Contests and requests – keeping me on my toes by stretching my normal artistic fare.
My entry into the AVCon 2011 T-shirt design comp:
I’ve started taking character illustration requests for the Kingdom of Loathing again:
A sample picture (this is my Disco Bandit character ‘Silks’ from my old comic)
A painting for a player named ‘Brocrates’:
A painting for player ‘Ereinion’:
I was inspired after attending the ACSA’s 2010 graduate exhibition. Today was the last day of the exhibition so I was glad to catch the show before it ended.
Since I’ve been dabbling in watercolours lately, the watercolour portraits by Ruby Chew were really awesome to see. When I’d caught glimpses of the graduates putting up their work I had no idea that there would be her 52 marvellous mini portraits included alongside her large canvas paintings.
With Ruby’s works fresh in my mind I thought about restricting my palette to just the three primary colours to depict myself. I’m no master in watercolours or portraiture, but this was a fun exercise that I’ll probably try out some more over the weekend.
Oh, and while I’m updating, here are some more bits and bobs of various old art:
And lastly, you may have seen my Ducky Love design, but what about pink ducks?
Oops, been a bit quiet again. Here’s a quick-sketch I lined up a while ago to appear here…
Reference from a fashion magazine, I think.
I think I was lazy with the shape of the face and traced the outlines so that I could move onto practising the shading. I wanted to spend some more time on rendering noses and lips – and it shows, because other areas feel a bit flat. But as a quick drawing exercise I think this turned out okay.
I am in an evaluation stage now. If I do go back to the image I think I will have to see about making the dragon’s beard more golden and tweak some shading on the tail. Otherwise I’m ready to call this complete.
A couple of WIP scans. Click for biggenning.
I’m trying to push the colours and depth of tone in this one. Usually I get a bit wussy and hesitant about adding more and more glazes over bits that I’ve already spent so much time on. It’s going to be interesting trying to emphasise the whites.
Yesterday I completed the more-difficult-than-expected task of selecting a number of images to feature in my portfolio. I set a limit of ten images and tried to gather a set of images that gave a rounded representation of what I can do.
While trawling through work recent and old, I found a number of pictures that never got the chance to see the light of day. Here’s a few that I rather like.
There’s plenty more! When I started this blog I had an idea of diving into old work to examine what I’ve been doing in the past. Maybe this is the start of bringing that idea to life.
They’re a little heavy – the beads are glass – but I’m pleased with the outcome.
Yay for phone cameras.
Unfortunately the people I bought the beads from didn’t have two shades of blue in the right bead sizes. I made do with clear for the light blue – and put pieces of blue paper between the glass so that from certain angles it refracts the colour. You can see hints of it in the above photo but it’s definitely most effective viewed longways.
I am thinking of making a necklace to match. My housemate suggested putting the blocks on tiers so they look like they’re falling. To go with that I had an idea of making a matching t-shirt design, so it would look like the blocks were falling into the t-shirt… hmmm, ideas!
Last week’s homework was to create two images that were hybrids of two objects that were randomly assigned to us. Each image needed to have one of the objects stand out as more dominant than the other.
Here are my attempts. Can you tell what the objects are, and which is supposed to be the dominant one in each image?
Does this one give things away too much?
In the famous Monkey story, the Monk spends most of his time travelling on a white (okay, grey for you horse enthusiasts) horse. This horse was actually a dragon – Yu Long, the third son of the Dragon King of the West. He was sentenced to death for burning his father’s pearl and saved by the Goddess of Mercy in order to fulfil the role of the Monk’s steed. (Which was actually quite unnecessary until he accidentally ate the Monk’s horse on their first encounter).
Anyhow, Yu Long then earns a bit of a beating from Monkey and joins the group, after which he spends most of his time stuck as a horse and devoid of personality. I’ve always held an interest in the White Dragon Horse. There’s such potential there that I’d love to see explored. I think in the original story he only gets a couple of opportunities to shed the horse disguise during crises and although he gets to pull some neat tricks I don’t think he actually has much success with his contributions.
Now that you know all about him, maybe you’ve got an idea of why I wanted to draw him.
The latter stages of thumbnailing:
Post it notes were kind of handy for seeing through to the previous sketch layer
And a more developed sketch. I wanted to add more things to hint at his involvement in the story (however limited that involvement was). The orb in the sky with his tail wrapped around it is supposed to represent the great pearl. I was thinking of putting in some birds to represent where he was found (Eagle Sorrow River), and his brief stint disguised as a princess during which he sang and sword danced for the amusement of a demon lord (and as an attempt to assassinate him). However I think the top left where I’d planned to put them is better left open.
Water manipulation is easy for a dragon.