Kingfisher

I hope everyone had a great Memorial Day weekend! Spending time with my family I ended up throwing the idea of keeping my drawings going out the window as I was having too much fun with everyone. Finally back and ready to get the engine running again.

I decided to try adding some bird sketches to my sketchbook. Birds with intricate patterns especially are pretty tricky to draw as the coloring of their feathers can distract from the shape. This will likely not be the last bird I draw as I could use the practice on illustrating feathers.  

Blender Update

Since I won't be posting tomorrow I thought I'd give an update on Crank. I was able to weight a crude rig onto my mannequin and actually make some restraints and limits on some of the joints. There is still a lot missing here, but you can see here the beginnings of a simple walk cycle. 

PUFF

"PUFF the fat dragon." A doodle from today. I'm fond of using goat elongated pupils lately for some reason. I guess they add a distinct personality. Looking at little details in animal anatomy I think there's a lot to take from real animals to give to fantastic ones with the purpose of giving subtle connections or implications. For example: If I were to give this dragon snake eyes with a sliver-like pupil he'd seem fat, yes, but also dangerous. By giving him these goat pupils it gives him a little bit of a silly and distant air to him. A lot of these things I really only can identify in retrospect if I don't really have a goal or target when drawing, but from time to time I'll challenge myself to purposefully give specific emotional or instinctual reactions I'd like the viewer to have when seeing an illustration.

Trolls Like Tea

Didn't you know? Trolls like tea too! I have a good percentage of my genes from Norway, a fact I'm too proud of for someone who's never been to Norway. I've learned little bits of the language, but not much more than that. Thanks for checking in, and ha det bra! 

Pistol

If you're familiar with guns you might be able to tell what make this is. Just another thing I think I could use some practice at. Every once in a while I doodle a gun, but I don't draw much from reference. Like everything though, I wanted to draw off of reference for this to get a better feel for proportions and details.

Midni

Here's a sketch for an online course I'm taking. Planning on taking this to color, but I thought this would work nicely for a daily. My intent was to portray an overhead of a sort of chameleon-girl acting as a scout or spy on an encampment (probably not the best angle as she's probably be easy to notice lol). Anyway I'm really liking it just because it actually has a background and environment- most of my stuff is pure subject matter and although for the assignment we need a background, you'll see with more of my recent work I'm putting in more environments.  

Nude Study 01

Wanting to push some of these sketches further (as many of these are not really sketches anyway) I decided to try posting some works in stages. I'm going to keep making daily posts but I wanted to look into also posting the stages of works that need multiple sessions to complete. Above is the first progressive work I decided to try of a nude study.

ARTIST SHOUT OUT! 

Today is my first Artist shout out! Looking for cute and scaly merch? Check out... 

Andrea Sutinen

I found Andrea's work on Red Bubble, and her wizard lizard series of stickers is freaking adorable. Check out more of this great stuff here: 

https://www.redbubble.com/people/petakov-kirk?ref=artist_title_name

If you'd like to see even more of her work or support her on Patreon then get your booty over to here:

https://www.patreon.com/daftpatience

Mammuffin

(daily): Just a lil' ol' mammoth living his best life. Starting these by dropping big blobs of color and trying to avoid relying too much on lines. 

Metal

(daily): After not posting yesterday I decided to throw in two today and a bonus post below. These are two I did in my sketchbook today. Originally I started with the watering can just because the other day I needed to illustrate one for a birthday card and for some reason it never looked right. After looking up reference I realized I didn't include the widened nozzle like the one above has. After that discover I felt like making a sketch of another one today. 

(daily_2): After drawing the can I remembered something I've been needing to get better at is rendering metal. I wasn't very pleased with my armor chest-plate I drew above, but after scanning it in and seeing it with fresh eyes I actually think it doesn't look too bad. Funnily this happens to me a lot- usually the drawings I really like tend to look bad in retrospect, and the ones I think look shabby usually end up looking much better in retrospect, albeit this one was still just done today.

