Hello, thread. Thank you for the suggestions and kind words everyone.
Some of this dump has been posted in the Doodle Thread already.
This is a t-shirt design commission. I did the full clean version of it in Illustrator, which was a fun re-learning experience.
Here's the illustration I did for Tam for the AC Secret Santa.
M-m-monsters!
An ongoing series of portraits involving brightly coloured hair. Painting planar faces is pretty pleasurable. Painting non-planar faces is also pleasurable.
These next three images are some UNDER2HOURS figure studies I've been doing recently to help speed myself up and to just get loose. Faces, feet and hands really take a beating under the time constraint, but mostly I think I'm getting better.
(The lady with the impressive obliques was more like 3 hours. I lost a lot of time just noodling on her face.)
This is some fan art for the D&D podcast The Adventure Zone. Stylistically, they're sort of like Pixar mixed with Rankin/Bass. They are very fun to draw and paint.
Your work feels so solid now, its crazy. I love the mix of skintones in your studies, you handle them well. Its not surprising with your observation skills, but sometimes a darker skin tone causes people confusion when it comes to rendering.
the gamer goat shirt is cool, as its not a style that I would have pegged you for so its really cool to see.
Watching you improve has been really inspiring me to work on my structural forms and start rooting out those under laying perspective and construction problems I've always had. I hope you keep posting your studies as you work on them.
Holy cow. I was just extolling the virtues of The Adventure Zone to a friend, and that is the best fanart I've seen of it by a massive landslide. Really awesome! And those hand studies. hnnnngggg...
F87: Thank you very muchly. I am looking forward to seeing a big dump of hand studies from you.
Iruka: I'm glad you dig. Your use of colour and design is something that I'm always envious of. Clearly we need to do some sort of artist fusion dance and merge into a horrific, universe endangering, super creature.
Bobbyrrrr: Thank you! Combining compliments with references to The Wizard is probably amongst the highest form of flattery.
Mangoes: Let our hands study each other as we high five.
Flay: Thanks! The Adventure Zone is a very good time.
Just another study dump for now.
More quicky figures. The lady on top was definitely more than my increasingly less strict 2HRS limit.
Some drapery studies.
These are some Prokoish mannequinized figure studies. Some of these are pretty darn clumsy, I think. I'll probably have to do about another 80 of them.
I finally got around to finishing off that Adventure Zone fan art.
I didn't use a maquette for Magnus, but I ended up making a quick little thing for Merle and Taako. I wanted each of the characters to be pretty evenly lit, which meant that I need a few more light sources, which meant it was very complex. The maquette helped out quite a bit.
Hey Chico, did you use Blender to make those character maquettes? I recently decided that I want to learn some 3D software to help me learn about lighting characters and environments. What's the learning curve like? And do you have any suggestions for resources on getting started?
My understanding is that Blender is horrible and hard to learn when compared to other modelling programs like Maya or what have you. I'm, obviously, in no way a modeller, so I pretty much just use Blender to make some really basic forms and light them to help inform things.
I also used Sculptris for the heads in that maquette (you can export Sculptris files as .obj and import them into Blender to light them properly.).
There are also a bunch more modelling videos if you just punch BLENDER TUTORIALS into Youtube. Finding one that suits your needs and then following it along step-by-step is probably the best way to figure things out.
https://cgcookie.com/blender/ has some free resources, as well as some premium courses. I haven't done any of the premium courses, so I can't vouch for their quality.
Blendswap.com/ has a bunch of models you can download for free to play with.
Thanks Chico! Honestly, I'm eager just to be able to set up the most basic, rudimentary maquettes to help me light scenes. I'd be thrilled to be able to position some literal boxes in the place of characters and architectural elements and see how the light falls on them. I am trying to shoot as much reference as possible for my imaginative paintings these days, but I end up stitching together scenes piece by piece and the lighting isn't unified. A 3D program like Blender seems like the best alternative to literally building scenes from clay and lighting them, James Gurney style.
Thanks again for the links, and all your super inspirational artwork, too!
Scadilla: The key to adapting to a different style is to have a firm grasp of the fundamentals. Which I'm not saying that I have, but I'm slowly getting there. I don't really feel like I'm very good at any particular style. I hop around because many styles excite me and I get bored.
