Friday, September 10, 2010

Finally forced myself back into art with a bit of art homework! I decided to move on from Vilppu and study some Andrew Loomis stuff. I went through the first 50 or so pages, doing every single "assignment" whether it was asked for by the book or not. A lot of it I'm already familiar with from school but of course it's never a bad idea to go back and refresh. I feel like I really took in a lot more of the info this time simply because I care more now than I did as a rowdy college teen. So that's good!



Here's a canvas fulla some junk I was studying. Nothing too outrageous, just some measurements, muscle groups, gestures. I am amazingly unpracticed when it comes to drawing males (especially from memory) so I will definitely be spending more time with that.

Nearly done with the website. After sitting on it for a while I thought of some new things to add to it, so it's taken a bit longer than originally anticipated. I think it will be cool when it's up though!

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

GOOD EVENING!

Really been neglecting le olde blogge the past month, but I have excuses! Good ones! Kind of! Between packing, moving, unpacking, working extra hours, vacation, and attempting to incorporate more exercise in my life, I've been neglecting the computer more than ever. And this has led to my being considerably less productive since all my art is usually the product of a good old fashioned computer sit.

But it hasn't all been for nothing! I've done a bunch of doodles and given my artistic brain some time to rest and stop grinding gears about art for awhile. I've actually been tempted to do a painting lately and I think I finally have an idea (and all the right colors) for it. I'm really addicted to the sweet sound of my CTRL-Z so the thought of doing an honest to goodness painting, even if it's cartoony in nature, is pretty intimidating but exciting.

Anyway, I was able to sit down and churn out a little doodle tonight.



It's not the usual fare from me. Definitely has a more loose "caricaturesque" look to it, but that's kind of cool because while drawing it I wasn't paying attention to any of the things the tiny editor in my head was saying, I was just drawing & goofing around. Most artists get this I guess, just that feeling of being so mentally detached from art for a while that when you finally feel like drawing again, your repertoire of usual art tricks is gone and you just draw without thinking or trying to make any pieces fit your way. It's refreshing and opens the door for a new period of growth & understanding, until the cycle repeats again!

Friday, July 16, 2010

Owl Doodlin



Been in sort of a mild art drought the past couple weeks I guess, but managing to bust out a couple doodles here and there. This one's from yesterday. I decided to draw up a sort of basic standing pose of Owl because I realized the only decent one I have is pretty outdated. The anatomy is pretty botched but there are some details I feel pretty good about especially in regards to the legs. They're too long & sort of crooked but uhhhhhhhhhh oh well too bad!

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

WHEW sure have been busy the past couple weeks going to doctor and finding a new place to live and working a lot of hours????? So not much time to make sweet sweet art in between all that (and being lazy i guess???) but anyway managed to doodle out some stuff and do a few gestures the past few days so that'll have to do for now!

Gestures. I had a DA slideshow going and then some bad anime drawing popped up so I decided to do a "gesture" of it too lol.

Doodle of Touhou character Suwako. I don't really know anything about the series but she's a cute character so...


A character I made up on the spot to sort of draw alongside a friend's character. Look at those massively long legs wow. I think I went overboard trying to make her look tall & thin haha.
Quick little doodle I did in SAI of Corryn the lion goil. Standing around looking like a grouch as usual eueh.

A couple weeks ago I decided to start thinking more about the lives of my characters in terms of their history and future, in order to get a better feel of how they are outside of their "present". Basically I wanted to flesh them out, so this is my character Owl drawn as a 16 year old high school kid rather than the snot-nosed 11 year old boy he is in the present. I feel like I did a pretty good job keeping the character "real" through the aging process and also keeping him recognizable although obviously aged. Maybe it's easier for me to tell because I draw him almost every day, but anyway...

This post is full of a lot of pictures despite me saying I haven't done much art the past couple weeks.

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Web Buildin!

HEY Y'ALL didn't do a lot of drawing today but I did spend a few hours organizing art and making thumbnails for my new website! I realized that it's about time I get a proper portfolio site up asap in order to have all my ducks in a row when I apply for jobs, and just as a place to call my own that isn't DA or Blogspot (as much as I love them).

All coding is being done by my sweet & wonderful & talented boyfriend Brian Lee.

If you wanna take a sneak-peek at what's going on you can do so here, just know that the content is being changed every day so nothing is final until it's uploaded to my domain.