(bonus post): Although I have just used this blog for sketches and illustrations I don't see why I couldn't post these too. Since I missed yesterday's post I thought I'd try to go a little beyond the usual and show some of my 3D work. When I was in school I worked in Autodesk Maya, and although I wasn't very good with it anyway, now that I'm out Maya gets a lot more expensive if you're not a student so I decided to start working in Blender which amazingly is free to use and for the most part has many or most of the capabilities of Maya. 

Anyway, to the art part- below are some screenshots of my first attempts at modeling and rigging in Blender. Going in I wanted to stay very modest and make a blocky character who floats so I wouldn't have to animate a walk cycle. For this purpose, meet my new buddy "Cubo". No legs, and very simple geometry.

After getting a bit more into some tutorials on rigging though I actually started to feel a bit lame watching my instructor map out the joints on legs and programming the feet to react in certain ways when the leg moves, etc. while I just waited for relevant parts to start up again. Because of this, I decided to step up my attempt to a much more ambitious model (for a scrub at least) and ended up with a design more like a mannequin. Not sure if I'll post more on these things or not, but for now enjoy these screenshots. Below is attempt number two "Crank". 

Ruby Drill-head

(daily): Attempting to put down color more quickly in my sketches. Trying to be careful to not let it mess up the result by jumping the sketch process. These are becoming more like quick paintings than sketches. For a doodle though I'm pretty happy with this little guy- I think he'd make for a fun video game character.

Chameleon

(daily): One of my favorite animals since I was little. It's an animals that seems designed to be bizarre. Rotating, independent eyes, changes color, has mitten hands, a tail that curls, and a projectile tongue- legend of the animal kingdom. 

Redbot

(daily): A quick colored sketch working on foreground middle-ground and background.

Catche

daily: Drew this during lunch at work. I work with camera techies and got inspired to draw one of their lights as a robot- very good for finding things in the dark- bad on sand.

Red-Bellied Skeef

(daily) More fur stuff, this one took a lot of influence from the last daily of the otter. Not much to say about this one, just trying to get a little better and better with fur.

Otter

daily sketch: Another sketch inspired by an assignment I saw assigned to the illustration students at my alma mater- this one was to illustrate an animal with fur. Otters are cute right? Yeah, let's draw an otter. This one just got out of the water. 

Eggs Benedict

(daily sketch) Back in school I noticed the illustration students had an assignment in which they had to illustrate food and try to make it as appealing as possible, this memory inspired today's sketch. As another install in my series of things I usually don't draw (or ever draw) food is a rare one. Eggs benedict is one of my dad's favorite breakfasts so I decided I'd illustrate a good looking plate of the dish I found online. 

daily sketch (digital): Toad

Another thing I don't usually draw- toads. A friend of mine is drawing a frog character and it got me in the spirit of drawing amphibians. Kind of like with turtles, I was surprised how far up the head toads eyes are- just more cool little things you learn when you have to replicate images on paper.

daily sketch (traditional): "Dunkeys"

I'm starting to have a lot of fun finding more things I haven't drawn. I'm sure any professional artists or students reading will be surprised by some of these, but I've honestly always just drawn fantasy things like robots, dragons, and the such that I'm starting to realize there's a lot I'm not able to draw upon (no pun intended) because I've never studied wider subjects from life- like the lawnmower from a few days ago, and now- the dunkeys. 

Yesterday somehow a conversation with my mom lead her to asking if I'd drawn a donkey before- I have not. I changed that today. I've been told it's always better to draw from life, but one of the biggest conveniences today for artists is being able to bring up any subject matter you want on Google and you have instant reference. These were my morning sketches from reference I found online (the bottom one being shaded and colored while on break at work). 

daily sketch (mixed): "Wither"

Ok ok, yes it's another "knight thing" but I promise I'm not even thinking about it, I am just magically drawn to draw these sorts of things now I guess.

