Sweethearts

It is a little series of portrait paintings I'm working on. I have prepared these to be animated for a short sequence . I'll post it some time soon.

 Inspiration comes from  I holi one colour festival and from  my friend's, Agne Solo, portrait photography. Her work is so inspiring!

For these , I started with  painting the portrait in black and white first. Then, really,  just play with lots and lost of different brushes and colours . One particularly amazing brush was realistic charcoal , by artfus.

It was so fun .

Thanks for coming by :]

Mini & Mo

Some monkey business :] Fairly loose character drawings inspired by this amazing studio website, Deisign, character design advice.  I tried to pay more  attention to contrasting shapes this time.

A friend of mine gave life to his own version of these two guys, check it out at Tom's blog

Munis, a RoboPup

Recently I went to Spielwarenmesse a toy fair in Nuremberg.  I saw lots and lots of robot pets, they're definitely trending. Even the tamagotchi's making a return!  But one's I took a note of were, Teksta puppy and Zoomer pup, which won  the award for innovative toy. 

I thought I'd give it a go at designing a more articulated robot dog. And as for the name, it is given after my beloved dog Munis, who sadly passed away very recently.  It's in his image that I have based the character on: upbeat, bubbly and kiddy. Which he was to his very old days.  

P.S. a thanks goes to Tom for encouragement to revisit the design (:]

Sugar and Spice and all Things Nice

And that's what little girls are made of! A nice little old rhyme, which inspired this one.  I've been meaning for quite a while to attempt and design a fashion doll which was cuter  than Bratzillas and with a bit more spice than Kawaii Crush. (:]

Family Portrait for Chistmas Present

I thought a family portrait collage would be the best Christmas gift this year.


With this portrait collage  I was aiming to achieve a strong contrast in light,   painterly strokes and slightly exaggerated volumes so it does feel a bit stylized. The composition nods to the family tree, with my grandparents in the middle, their two daughters branching out with their families each side of their parents.

Overall, it was  a warm and intimate experience, drawing all of the loved ones and getting to know their face in minute detail :]

72 % Water

Finally I got round illustrating an old idea ! I imagined a water creature walking out of the ocean.   72% water, he contains chemical X. The plotters behind contamination of waters intend to 'fix it' .

This time I concentrated on a clear line work. Gray-scale painting was my next step, to solve all the complex water and atmospheric rendering. After that, colouring in was simply fun :]

 

 

 

Feels Like Summer

And here is a T-shirt Idea for it :

I attempted a moody drawing with 'Feels like summer' .  I've been watching the works of Loish, and can  sense the influence. Other than that,  I watch for mainly two things: good variety of colour values and shapely lines.

Medeine, Baltic Goddess of the Forest

 Medeinė (derived from medis (tree) ), is one of the main deities in  Baltic mythology, She is a ruler of forests, trees and animals. Medeina is depicted as a young silver-haired woman and a she-wolf;  an unmarried beautiful huntress. Her duty is not to help the hunters, but to protect the forest.

For a long time I wanted to do a painting as resolved as this.Overall, I think it was an excellent exercise in illustration and not as much in character design. I paid particular attention to poses, composition and colour (a great challenge was to avoid  the generic blue-wash looks). Again, haven't used much reference here, only for the skin colour under moonlight.

Didn't have so much fun painting like this in ages! ((:]I hope next character from the Baltic Gods family, will be Telovelis...

Perky Lady Painting

Getting to speed with drawing this year. Portraits are not something I draw often, but I;m quite happy how this one turned out without using any reference.

Evolved from Octopus : Air Pilot

As a follow up to previously uploaded sea creature paintings and studies, here is a character concept for the air pilot. the thought was to reimagine a human, who evolved from Octopus instead of chimpanzees. I used this little project to familiarise myself with male anatomy and muscles.

A bit about the logic behind it. I tried to introduce a bit of octopus anatomy to it. Much like an octopus, the pilot's scull is relatively flat. Jaw is wide and there is no high bridge between the eyes, instead the eyebrows take much thicker shapes . His arms and legs resemble octopus tentacles in that they have quite defined edging to it. The chest over all takes the a light bulb-kind of shape too.

Octopi, Sea Creatures and Air pilots

These are series of study sketches ( with a twist , the colour finishing) for a collaborative character design task . The theme is Air pilots, but they have descended from sea creatures, (shown in images underneath).

They are extremely quick to draw, each taking roughly 30-40 min. I am keen to boldly explore use of colour and some new visual depicting techniques ( Thanks for the tips to Tom McDowell, great artist! ).

 

Painting with Cintiq, New Winds

Last week it was my first time ever I got to get close to one of them Cintiq screens, and I can only say it feels as it could develop into some form of addiction to drawing :D Really great tool! So, if there is good 20 minutes free, I exercise in sketching. So these two below are my first attempts (:]

This octopus, I imagine, should be first of the series of sea creatures, which I am studying for a personal collaborative character design project (more about it when I upload few more examples in the future). I study real life reference , but to make it more of a interesting task,   as well as explore character colour palettes, I just experiment with colour and composition

 

 Another hour-long drawing was done for a topic by Illustration Friday Challenge:

 Burst 

 "I was not out to paint beautiful pictures; even painting good pictures was not important to me. I wanted only to help the truth burst forth." Alice Miller

It's been 3 solid  weeks of drawing every day! ( yay!) and I feel like my hand is back from the dead, so to say. I hope there will be lots more to share (:]

pORTFOLIO wOrks : drawings

A comics done for Euro cartoon competition which took place quit recently. For my bigest joy succeded to get some rewards :]



This is an illustration of Mogwai's - Hunted by a freak.


The idea of this character came during a walking-tour somewhere about 3 o'clock at night..