Word of the Days

More design exercises, all done within a 1 hour time limit. The time limit forces us to really focus on the truly essential parts of the picture and design. Having a lot of fun with these and trying to push myself out of my usual comfort zone. As creatures of habits its hard for artists to do this but in order to grow you have to jump out of your normal routine to make those "happy" accidents as you further enhance your craft.


Here are the following words of the day:

Hunter


Healer


Blacksmith

More Word of the Days

Working on my portfolio, have a few characters I am finishing up in color and will post those once I have the whole lineup complete. In the meanwhile, here are a couple more digital speed studies that I do daily with a couple buddies. The following are open to any topic and are based on the following words:

Knight



Wizard

MORE DIGITAL STUDIES

All of these are quick speed paints, about an hour or less. Some of these are daily exercises I do with a few buddies of man, a way to shake the rust off and study different things each week. Others are word of the days that my wife gives me and I just paint. Regardless, I am primarily working on my shape design, grouping of values and lighting.

SPEED PAINTS

Just messing around with composition and lighting on these. These are a departure from what I normally do, more shape based and less linework.



We'll see how these go.

PRACTICE WHAT YOU PREACH

Every term at AI I tell my students a few key things to remember for the term: 1) I am a hard ass but I am fair 2) If you want to make it out there you better be prepared to work your ass off and 3) You need to be a better draftsman which means more drawing from life!

So not to be a hypocrite the next few images are some studies from life that I have done. The purpose of these types of drawings is not only to hone my drawing skills but to increase my knowledge of different personality and shape types. In each drawing, whether it be exaggerated or not I always try to inject story into it to capture the gesture and life of each character.

The first few pages are from a gesture class at AI. The ones with the blue arrows were an exercise in finding the rhythm in the pose after your draw the initial gesture.







This page was done quickly because the kid was moving around so much. I did not have much time to capture any detail so I was mainly going for the "feel" of each pose. Each one was probably about 45 secs or so so I had to capture what was important and forget about all the little details. A great exercise for those who have problems with stiff drawings.



Next page is from a class I sat in on with my friend at CSULB. Mainly 1-3-5 minute poses. Super fast so again getting only what was necessary was key to these poses. Usually I have to inject story into the pose, but the model was awesome, she had swords and the costume from Kill Bill so we were drawing Uma Thurman from Kill Bill. So cool and she even had the soundtrack from the movie playing as we drew.




Lastly, a page from my sketchbook at one of my famous coffee shop days. Coffee shops are always great to see a wide cast of characters without having to go too far.

Enjoy!