Had a bit of a slump recently! Boo! Then I stopped slumping! Hooray!
Now I am dumping.
Alien portrait!
Some hot studies!
Some fun doodle dudes!
Drapery and faces!
Some hot robot nonsense. Some poorly engineered bits on these robots.
The lighting setups aren't consistent between the three. The first sort of has four hot lights above it, one in front and one sort of over the shoulder. The middle has one in front and one as a backlight. The third sort of has one above, and two in front to the sides.
I've been re-reading through Scott Robertson's How to Render book trying to learn how to render different materials and guess my way around plotting reflections. Guessing at reflections is easier when the robots are standing in a big void with just a few lights around them.
I should probably try putting things in a proper environment. I should also try panting a proper environment to put things in.
Bobbyrrrr: Thank you. Plopping in little details is a delight to do.
Enc: Crwth blade??? He wishes. Just wishes it. (Crwth's cock sword would be much bigger)
Did some building studies recently. I used Carapace to find the vanishing points and make a grid of the buildings I was referencing.
The lighting on this one is very undramatic and I left it unfinished with some construction junk on the left because that is a cool thing to do.
This one was going to be bigger, but after I had built this fancy arch, I realized that the 3rd vanishing point was misplaced, and not curve linear enough to stay accurate to the reference. The arch is the most interesting bit in it, anyway.
A lot of hard, round, no opacity, no pressure brush work on this one that makes it look pretty graphical rather than painterly.
These are some contour studies that I tried to do without any sort of preliminary sketching. It is pretty excruciating. The very top one is me taking a lot of time trying to leave crisp, confident, measured lines. I quickly abandoned that and started scribbling a bit more. It is a very educational exercise that I need to do more of.
Some lady faces from this weekend.
The value swatches I used for this are 80% black and a 20% white. Why didn't I go for a proper full black and full white? I dunno, man. Get off my back.
The contour drawings have really nice energy to them, when you loosened up, it found a nice balance between your tons of structural knowledge and a bit more confidence and playfulness. Love that too. LOOOVVVE
Been doing some Scott Robertson studying recently. Still infinitely far from where I want to be, but being able to build these somewhat solid automotive designs (and without direct reference), is very empowering and gratifying. I've always been terrible at cars.
Those are great! The cars seem a bit squished in width (especially towards the back end, and/or the back of the cabin), but the construction is still super solid.
Thanks for pointing that out! The general skinniness of the cars is, I think, in part due to me guessing at wheel widths to establish the width of the cars and maybe a convergence that is a little too fast in perspective.
The cabins all look like that is because I built them in a sort of sports car fashion where the widest point is the A-pillar and then it starts to taper off toward the back.
I think it's more noticeable on mine, because I made the cabins mostly just bubbles sitting on a flat plane rather than nicely merging the forms into the rest of the back end.
Bundle of face doodles. Playing around with some Kyle T. Webster brushes. A lot of references from Shorpy and the Sartorialist. Flash photography and oily faces are fun when you want to pick out descriptive highlights.
Here are some animals, one of which is a cat! The fluffy fox is sort of meh. Painting that fluff is pretty tuff.
And HARUGALÖR with a D&D 5e statblock.
HARUGALÖR Medium Monstrosity, unalignedArmour Class: 15 (natural armour) Hit Points: 55 (6d10+5) Speed: 60ft., dance 65ft.
STR 12 (+1) DEX 19 (+4) CON 14 (+2) INT 14 (+2) WIS 10 (+0) CHA 5 (-3)
Skills: Dance +10, Stealth +10, Perception +3 Senses: Smell 100ft., passive Perception 15 Languages: Abyssal, Halfling Challenge 3 (700XP)
ACTIONSHARUGALÖR Dances. HURAGALÖR Dances giving it +5ft. movement speed and -2 Charisma.
Innate Spellcasting. HURAGALÖR uses its Intelligence for spellcasting (Save DC 13). It can innately cast the following spells, requiring only to dance while it does so:
3/day each: Knock, Water Walk, Spider Climb
1/day: Dimension Door HARUGALÖR's Dance. All watching HARUGALÖR dance must make a DC 14 Constitution saving throw or shudder and look away. If you succeed in the saving throw, HARUGALÖR thinks that you have enjoyed its dancing and will want to dance for you again in the future.
