Figure drawing

I'm trying to make my stuff look more good.

Jim's coloring book

Lat night, my sketchbook and I were playing games at a friend's house and one of the people there had a set of colored pencils, so I drew a few pictures that she colored. They all turned out pretty well, so I thought I would share them with all you true believers.

Posemaniacs.com

it rocks my want-to-go-figure-drawing-but-too-lazy-to-get-out-of-the-house socks.

Getting Pumped for V-day

Historically, Valentine's day and I haven't been on the best terms. The holiday seems to have an unfortunate tendency to coincide with breakups, defacing injuries, and other tragic events. I realized not too long ago that I was probably going to spend yet another Valentine's being just as single as ever, so I decided that instead of whining about it, I would make super awesome valentine's day cards and then give them out to everyone I know.




I didn't like this one, so I decided to redo it, but then I decided I liked it again.

Fat and Goofy: The Secret to Artistic Happiness

For all you true believers who might be interested in learning what my process for digital painting is like, here's a quicky on one of two approaches that I usually take. This approach is remarkably similar to Adam Ford's.

Step 1: Draw something. I'm using the fine point pen from Corel Painter 9 for this drawing, but I'm pretty sure there are other brushes better suited for sketching; I just haven't found any yet.

Step 2: Base colors. Here's where you nail down your silhouette. Keep it all one color, because if you want to change the skin color later on (which I did), all you'll have to do is experiment around with the paint bucket tool until you find the skin tone that's right for you.

Step 3: on a soft light layer, I put a desaturated green on his beard growth area, yellow across the forehead, and a rosy pink color on his cheeks, which I really wanted to play up on this one.

Step 4: on a multiply layer, I put down a light yellow color everywhere I wanted to show direct sunlight. By the time this step is over, the image should be able to read well even after you take away the lines.

Step 5: Another screen layer with a desaturated cyan midtone. After I finished this, I took the opacity of the layer down to 37% or so so that the ambient lighting wouldn't be overpowering.

Step 6: slap in some occlusion shadows on a multiply layer. For this, I painted using a straight black but set the the opacity of my brush really low, about 10%.

This is what it looks like when I put all the layers together. After this point, I flattened the image and worked out some things like soft and hard edges, subsurface scattering along the core shadows and in the ear, and then I decided that he needed freckles.

Merry Christmas, One and All

For one of my figure drawing sessions at work this month, we had Santa model for us, and I decided that it would be great to bring out my gouache paint set and make a postcard out of it

Our Santa is a pretty cool guy, the kind you would drink a beer with, If you were a beer-drinking kinda guy.

This is the staff of Cordovan School of the Arts.

Shane Lewis

I've been copying Shane Lewis lately. His blog can be seen at http://stlewis.blogspot.com/
The frog on the top is my demo for a class in which I taught some five year-olds how to watercolor a Shane Lewis frog. I had a bit too much water when I was painting the eye, which resulted in a happy mistake that made lit look like a crying frog.