Sketchbook Flashback – Rorschach

Welcome to another Sketchbook Flashback.  This is a series where I take you back to see some of my earlier drawings, in my efforts over the past year to learn how to draw better.  Hopefully this will give you some idea of my growth.

This one was simple.  I was in the midst of a Watchmen phase and didn’t want to draw the same old characters.  However, I still struggle with anatomy and faces, so I picked a character that was both faceless and his form was a little more vague. Again not the best work.

Sketchbook Flashback – Toothless

Time for another Sketchbook Flashback. This one is another special one.  A friend was a little down and I decided to capitalize on her love for How to Train You Dragon. This one should need little explanation.

Digital Paint – Wolverine

Hey guys, I wanted to share another project with you.  Unfortunately work has kept me pretty busy and more projects keep piling up.  Its exciting but for the moment I am pretty occupied.  So Austin’s picture is taking longer than I would have liked.  However, progress is being made, but its a stage where I don’t want to show it off yet, at least not until its looking a little more complete. In the meantime I thought I would share another one I painted a while back: WOLVERINE!

I can’t really say why I picked this one.  I think I wanted something without a lot of background to paint, wanted to focus on the character itself. As usual I don’t own this pic, it was just a familiar character with a well inked picture. However, this was the first time I stepped away from the shading and highlight technique with the burn and dodge tool, focusing instead on painting with colour variations.  The results aren’t perfect but I am not sure its terrible either. However I am not pleased with the skin tones and that continues to be something I struggle with. I shall try to work on it.

Sketchbook Flashback – Leornardo

Hey guys, another Flashback post. These are just trips down memory lane, looking back at my artwork of past, charting my growth. This is one of the few I like.  Its not perfect and there are flaws but its a step above previous works. This time I went for something I used to draw years ago and thought I would take another crack at: a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, or more specifically Leonardo.

Work in Progress – The King of Cars – Part 3

Hey guys.  Another update about the picture for my work in progress for my nephew, this is just a preliminary paintjob I’ve done for the picture. I haven’t gotten to the more complicated shading and details, but wanted to add something a little more so I started doing some of the detailing including the numbers and logos. Other things have been added for detail that will likely change like the eyes. More to come…stay tuned.

Work in Progress – The King of Cars Part 2

So last time I should you the line art of a sketch I did for my nephew Austin. Well in the meantime I’ve worked out the ink lines for it as well and am moving on to my paint job.  So here’s this step, another should be along soon.

Work in Progress – The King of Cars

This one is a special one.  Its a work in progress and the first piece of mine that I am taking from sketch-book, to ink, to colour myself. Lets see how it turns out. As I move through the stages of this one I will show my progress, step by step. But for now I wanted to show off my early work on it.

As I said this one is special.  It was a specific request of my nephew Austin, who has an affinity for the Disney-Pixar film Cars.  Though he’s less than three years old and still has trouble forming sentences, he informed me that his favorite character was The King, played by racing Legend Richard Petty and modeled after his famous 1970 Plymouth Superbird (or so I am told as I am not a racing fan). So this one is meant for Austin.

Its another slightly sloppy one.  I haven’t added the detail and shading I normally would, because I intended most of the detailing to be done in paint.  I am hoping to correct some of the misshapen, poor angles and disproportionate elements of the picture. I will also be adding some of the more specific details of the characters like his sponsor stickers and a better set of numbers. However, I didn’t think I could draw something in organic, trying to draw things consistently shaped is still something I struggle with, but I am working on. Honestly I thought a car would be too much of a challenge but to be frank I think it turned out all right.

Again this is one that will continue to evolve so check back in on its progress.

Sketchbook Flashback – Spider-Man

Hey guys.  While I want to keep this mostly about my more recent and ongoing peices of art (mostly because they are better) I thought I would use some older pics from when I started drawing again about a year ago or so.  These aren’t great and show a lot of work needs to be done.  But they give you an idea of where I started and how much I have grown.

When I first bought my sketchbook I thought I would start easy, with a character I am very familiar with.  Yes that’s right, Spider-Man again. There is nothing really to brag about here, its just a quick sketch that really tells me how much harder I need to work at this.  The detail is sloppy, the body proportions are all over the place. And its small. Really small.  Its a far cry from the gorgeous splash pages I envisioned in my head.

Groan…

Digital Paint – Kitty Pryde

So I thought I would share another painting I did a while a back.  This was my second attempt.  Again this is a drawing I do not own, it was merely an experiment to see if I could indeed paint convincing comic book pages or if my first attempt was just a fluke. Turns out it wasn’t a fluke, that I showed some promise, though I know I am far from professional.  This time I went with another character I like but an artist I wasn’t familiar with. This was my attempt at painting a Kitty Pryde.

Again this was one I did with the burn and dodge tool.  Part way through this one I thought about switching to using colour variations rather than burn and dodge, but went ahead and finished that one, saving further experimentation in another technique for a different picture. This is another one that I need to go back and work on because I was a little intimidated by the hair.  At some point you may see an update about this one so don’t be surprised if this comes back again.

Digital Paint – Spider-Man (Evolution)

Hey guys,

I couldn’t wait to start showing off the new art, so despite having just set up the blog I thought I would post any ways (happy Vic? ).

Wanted to share with you what was my first attempt at digital painting. This grew out of a curiosity as to whether or not I could do a digital paint job of someone else’s work (since none of mine were inked at the time, nor worthy of painting). So I sought out a familiar piece.

This is a Spider-Man panel from years ago by a favorite of mine Mark Bagely (former artist of Ultimate Spider-Man). I chose it because, first its a pretty well inked image that demonstrates the character and movement well. Second its a character and artist I am familiar with. So I started to experiment. The first step was just laying in the base colours with the line art remaining as the top layer in Photoshop. I also added a gradient to the background just to separate the character and give the whole picture a little life…probably not what’s usually done for backgrounds, but I am very much an amateur.

Encouraged by these results I continue to experiment further adding shading and highlight to the character using the techniques described to me in a You Tube video. I followed the instructions using the burn and dodge tools to give dimension and detail to the character. I’ve since learned other techniques that are better suited to painting a variety of images as the burn and dodge tool don’t always get the desired results. But for this first attempt I think I did pretty well with just burning and dodging.

Though its certainly not perfect I thought it was a great attempt and kept working adding some colour to the background.  This proved more tedius then I would like and though I left it as is, I am tempted to go back and rework the background.  Of course I kept all the source files so it shouldn’t be a problem to improve the background.  But for the time being this is the final version and I am pretty pleased with it.

So that’s it my first experiment. Of course this has encouraged me to keep trying and keep learning.  From here I’ve done a couple different images and continue to experiment.  I am also in the midst of learning inking to cover all the basis. Now I won’t be featuring the step by step breakdown of the evolution of an image with all the stuff I paint. But since this was an interesting experiment I thought I would demonstrate the picture’s evolution.

Hope you enjoyed and stay tuned for more.