30 Day Drawing Challenge - Day 11 - Turning point in your life

Day 11: Turning point in your life:

I don't believe I have come to any real turning points in my life yet.
Had to try and get this done before work, so it's rushed. 

30 Day Drawing Challenge - Day 10 - Favourite "candy"

Day 10 - Favourite "candy":

Double Decker.

Although half way through I realised I should have gone with these fellas...:

Day 9 is still in progress.

The Break, The Bad and The Ugly

I've started a new piece which is meant to be my 'favourite tv show' from the 30 day drawing challenge.
The show I decided to choose was...

Breaking Bad...one of my favourite shows on TV at the moment.

I decided to try and illustrate in a unique way, and somehow got influenced by a certain film poster:



I've always liked the general style of the poster, and I thought the 3 characters match up to the three protagonists in Season 5.

Anyway, here's a preview of what I've put together so far:

Hopefully you recognize the above character as a Mr. Michael Ehrmantraut.
It's been pretty hard trying to match the style of the above poster, it really is an illustration master piece. I'm fairly happy with the result I've achieved so far though.
I'm trying to get this finished but it may prove to be too much of a time sink, it's already a day late. Also I started the project in low-res which I really need to learn to stop doing. 

Life Drawing

Life drawing #3, about 30 mins. Kept the lines in because I thought I liked it...now i'm not so sure. 

Source:

edit: Even though this is a study I really wish I had put more work into it, it's been bothering me all day how unfinished it looks. 

Ay well.

 

30 Day Drawing Challenge - Day 8 - Favourite Animated Character

 Day 8 - Favourite animated character:

Courage the Cowardly Dog.

Admittedly I've only ever actually seen a few episodes of this show, but I've always loved how pathetic it's main star is. 

How I work

I thought I would share a little bit about how I have established my work set up when creating a new piece.
A few days ago I saw this photograph on a website called reddit:

I really liked the image and it got the old imagination spinning.

As I have not really done any environmental art yet, I decided this would be a good image to use as inspiration for a new piece.

I open the photo in photoshop, but the DPI up to 300 and set to work painting my interpretation of the image.

This is a screenshot I have taken about 2 hours into the project. The psd is split into three layers,  a layer of the source image, which I placed to the left. A canvas layer, which is pretty much the entire painting one one layer, and a detail layer, to sharpen up the edges and work in any details I have missed on the canvas layer.

In the bottom right of the screen I have blown up the image to full resolution to show what it looks like. Very messy. Zoomed out however it gives me a good enough idea of how the piece is going to look when the image is compressed down.

Now I've got the base image established, I will go back to the image and work in the details so it looks more reasonable at full resolution.

After this I want to add a few scenery elements that are not in the original source photograph, which is where the conceptual art side of things come in.

The thing I like about this project is that I have not used any colour sourcing from the original photograph, and come up with the palette by myself. This is something I will probably be doing more when I work from source imagery as I think it ends up looking more interesting.

30 Day Drawing Challenge - Day 7 - Favourite Word

Day 7 - Favourite Word:

 Debacle - A sudden and ignominious failure; a fiasco.

Debacle is an old time word that probably reached it's peak at some point in the 1920s. Those halcyon days of eggs and coffee. Back then a woman was called a dame and a disagreement was simply called murder.

Pronounced 'de-bark-el', you might be able to guess how I arrived at the above picture.

30 Day Drawing Challenge - Day 6 - Favourite Book Character

Day 6 - Favourite book character (Can't be a movie):

Smaug the dragon - The Hobbit (technically not a film...yet)

I always liked Smaug, he gets to sit on a pile of gold all day and kills people he doesn't like. Where can it go wrong?

Life drawing

Life drawing, the mark of any good digital artist. Both are from source images and done on the same day (Aug 26 Sunday) - the ballerina one is a bit stunted, the legs aren't really long enough, but I kept it that way to remind myself about proportion.

Image #2 was done immediately after, and I think there is already an improvement from #1. Again it's been about 4 years since I've done life drawing, so getting back into it is a learning process.

30 Day Drawing Challenge - Day 5 - Best Friend

Day 5 - Best Friend:

This image really isn't meant to be as emo as it comes off haha. I was in a pretty lame mood when I painted this though and didn't really want to pick one friend. Again the source image was a google image search for 'empty chair'.

I could not be bothered when it came to painting this - took about 10 minutes, which is why it looks like shit. 

/teenage girl

30 Day Drawing Challenge - Day 4 - Favourite Place

Day 4 - Favourite Place:

So this isn't a specific place...and not actually a place I've ever been to. The place in general is 'a country road on a bright autumn day', and this was the best source image I could find.

Took about 2 hours? some of the colours are sourced from the photo, which feels like cheating a bit. I don't know what the ethics of this whole thing are. Used a speckley brush for the tree leaves, really like the sun coming through the leaces in the rop right, best part of the image for me. Again I can't remember the source, but it's on my computer somewhere if anyone really wants to see it.

30 Day Drawing Challenge - Day 3 - Favourite Food

Day 3 - Favourite Food.
Couldn't pick one, went with bacon and profiteroles motherfuckaa:

Kind of looks shit! But the bacon looks a little bit like bacon at least.

30 Day Drawing Challenge - Day 2 - Favourite Animal

So I decided it wouldn't hurt to do this. I only discovered it today (Aug 22nd) after completing a self-portrait I've decided to skip day 1, and move on to to day 2 - favourite animal:

 So there it is. It's an octopus. I drew it from a source image, but can't remember where I found it. Probably page 1 under google image search for 'octopus' so go there if you want it.

Took about an hour I think? I like how it came out anyway. Painted it all on one layer like a moron. Lesson learnt.

Self-Portrait

I got bored and decided it was time to pick up the tablet again...and this was the result.

First self-portrait I've ever done, took me 5 days in total, I'd guess-timate about  20-30 hours. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out, considering I've not done any painting for about 4 years now.

I think this has woken up 'the artist in me' again any how, and I feel like getting back into digital art. I will now be using this blog as a documentation of that progress.