In a lot of my past art I've been trying to use the paint bucket tool more. In my online course one of the repeating techniques is to save time by lassoing chunks of the painting and filling in base colors. It sounds silly but I do not like using the bucket tool and this daily is my cool off sketch- No paint bucket tool used at all. Again, it's a silly thing to fuss over, but with time it seems all the techniques that drove me crazy are now just part of my standard arsenal.

This sketch came from an idea I had a while ago where I wanted to use a race of highly radiated humans that ended up very skeletal and withered. I took a lot of inspiration from ghouls in the Fallout game series and appropriately these were used in a DnD game I hosted with my friends- the game being suspiciously Fallout-like. 

Anyway, this is sort of an adaptation I made with the idea of making a very skeletal race for an MMORPG like World of Warcraft. Despite my earlier description I wouldn't diagree... they're just the normal undead/zombie choice, but oh well- an early attempt at making a replacement for them. IF anything maybe these could at least be considered the "mummy version".

daily sketch (digital): "Robo Charger"

Without meaning to do a knight twice in a row- here we are lol. 

daily sketch (digital): Knight

Did this while chatting with a friend. We have drawing sessions every once in a while and catch up on things. 

Just needed something to draw and medieval armor came to mind. This is actually based on old Spanish armor. I got to go to Spain a few years ago and noticed a lot of old armor having a mixture of steel and fabric like this. I just wanted to make sure whatever I drew that I added shadows and color to it on my road to getting better at rendering.  

(Saturday) daily sketch (traditional): lawnmower

Really quick, an announcement. Saturdays I'm reserving as family and chill days so I will be posting Saturday daily sketches on Friday nights. So enjoy Saturday's sketch ahead of time!

More good stuff that I simply haven't drawn much (or in this case maybe at all)- I don't remember ever drawing a lawnmower. I was sitting in a cafe looking for something to draw and a lawnmower came to mind... why? Don't ask questions just draw! I gotta say this was a pretty cool lawn mower I found on the internet. Industrial design has come a long way. What's crazy to think of is: When someone asks me to draw a lawnmower (without reference) I'd probably draw one of those old push mowers (even though I never owned one) that's just always been a symbolic lawn mower in my mind. Now though, as time goes on, will children grow up seeing something like this as always having been a "traditional" mower? I'm 26 and I already feel old.

What things have you seen or thought of that will be very different to the coming generations in terms of art? 

daily sketch (traditional): "Marketplace"

A test of my artistic stamina. For me this scene wasn't so much tricky as it did test by ability to keep at it in one sitting. I think art work is a lot like "work work"- the more you do it the longer you can do it and the heavier loads you can do. Obviously there's nothing wrong with doing complicated pieces in more than one sitting, but I've been trying to see more of my projects to the end and even uncolored this pushed me a little for one sitting. I like it though. This image came to me as an idea for a DnD location. I played a while ago in college and I thought it'd be cool to juxtapose a shabby environment with futuristic technology like robots being sold at a bazaar. Reminds me a lot of Tatooine from Star Wars.

Have you ever had "art fatigue"? Where you're excited to get a project done but start loosing steam to finish it? 

Kor'Timni Speed Paint

My first speed paint! (kind of)

I bet after a week of waiting you thought that post I made saying I'd post a speed paint of Kor"Timni was a lie huh? Guess again!... Yeah I had trouble getting my account verified and information confirmed for Killertracks. Really good website for music though. 

Technically I've done one speed paint before this but I don't know where the file is and it was paired with some artwork I did for a friend. But consider this my first PUBLIC speed paint. I hope you enjoy it!

Music in the background is  called "Japanese Temple" by Yu Namikoshi.

daily sketch (traditional): Good Luck Gecko

One of my coworkers is taking college courses in biology right now. I drew this as a little encouragement for a test she's taking tonight. I only now spell checked it and found out I spelled "endeavors" wrong lol. Better that than "academic" right?

