Started out drawing some funny faces. Just trying to improve my expressions. The eyes and mouth are the only things that actually change, so no noses. Then I did some figure sketches to try to improve on that. Someday I’ll take life drawing and really peg this. For now, all I have are the stock pose galleries on DA.
Just a speedpaint landscape tonight. I need to get back into the swing of painting regularly. This is Walpa Gorge, Australia, painted from this reference. I painted it in a high key, meaning lots of light colors and not many dark ones. It makes the shadows on the cliffs and on the path really pop out, doesn’t it?
I also kept in mind that “Shadows are not the same color, only darker. They are a different color.” So, reddish brown local color, and purple/blue shadows.
Just a silly sketch for tonight. My werewolf character tends to wear gangsta-style clothing, five or six sizes too big. But hey, it fits when he transforms.
I dared plug in my tablet tonight … and it turned on!
So I seized the opportunity to sketch some stuff. A guy in my story critique group mentioned that he had dragons that looked like Jurassic Park raptors with wings. I’ve been drawing that for YEARS so I had to give it a go.
I tried to dragon them up a bit, along with a few sketches of his other dragon species. They do look quite interesting.
Here’s how my vectory dragon is progressing. Doing big chunks of shading inside the lines is tricky. However, vector drawing makes scales and spikes easy! Draw a few, copy and paste over and over, and you’re done! I’m resizing spikes and scales a little as I go, so they don’t look too obviously copied.
It’s still very rough, but you can see where I’m trying to go with it. I don’t want it to immediately look like a vector pic. Those hard lines, though … those are what give it away.
I’ve had a picture I’ve wanted to do for a while, but I’m gimped without my tablet. I wondered if I can make it look painty in Illustrator instead.
So here’s my crappy mouseart sketch.
A dragon running away from a sword-wielding knight of some sort.
Here’s the beginning vector trace:
My dragon started out green, then I put the trees in there and he vanished. So he’s orange now. I haven’t messed with the knight yet because the dragon gave me such fits. See that fold on the back of his knee on his near back leg? That took like fifteen minutes.
We’ll see if I can make this look as cool as it looks in my head. It definitely has promise at this point. Also, laugh at my crappy trees. They’ll be better later on. I just scribbled them in so I could see how the composition would go.
