy Wednesdays: Hands

As Wednesday is anatomy day in my schedule, I decided to do studies of something I haven't explicitly studied in the past having always intuitively been able to get to a fair representation, granted with a bit of effort and the old tongue poking out. So what better time to bite the bullet and lessen that effort with some hand studies.

Hands are one of the most expressive parts of the body, second only to the face; probably first if you're Italian.  

For an illustrator dynamic expressive hands are essential to being able to give added cues to the emotional state of your characters. They also need them to wield large guns, and hang from the nostrils of dragons and cast spells bewitching hapless heroes and so forth. They are always an area of focus that can cause difficulties so they are deserving of some attention.

I don't want to turn this blog into a tutorial because for one there are much better resources out there doing just that. However for me the key trick lies in knowing the large general shapes that make up the hand and working from that down to the individual fingers. The general shape I still use to start with in my head is a mit. No not myself, an actual mit; it simplifies things down before you start thinking about individual digits. Loomis's technique of using simple planes can get you further...after that knowing the anatomy is essential to add realism.

As the cliche beret wearing master french painter mentor in my head says, "You cannot zust look at ze hand! You must hear it's pulse, you must feel ze tendons pulling and ze skin stretching over bone, ze muscles flexing and ze fat pads zey bulge...you must feel ze grip of my hand on your throat if you draw another rubbish clawed monstrosity."

ermm ok so with that scary dip into my head here are some studies working from the bones out. I used several anatomy books aimed at artists to study from by Gottfried Bammes, Loomis and Burne Hogarth. Bridgeman is of course fantastic as well, but one can only do so much. 

PS. this stuff takes longer than I expected and I haven't really hit my routine as well as planned. I am already thinking about re-jigging my daily work schedule, not in total hours but in how I split it up. 

Also I have been thinking about adding a list of the resources I always end up going to for studies, reference, inspiration etc down the side...holler in the comments if you'd find it useful.

Daily Draw Feb 3

The original mess of a 3 minute sketch. For a pretty bland static pose it had some elements of dynamism about it...well the flag anyway. 
For informal fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants type painting this rough gesture sketch is all I really need to start off what will become a finished painting..

An interim stage. The colour palette has been mostly worked out, and a bit of design work is now coming in to the character

And the final. Probably finished in single digit hours over the course of a day. The colour palette works but I think I went a little overboard with the contrasty lighting . I definitely prefer some of the softer elements of the material and design work on the jacket in the previous image. I thought I had lost some dynamism in the sketch somewhere along the way, but I actually think I improved the pose which was way hunch-y. It's still a bit stiff but that can be massaged away.

With things like this which aren't fully planned out there are often some small elements of the image I really like. For this one it's that little bit of red bounce light off the rug and maybe the general idea of the headpiece.  

Daily Draw February

Entry for Day 2 : Here Kitty Kitty...

Daily Draw February

The online art community and gallery website SatelliteSoda.com hosts a daily draw challenge for the month of February each year. Each day you have to post at least one drawing, sketch, illustration that you have been working on that day. I hadn't heard of it before but a friend challenged me take part and as I was planning to be drawing bucket loads every day anyway I figured I could easily jump in with no extra fuss.

A lot of people on the site view it as a challenge. As I have been drawing daily for over a year now since I became really serious about improving my skills, I do admit to a tad bit of smugness on how easy I think this will be for me. 

All artists, whatever section of the skill improvement trail they are hiking on, know well the importance of practice. If you are new to the whole idea of a practice regimen, these kind of things are great to get involved in so I urge you to check it out. The great thing about daily draw challenges like these is that they provide a social forum, some support and a bit of an ass-kicking as well to get in that practice. It's also always heartening and infectious to see the excitement of people doing what they love and some of whom maybe aren't as smug in their diligence as I am. 

I also coincidentally discovered a February Sketchbook Challenge Facebook page. Guess I'll post up in there too.