Week 3- In which creative output drops down another level, as study re-asserts itself on the priority foodchain. Breaking my own rules, for sure, but so long as I’m putting something out and learning from it, its all dandy. Perhaps less interesting for y’all, but I think I’ve already proven myself lacking on that front when I try to force it without a good run-up. I’m better than this, and I can produce better stuff if I give myself some space to look at the world via art-brain again, instead of work-brain or doodle-brain.

So what did I learn this week?

- Its harder to make a ‘cute’ spider than I thought it would be

- Spending all day doing graphicy UI stuff is actually more useful for drawing/painting than I realised ( Its helping me do more accurate studies from ref, placing elements in space with more of an anal attention to detail than my usual leaning towards gesture )

- If you stare at a deer skull for long enough it turns into a bunch of abstract monsters squabbling for your attention to detail.

- People on deviantart REALLY like goatfaced pirates.

Output slipped a little this week, as my evenings have been stuffed full of social events for the past few days.  The general vibe of this bunch is rather spooky, and I did break my rule about no studies from ref ( That’ll be the skeleton dude, who was taken from a screeny from Corpse Bride ) but I felt so render-rusty this week that I kinda had to give some time to that, even if it really didnt feel like *enough* time.

I’m kinda hoping that my time problems will be slashed when I get my Cintiq12WX , knowing how much the disconnect between an intous and the screen can really slow me down, especially when I’m trying to explore. My rendering problems, on the other hand, will only be solved with further attempts to improve on em.

My favourite from this bunch is the goblin with the naughty spider, which was last Sundays daily ( Which is actually a cleaner version of last Saturdays Daily!), and had more time spent on it than usual, (Though I still want to pour more into it at some point.) WIP compilation for that one after the jump.

Happy New Year! Like many this month, my 2012 starts with a push to get back into good art habits .  Just before I got my job at CA I was doing a daily lunchtime painting with an old acquaintance over at deviantArt, which kinda fizzled out as life got in the way. Terrible!

So I’m bringing that back for myself, with some new rules to boot.

But what are they? I hear you say. Here we go-

1: One image per day

2: An hour or so to do it

3:  It has to be relevant to my day or have some thought behind it.

The purpose of this exercise is to get as many ideas up as possible without dwelling on them or getting too precious – this is an exercise in creativity as much as an art grind, though I hope as I get into the swing of things they get more awesome.

I’ll be uploading the dailies  daily over at http://typocity.deviantart.com/gallery/with a weekly compendium here on FrenchBird. Time allowing, I’d like to take some of the more successful images and give them a couple of extra hours attention, ( be it in producing further iterations on the theme, or adding extra details) but we’ll see how that one goes.

This post houses the animals- this isnt everything, just a selection of sketches which I dig, and some which people who flick though my actual book are drawn to first.  Its been fun to be back on the cartoony animals, especially after banning myself from doing so for a spell so I could diversify my skills a bit.

Onwards!

More cats. CATS EVERYWHERE.

This feels kinda overworked, yet at the same time not polished enough, cant place my finger on why. Have been away from rendered personal stuff for so long (besides the lil’ experiments with different brushes) that I dont really know what my approach is any more, which is kinda scary. As a result this took way longer than it should have, guess I have to do lots more to get my groove back.

That is, I felt weird having a really loose direction, instead of having a solid one then subverting it… and the result is more of a mash up than I’d have liked.

WIPS -

Sort of regret covering up this lineart, but then I always feel like that :p.

Things juusst started to get a lil complicated. If I had pushed it from here towards the style I used for my taxidermy animals, it probably would have felt a little more towards what I wanted, even if the rendering is weird and blocky. Or I could have saved myself a lot of time and just done a straight cel shade with less weird fur.

Continuing the trend of toony animals everywhere – This time playing with an sketch from January. Not exactly a massive leap stylistically from last week, really, more time spent on the details though.

Mrrrow

Probably the ‘safest’ toon animal I’ve done in a long while. An easy one, playing with brushes, painting over the study.

Part of me is horrified by this cat, because it reminds me of the kind of thing I was doing before I started to really know how to play with shapes, and I remember how I pretty much gave up on cartoons as a result (Because it wasnt a growth area, I was stuck in a loop). But part of me recognises that while people do enjoy my wilder stuff, and I sure as heck enjoy drawing it- its not always really relevant. Last weeks tiger was super fun, for example, but where would it fit in as a concept? Good as a fun personal piece, but thats just it- its a personal piece.

This cat? This could slot into far more situations. And perhaps I need to do this again with other things, other characters. Tone things back, so that when I do push things forwards, I really go for it, and dont just hang around in the same style all the time.

Cuz man, I’ve toned back naturally in recent months, and this cat reminds me that I actually havent been pushing the shapes/style that dramatically for a while now anyways, not to the point where you have a Gesundheit! or a Sword and Sworcery , at least..

Playing with the awesome watercolour brushes found at Stumpy Pencil

I dig the crazy faces of animals in Japanese art, first noticed em when I saw the CRAZY HORSE FACE scene in the Shogun 2 app I worked on earlier this year . Recently picked up a pretty awesome book full of crazy Japanese animal faces, and this was a spin off one of the tigers :)

I thought it was worth posting this on its own, because this ‘starting from someone else’s fixed point and letting it grow wherever it wants to’ stuff is pretty fun.

In the above example I wasnt really chasing the Taxidermy theme this time round, more the Hog theme, seeing where I could go from the starting point of an existing approach, in this case, ‘Rashberry’ from Viva Pinata. I dig the ruffled layers of paper thing the Pinatas have, in my mind that kinda makes em all slightly feathery,  which is always a fun thing to play with.

Below, my starting point was a geometric kinda Animal Crossing dude who immediately shed his twee, changed genders, and became a badass diamond thief.

The next step for this particular character was to start from someone else’s colour base – in this example, the swatches were taken from a colour scheme site.

Its fun how just changing the palette changes the entire tone of  the character – The first is clearly some sort of prissy heiress – a femme fatale, the second is a little edgier, perhaps from a dark metropolitan future where all the gangs are colour coordinated- the third seems like a much younger character, perhaps less scheming than the previous two and more likely to steal your sweets than your diamonds. (she also reminds me of terrible faded 1980s/90s duvet covers)

Some more from the Awful Taxidermy Archives. I found this dude in an antiques shop here in Horsham.

Dragon flavoured Sketchbook fodder. They’re pretty tricky creatures to define, what makes a dragon different from a crazy dinosaur or a big lizard? Well, wings, fire, and a fondness for jewels if they’re Tolkienesque… but thats not really what you hear about in folk tales or see being impaled by St George, those range from weird frog like dudes to giant poisonous eyeless worms whose bodies heal unless they’re thrown into the River Wear.

Anatomically I like to think of them as sort of a mix of everything, which makes them pretty interesting to toy with. I’ve not even begun to scratch the surface here, but there we go.

There are some pretty sweet Hiroshige style illustrations in the Artwork section, and the whole app is littered with watercolourey zen backgrounds from the game, so its worth grabbing just for that if TW isnt your thing :).

Still scanner-free, but I’m frustrated about being unproductive so y’all can festoon yer eyes ‘pon these poorly taken photographs of dudes and dudettes of various shapes and sizes.

Chicks be checkin out his fine ass plumage.

This guy was just caught proposing something untoward to a gnat.

If you pay this dude good corn he can get you things. Farm things.

This guy here ——————-^  is a well renowned puppeteer among shady underground circles.

This image is blurry because none of these animals have souls.

One of those rabbits is actually a drug fuelled hallucination.

One of these rabbits is actually in a drug fuelled hallucination.

Obligatory bird page.