Choppin'riffic

My CHOW entry for the current topic on conceptart.org

There were a bunch of us from work who entered - all our entries were brilliant! Check it out:
http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?p=2234283&posted=1#post2234283

Life drawing - 22nd April 09

3 x5 minutes, 3 x 10 minute and 1 x 20 minute poses.

DSG #1473 (Daily Sketch Group)

A quick paint for Conceptart.org's Daily Sketch Group forum.

http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?p=2214263&posted=1#post2214263

People practice

Life Drawing - 8th April 09

5 minute (greyscale), 10 and 20 minute poses from life drawing class earlier tonight.

Enviro - The Towers

Another speedy from tonight - felt like squeezing out another enviro before getting back to work tomorrow. The saturation is a bit crazy with this one, but I like the looseness and design overall.

...Mike...using 3d? Lies!

I'm constantly giving crap to my 3d friends about how bad 3d is - that's because its TRUE (2d rules). Zbrush is an exception cause its actually good!. This is my first real go at zbrush and I have to say that I enjoyed it overall.

Time for Mike's zbrush review:

+ Modelling, carving away and painting - great fun and works as you'd expect it to.
- The menu's are infuriatingly complex. Also, sometimes the program will just do something completely random (seriously), when you are trying to do something that you thought was really straight forward.

Strange program, but I'm keen to give it more time.

Random enviro

Finished this pic earlier tonight. It went through quite a few idea changes - I just tried to feel my way through this one and see where it took me.

Speedy - Thundercats

'Puss in boots' is the current Character of the Week subject at Conceptart.org, and we figured that was a bit meh for the weekly friday speedpaint. Instead, we kept the cat theme and went with the Thundercats cartoon.

Here's my take on Mumm-Ra.

Life drawing is back!

Here's a few sketches from today.

The first is a pic I drew in some down time at work. I'm having a hard time painting colour onto a greyscale thumb - not sure if the colour version of this works yet.

The second is some pen sketches of a life drawing model - life drawing has started up again, so expect more of these every fortnight. Huzzah!

Robots rule

How can you not have fun drawing robots?
I will call this one: 'Robot Man'. Painted while watching Transformers, funnily enough.

The start of...something.

Figured I'd start my own project tonight. Yup, you heard right!
I'm not even half sure where this idea is going, but isn't that how a lot of good things start?

All I know is I want to do something along the lines of Oddworld - maybe with a slightly darker tone? I had no idea where to begin so I figured a bunch of creatures that populate this place would be fun - here are the first bunch of thumbs.

I wanted these creatures to sit about halfway between comical/ridiculous and menacing/freaky. More tomorrow hopefully!

Who isn't watching the Watchmen?

You know when you get that feeling that you're overdoing something but you choose to keep pressing on anyway, hoping it will turn out ok...and it doesn't? Yep, that happened tonight. Our 30 minute speedpaint today was Watchmen inspired and I figured I'd paint a stylized version of one of the characters.

I was pretty happy with that speedpaint and thought it'd be cool to do a few more. I slowly realized that was not such a good idea - each subsequent pic turned out worse and I cared less and less, focusing more on just finishing and having this colourful-rainbow-design'ish-thing to show off. The two last characters in particular were so badly rushed that I've attached only a low LOW res version of them for you to see. Everything looks better when its shrunk down!

Too much of a good thing is never actually good.

In other news, we had a 'tremor' (ie. a freakin' EARTHQUAKE) earlier tonight in Melbourne. Crazy times!

More speeeeeeed

Another speedy from tonight. The (new) plan is to try and do one of these a day. I haven't been too good with sticking to any plans, so I won't get too excited just yet.

This one took about an hour.

Don't make friends with this guy

A speedpaint I did at home tonight - this one took about 50 minutes.

This pic actually started off full colour and it was only right at the very end that I realized something wasn't sitting right. A few colour shifts later and - like a slap in the face - BAM!: Evil Maximus.

Before that he would've been the friendliest Samurai you ever did meet. With a sword. A bit of blood on his face... aaaand dead bodies all around him.

Speedy 27th Feb 09

Another 30 minute speedpaint from friday afternoon to signal the end of another week.
The topic chosen was along the lines of 'hell creature'.

EOW 106 - 'Great Wall'

The Environment piece challenge at conceptart.org this week is 'Great Wall', and I decided to give it a go. I started this piece early but somehow, even now, it still feels rushed and unfinished.

Took a lot longer that it should have and I'm not so keen on the end result - I think the composition and focus is all over the place. I'm pretty happy with the way the tree turned out though. Not sure if I'll submit it on the forums either - we'll see!

Portraits cont'd

More portraits done lastnight. I'm slowly able to cram in more detail in the 30-35 minute bracket too, which is encouraging. The jaw in the last portrait was really bugging me (still is) and I changed it a few times - so that one took me a little longer.

There will be plenty more of these in the next few days/weeks probably, but I'm also getting the urge to get back into some environmental stuff soon.

Hot girls that don't look so good once I've drawn them.

3 more portraits from earlier tonight - each one took 35 minutes, painting from google reference.
The first one was really bad, the second I was really happy with and the 3rd was a bit dodgy, mostly cause it lacked any definition.

Yes, they're all portraits based on great looking girls.
I'm a guy. I was in no hurry to draw crazy old men.

The first of many

Here's a portrait I did earlier tonight from reference.
This took waaay too long to do and I think I know what to concentrate on next time round - work smaller, be more loose, aim for a short time frame (15-30mins each maybe?) The plan is to do a bunch of portraits, hands, feet, and poses to get better at rendering the figure - something I've been lacking in severely for far too long.

The problem with digital painting for me is that I want to do *everything* - people, environments, vehicles etc. I don't stay focused on anything for too long, probably cause I get bored of doing one thing after a while - so you'll see me jump around a lot from subject to subject.