Monday, August 31, 2009

It's been a while...

... since I posted any of my sketches and work so this will just be a huge dump of stuff I haven't posted on Deviantart for various reasons. I think they are in order from oldest to newest. Almost all of them are requests of avatars from online so hopefully that will explain some odd costume choices. Feel free to ask me anything about them via comments.





All done in Photoshop with a tablet.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Places to Learn Online and Elsewhere Part 1

I bet someone thought I forgot about this place again, but I didn't I just had some internet trouble.

Now, I've added some nice links on the side of my blog listing important places on the net I like to go or recommend other people go to when they get started in drawing. I'm not saying everyone will find them useful, but hey, give it a shot.

Speaking of those links, there are a ton of places online that can help you with your drawing skills. the few I listed there are for a variety of people as far as skill and interest are concerned, but I find the most interesting for me in the past few months when I was in school was ImagineFX. They release a magazine every month with tips on painting digitally including tutorials and interviews with famous painters usually in the concept art business. Now, that doesn't mean run out and buy them, I mean, they are pretty steeply priced at $20 a pop (because they come with some shareware programs) so flip through all the pages at your local book shop and see if the stories inside are going to be helpful to you. Once you're done that, take notice of their website. This is a nice little gem too because on there they have some old tutorials posted up for you to look through for free and everyone likes free. So, the website has some cool tutorials on it, but don't forget to actually try them out! I find I usually need to try a technique three times with the tutorial beside me before I start to retain it! You don't get better by just reading it.

When you have had your fill of the tutorials, they also have a cool forum section. And I don't mean cool as in flashy, the forums are pretty tame, but if you found Conceptart.org intimidating to post on, these guys should be more comforting. On the forum they have monthly challenges and neat little "draw something every day" threads, which I find totally amusing. There are help threads (like the one I linked to) there and also book recommendations from other artists. It's like everything I wish I had time to participate in. Oh, and as a bonus, if you win the monthly challenges you could get your image posted in the ImageFX magazine. How is that for self advertising?

Okay, I think I went on a rant with ImagineFX and I'm not even getting paid for this shameless advertising. Jeez. So, forums, always a good place to get information. Like I briefly mentioned, you can also look into Conceptart.org for cool art, but I'm not sure what exactly is on there besides people's personal art posting. I assume it's very much the same as ImageFX, but more professionals on there. Deviant art is also a cool place for art, but I'll be honest, I find it disappointing at times. It's easy to post work and that I like a lot, but getting comments, critiques or feedback is next to impossible without already having a network of friends on there. Now, I've looked into the forums on there briefly (yes, they have them), but I didn't find anything really going on that interested me. More calls to talk about general aspects of life or personal opinions on some fine artist I didn't know. So, maybe I'm just unrefined, but I was looking for more of a sharing of work and ideas thing. If anyone knows where that is, leave me a comment.

Oh, final mention, artist's blogs are a nice place to get the inside scoop on their working habits (sometimes) and maybe get to know them so they would be more inclined to help you... don't look at me like that. In my next post I'll try and talk about being an observer and hopefully more on places to learn.

Hope that got you thinking.

Monday, August 3, 2009

Keep listening

So my blog is usually a place I post my pictures I don't bother putting on Deviant Art, but recently I have been wanting to add a little more usefulness to this place (thanks to a friend of mine having a very educational blog). I think that is really important because I know I always get excited when an artist I like or just one whom is really good sits down and shares his or hers knowledge about their work.

Recently I have been watching ebas on Deviant art and I know he is a professional comic book artist so he is filled with useful information about the industry and how to set up a good picture. Now I originally started watching him because he drew some very idealistic women and hey, I could use some help in that department. I mean, sexy women always sells. Anyways I soon realized I had hit on a gold mine. Ebas's descriptions about his pictures are always fully in depth stories about how he designed the picture, why he posed it the way he did, where he was when he did and even the problems he had while designing. This, for me, is the perfect opportunity to learn about new techniques, what to pay attention to and , most importantly to me, how the artists' mind works.

Now, I'm an artist too, so obviously I know how I think, but I mean, you have to always be atentive to your seniors; you never know what you could learn. Learning a new approach to art can be very helpful when you start reaching out of your comfort zone, which I think is very important for an artist to do too. One should always keep learning to better their craft.

So that was a bit of a ramble, but in short I too would like to help artists out however I can. Now I am by no means professional, but I don't mind explaining my struggles with art because I have many. So hopefully I can post descriptions with my scribbley sketches or failed attempts at drawings/paintings, whatever here and write a little blurb about them and what I've learned.

I'll try and post art soon.