Anyway I've got a lot of work to do on the website, but for now have a ~self portrait~ sketch!

Monday, June 28, 2010

Nudies 2009

BOY HOWDY I sure spent hours doing some 2-3 minute gestures today and I am feeling good about them for the most part! I think that's a good thing? Anyway, these were all done from photos I snagged from DeviantArt (thanks artists!) since I don't really have an array of naked people sitting around in my apartment waiting for me to draw them :( Although that is every figure artist's dream I'm sure.



Along with continuing to study anatomy/random art stuff my next goal is to work on my 3d modeling skills! I really want to get a job in the videogame industry, but it seems like that's impossible unless one knows the basic workings of either Maya or 3Dsmax depending. I absolutely loathe 3d probably due to having to endure two shoddily taught classes in college where I literally learned nothing, but I'm going to give it my all and hopefully produce some decent stuff.....eventually. Haha.

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Box stuff



WELP finally felt comfortable with the initial part of Vilppu stuff to move on to drawing figures with boxes. I already use boxes in my art to help me visualize 3d shapes and block out the jist of the figure so it wasn't too tough to understand what was going on. I felt like it was a lot easier for me to do this part than to do the really loose gestures from the beginning, and I also noticed that doing a bazillion of those gestures the past couple weeks helped me visualize the flow & movement of the shapes better, as well as overall proportion. I think I'll continue practicing these steps together but I'm eager to start challenging myself a little bit more now that I'm actually starting to see and feel an improvement in the way I "see" and do things. And draw them too haha.

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Recent Drawrins


Just a couple of things I've done in the past week! The very colorful lion girl is a new character of mine & the other is a character belonging to a friend.

After doing a lot of gestures I find that it's easier for me to draw a figure, but somehow it's getting harder and harder for me to apply solid, simple digital lines. Maybe because I'm getting so used to sketching? Who knows.

Monday, June 14, 2010

GESTURES & STUFF

Here are some gestures I did at starbux today. I have random pose generator app from posemaniacs on my ipod so I can do some more interesting drawings than "man sitting at table drinking coffee" or "woman sitting at table eating scone" or the ever popular "2 people sitting at a table talking while drinking lattes". Anyway:


Two of these gestures have been turned into Rachael and Penny (My pal Mokou) for whatever reason lol. Anyway, I also spent some time doing a quick digital painting. I want to start getting better at it so that I can paint my own drawings, so I figured I'd combine figure study and painting for my first exercise since it's more fun than painting an apple or something (I'll do that later)




Obviously plenty of errors and things that can be fixed, but I feel like it's not too bad for an hour and like zero experience haha. Anyway I'm excited about doing more of that in the future! That's it for now!

Friday, June 11, 2010

Old vs New

SO the other day a friend of mine from years ago IMed me and suggested that we each pick an old piece of art to update. This idea seemed extra fun since we were friends back in the day & remembered seeing those old pieces when they were brand new anyway! So I picked a drawing for him and he picked this drawing for me:
That was drawn in like 2004 and I remember being proud of it for a really long time. Even still I am surprised at how much better it is than a lot of stuff I was making back then. The anatomy is terrible but there are some parts that look halfway decent. ANYWAY I decided to spend about 15 minutes in OC sketching up a redo and this is what I came up with:


Certainly not the best drawing I've ever done, but definitely a fun experiment! For me this ended up being less about the actual update in skill and more about just how I feel about the drawing in general. For example in the 2004 version it's a buff male wolf guy straight up holding a gun looking pretty boring also wearing ridiculous belts and stuff. The 2010 version is much more lively, a hot babe, and wearing ridiculous um... what even is that anyway lmao

Anyway I want to do a bunch more of these just because I feel that they're good exercises in sort of comparing my new processes to my old ones and thus sort of gaining a better understanding of the way I do things now. That way I can improve/change/etc and actually KNOW where I'm coming from rather than just sort of let my scribbles drift everywhere intellectually. Does that even make sense?

Sunday, June 6, 2010

OKAY I'M READY TO GO

So I've neglected this blog since November. I thought Tumblr might be a better way to keep up an art blog but it turns out I was wrong, not to mention lazy.

Finally though I'm starting to do some serious art homework and so i'll just be posting scribbles more frequently blah blah generic "I'm back" blog post. Instead of words here are some figure studies!!