That tiger!! You handled the fur there really well.
Have you ever considered trying to do something in a more extreme colored light? Sometimes you get a bit of a rim like somewhere, but I really like the mood of this page: http://i.imgur.com/gCfJ8nx.jpg because it feels like these studies venture into a different lighting scheme than you are normally comfortable with. Something that will be useful for setting more narrative scenes, if you need to.
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facebook.com/LauraCatherwoodArt
Hello, thread. Thank you for the suggestions and kind words everyone.
Some of this dump has been posted in the Doodle Thread already.
This is a t-shirt design commission. I did the full clean version of it in Illustrator, which was a fun re-learning experience.
Here's the illustration I did for Tam for the AC Secret Santa.
M-m-monsters!
An ongoing series of portraits involving brightly coloured hair. Painting planar faces is pretty pleasurable. Painting non-planar faces is also pleasurable.
These next three images are some UNDER2HOURS figure studies I've been doing recently to help speed myself up and to just get loose. Faces, feet and hands really take a beating under the time constraint, but mostly I think I'm getting better.
(The lady with the impressive obliques was more like 3 hours. I lost a lot of time just noodling on her face.)
This is some fan art for the D&D podcast The Adventure Zone. Stylistically, they're sort of like Pixar mixed with Rankin/Bass. They are very fun to draw and paint.
Magnus Burnsides, a dog lover, and a folk hero.
This is the line art for Taako: Wizard Supreme.
the gamer goat shirt is cool, as its not a style that I would have pegged you for so its really cool to see.
Watching you improve has been really inspiring me to work on my structural forms and start rooting out those under laying perspective and construction problems I've always had. I hope you keep posting your studies as you work on them.
Iruka: I'm glad you dig. Your use of colour and design is something that I'm always envious of. Clearly we need to do some sort of artist fusion dance and merge into a horrific, universe endangering, super creature.
Bobbyrrrr: Thank you! Combining compliments with references to The Wizard is probably amongst the highest form of flattery.
Mangoes: Let our hands study each other as we high five.
Flay: Thanks! The Adventure Zone is a very good time.
Just another study dump for now.
More quicky figures. The lady on top was definitely more than my increasingly less strict 2HRS limit.
Some drapery studies.
These are some Prokoish mannequinized figure studies. Some of these are pretty darn clumsy, I think. I'll probably have to do about another 80 of them.
is
the sex
Some recent junk.
I finally got around to finishing off that Adventure Zone fan art.
I didn't use a maquette for Magnus, but I ended up making a quick little thing for Merle and Taako. I wanted each of the characters to be pretty evenly lit, which meant that I need a few more light sources, which meant it was very complex. The maquette helped out quite a bit.
Some animal studies.
A lengthy nude study.
And a fun little fly knight.
@Lamp
I did use Blender!
My understanding is that Blender is horrible and hard to learn when compared to other modelling programs like Maya or what have you. I'm, obviously, in no way a modeller, so I pretty much just use Blender to make some really basic forms and light them to help inform things.
I also used Sculptris for the heads in that maquette (you can export Sculptris files as .obj and import them into Blender to light them properly.).
For some basic tutorials on how to find your way around the Blender interface, there is a series of videos here.
There are also a bunch more modelling videos if you just punch BLENDER TUTORIALS into Youtube. Finding one that suits your needs and then following it along step-by-step is probably the best way to figure things out.
https://cgcookie.com/blender/ has some free resources, as well as some premium courses. I haven't done any of the premium courses, so I can't vouch for their quality.
Blendswap.com/ has a bunch of models you can download for free to play with.
I hope that helps a tiny bit!
Thanks again for the links, and all your super inspirational artwork, too!
Had a bit of a slump recently! Boo! Then I stopped slumping! Hooray!
Now I am dumping.
Alien portrait!
Some hot studies!
Some fun doodle dudes!
Drapery and faces!
Some hot robot nonsense. Some poorly engineered bits on these robots.
The lighting setups aren't consistent between the three. The first sort of has four hot lights above it, one in front and one sort of over the shoulder. The middle has one in front and one as a backlight. The third sort of has one above, and two in front to the sides.
