October's Sketchbook 2012

Some new developments on the way (:] Have some ideas for little series of strange priest/nun characters , Looking rather bug-like . As well as another development for Lady-bird illustration.
I haven't used reference for the pose, so to achieve a rather loose pose.

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! ).

 

Life Drawing at Angel

Yesterday a group of us went to Angel, (a place close to New Designers venue actually) for a life drawing session. It has been a while since I last time did figure drawing, perhaps 4-5  months ago. So I found it extremely enjoyable after such a long break :] Also, to all of our pleasure, we had a really interesting model.

3-5 min poses

2 min poses

30 min pose

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 (:]

March's Sketchbook

Old Man's Mood Studies

The life drawing gets entertaining. We are asked to use different mediums and expressive techniques to convey an emotion , a state or mood. This time it was narcoleptic, melancholic, sneaky and pompous.

Nudes of March

This time the session was particularly interesting for we were asked to interpret an emotional state in different visual languages. So cool! there's an indication to what was the feeling on the corner of every image. Also, some 2min. poses at the end of the page.

Reference Sketches

December's Sketchbook

Pretty thin, I can say, but it’s  cause I’m knee deep in 3d production, which is nowhere close to 2d stuff.

So this month had some life drawing of middle aged female and an older man.  Other things include random doodling and some  thoughts on my next character project – Baltic pixie. 

 

Headmoore Painting

Im on holidays for both uni and work, so I finally got to finish this old idea. I got it actually... a year ago, while visiting friend in Amsterdam. Now it kind of fascinates me, that I captured it pretty close to the original vision. Some already noted that this piece seems unlikely to my style. Something fresh then, I guess...

Execution was very quick, everything seemed to fall into places withought much of trouble.But then again, it is only a sketchy painting. I guess the Italian approach of "working" in the head and thinking about an idea was what helped :D To create the feeling a driving decision was colour palette choise of 3 colours , two complimentary green and purple, and one which sits directly in the middle of them - bright yellow.

October's Sketchbook

Latley I’ve been practicing my life drawing. Also, using the same opportunity, when after the hand is well wormed up, I’d capture some ideas , little thumbnail notes on some side projects, mainly illustrative paintings, some characters too. Also it would be time to develop some of those painting ideas I had.

 

Life Drawing - Grasping the Essence of a Human Figure

Life drawing of past few weeks. There was a chance to join first year students in the class, as they have two of them and two models. Which is nice, there is plenty of space to draw " from an elbow" and models swap, so we'd get older man and then a woman model later.

Also, Chris Hunt keeps things varied. We'd have 2min. pose drawings and then,  half an hour long measurment practice drawing.

 

 

 

The Selection of 4 Wolf Designs

Discussions of the past 2 weeks have directed development of wolves design to these 4, selected out of.. so far 22 different design ideas for both of the wolves. I hope we could select one of each and I could start concentrating on them two. To solve how they  work together and so on.

Wolves might have 'features' of other animals, for example, a bat. They informed these designs as native Americans have a assigned meanings and signs to almost every common animal. For example, Owl being a bad omen, wolf being a symbol for moral teaching, polar bear being a good omen. It was also very common in their culture to give names of an animal to a person, which he deserved. These reasons lead to considering such other-animal incorporation in to the personalities of two wolves.

 It would be very appreciated if you could express your preferences now.

Environment Thumbnails

Some capturing of ideas for environment. I was thinking in sort of three levels: we start from nothingness ( unconscious) then the bad wolf enters, so the environments he "lights up" is revealed as sinister, as if this is what he'd build. Next takes over the good wolf and we see firm golden-brown-like clifs, (lighting for it would be web-like, but for purposes of thumbnails I didn't go into details) Some key shapes, flow and behaviour of environment is there, remembering it is an innerspace, I played with dinamic and theatrical presentation.

@ The Wolves Within

Design Ideas for The Bad and Good Wolves

Life drawing is really fixing things for me, drawing gets more fluid.
Today I had a chance to sketch out some ideas I had for both of the wolves. These are the sheets of variations in shape and structure ( I left other aspects like surface texture, colouring out of consideration). The main references while creating these, were wolf anatomy, of course, and Native American carvings. Influence of their culture will be even better pronounced when we select particular designs and work on their better resolution.

Well, now its time to ask for your opinion. If you have any preference or comments over any of the wolves, drop a line :]

Also, for more, visit The Wolves Within blog

Wolf Character and Environment idea sketches

I upload some more in-shape sketches of wolf characters and thumbnails for environment.  This is only the very first ideas I tried capturing and serve more as guidelines on which the design would rely.

In my honest opinion, and also from Bob's and Godwins feedback, it seems this can be pushe way much further. The anatomy studies are playing here a lot, but maybe the boldess should instead.

And these fairly vague thumbnails aim to explore directions for environment. However, lots more, for sure, will come.

September's Sketchbook

I'll try and keep it a monthly update of sketch selection.
This time it is pritty random and varied. Some life drawing, some ideas for paintings and illustrations, mainly scribbles.