I've been re-reading through Scott Robertson's How to Render book trying to learn how to render different materials and guess my way around plotting reflections. Guessing at reflections is easier when the robots are standing in a big void with just a few lights around them.
I should probably try putting things in a proper environment. I should also try panting a proper environment to put things in.
I cant even really deal with the intensity of that robobutt.
Went and did a handful of environment studies
And then went and painted a Kochikens for a 5th Friendiversary.
I swiped this hard backlighting setup from some Ryan Lang character paintings. It is a pretty fun way of defining things.
Hnng, it all looks SO good.
Enc: Crwth blade??? He wishes. Just wishes it. (Crwth's cock sword would be much bigger)
Did some building studies recently. I used Carapace to find the vanishing points and make a grid of the buildings I was referencing.
The lighting on this one is very undramatic and I left it unfinished with some construction junk on the left because that is a cool thing to do.
This one was going to be bigger, but after I had built this fancy arch, I realized that the 3rd vanishing point was misplaced, and not curve linear enough to stay accurate to the reference. The arch is the most interesting bit in it, anyway.
A lot of hard, round, no opacity, no pressure brush work on this one that makes it look pretty graphical rather than painterly.
These are some contour studies that I tried to do without any sort of preliminary sketching. It is pretty excruciating. The very top one is me taking a lot of time trying to leave crisp, confident, measured lines. I quickly abandoned that and started scribbling a bit more. It is a very educational exercise that I need to do more of.
Some lady faces from this weekend.
The value swatches I used for this are 80% black and a 20% white. Why didn't I go for a proper full black and full white? I dunno, man. Get off my back.
Love the buildings. The faces, so solid.
The contour drawings have really nice energy to them, when you loosened up, it found a nice balance between your tons of structural knowledge and a bit more confidence and playfulness. Love that too. LOOOVVVE
The architecture and contour page are mind-boggling to me, I need to try something like that.
The photographs were the arts.
Just a lil' update this time:
Been doing some Scott Robertson studying recently. Still infinitely far from where I want to be, but being able to build these somewhat solid automotive designs (and without direct reference), is very empowering and gratifying. I've always been terrible at cars.
His books are very much recommended.
The cabins all look like that is because I built them in a sort of sports car fashion where the widest point is the A-pillar and then it starts to taper off toward the back.
I think it's more noticeable on mine, because I made the cabins mostly just bubbles sitting on a flat plane rather than nicely merging the forms into the rest of the back end.
Things for me to keep in mind!
Hot little bundle of faces and hands. Need to paint more hands. And probably more cats.
Here are some animals, one of which is a cat! The fluffy fox is sort of meh. Painting that fluff is pretty tuff.
And HARUGALÖR with a D&D 5e statblock.
Medium Monstrosity, unaligned
Armour Class: 15 (natural armour)
Hit Points: 55 (6d10+5)
Speed: 60ft., dance 65ft.
STR 12 (+1) DEX 19 (+4) CON 14 (+2) INT 14 (+2) WIS 10 (+0) CHA 5 (-3)
Skills: Dance +10, Stealth +10, Perception +3
Senses: Smell 100ft., passive Perception 15
Languages: Abyssal, Halfling
Challenge 3 (700XP)
ACTIONS
HARUGALÖR Dances. HURAGALÖR Dances giving it +5ft. movement speed and -2 Charisma.
Innate Spellcasting. HURAGALÖR uses its Intelligence for spellcasting (Save DC 13). It can innately cast the following spells, requiring only to dance while it does so:
3/day each: Knock, Water Walk, Spider Climb
1/day: Dimension Door
HARUGALÖR's Dance. All watching HARUGALÖR dance must make a DC 14 Constitution saving throw or shudder and look away. If you succeed in the saving throw, HARUGALÖR thinks that you have enjoyed its dancing and will want to dance for you again in the future.
The guy in the top left looks like he belongs in a low-end Sega Genesis era platformer.
Have you ever considered trying to do something in a more extreme colored light? Sometimes you get a bit of a rim like somewhere, but I really like the mood of this page: http://i.imgur.com/gCfJ8nx.jpg because it feels like these studies venture into a different lighting scheme than you are normally comfortable with. Something that will be useful for setting more narrative scenes, if you need to.