Art wise I tried using this to get a little better at inking. It's subtle, but I used two different micron widths for this: an 80 for the outline, and a 30 for everything else. I also tried using a white Gelly Roll pen to add some spots on his back and tail but they don't come through very well. I'm thinking of getting a white out pen for things like this. Does anyone know of any other precise tools for applying hard white details? 

daily sketch (mixed): "Professor Unk"

I know I know... no one is impressed with the coloring and rendering, but hey I'm working on it! Anyway these are supposed to be sketches, but I can't help but try to push them further as coloring and rendering is something I'm desperately in need of getting better at. Right now I'm trying to see how far I can get without applying lines over the top.

But who is Prof. Unk? Unk is a marine biologist and he should be quite the expert... He's an eel! Like most eels he lives in a rock, unlike most eels he has trouble moving about. Have no fear though, Unk receives a lot of help getting around from his friend Carter (he's the crab).  

Lol this is becoming more of a story blog than an art blog now. If you're only interested in the art feel free to ignore the text in these posts, but I would like to maybe do comics or games in the future and I just think it's a lot of fun coming up with a story behind your sketches. Hope you enjoy and see you tomorrow!

daily sketch (digital): "Gandoon"

Two points on this guy- "Gandoon". 

1.) You remember the old Star Wars movies? I love how easy it is to remember all of the planet and alien names in those. That sounds like a weird thing to focus on, but I never forgot Kamino, Geonosis, Tatooine, Felushia, Endor, Hoth, etc.How are they so easy to remember?? Maybe I'm just a nerd and just read and saw them too much lol. Anyway, I like to name my characters, even if they're just sketches. Sometimes when I name my characters I get a little more attached to them and try to improve them more than I would normally. "Gandoon" isn't a perfect name, but I think it matches this guy and is more memorable a name than some fantasy genres throw at you. In some games I hear names like Ash'katar or Malegnenos or Slivinthoss... like,  REALLY hard names to remember! I'm telling you, I think names are an art form.

2.) Art wise (what I'm supposed to be talking about on this blog) This is a subtle practice at digital cell shading. It's not very apparent, but I'm still getting better at it. There's no colors just shadows really. Honestly this would be more of an example of a new technique I'm working on for coloring- that is coloring with the lasso tool. On a digital class I'm taking at Schoolism.com- I'm taking a recorded class taught by Andrew Hou and when cell shading he'll lasso and fill shadows on a sketch using the paint bucket tool. It seemed really weird at first, but I'm getting a little better at it. This guy is one of my early sketches I've done the shadows with purely using the lasso and paint bucket tool. Not a great example, but hopefully you get the idea.

daily sketch (digital): "Liv & Dino"

     Every day I wonder what to sketch. When you're a kid it always seemed so easy. Looking back it never seemed like you didn't know what to draw, but as a kid I didn't hold my feet to the fire and draw when I didn't feel like it either. 

     I remember watching a lecture by Glen Keane where he mentioned that in every project he ever took on he would try to get better at something. Even if he was doing stuff he didn't care about or things that he had already done a number of times. For example: If you're animating a dog, and you've already animated dogs before, then he'd step up his game by studying small motions and movements dog makes- the perking of their ears, the the way they drop on their front legs when they  want to play, etc. 

     By learning a little at a time, or by taking note of small, otherwise insignificant details I think what you learn starts spilling over into more of your artwork. I remember noting how far up the eyes of a turtle are on their head the last time I was on a jog by a pond near my house, and after that I started to realize it had begun to show up in not only my drawings of turtles (which weren't many) but anything turtle-like. I'd draw aliens with turtle-like heads and was surprised at how much more turtle-like they looked after I made sure to include that one small detail. Ever since whenever I don't know what to draw more often I think to draw something I'm not used to drawing (and off of reference). All this to say today's sketch was drawn to see if I could learn something of rhinos- and it worked! After looking at some reference, funnily, like turtles, rhinos eyes go further down on their head than I could recall off the top of my head. "Dino" the Rhino, and "Liv" the Otter are just a couple of silly sketches with a bit of surprising knowledge behind them- maybe that's why Dino looks a little smug.  

daily sketch (digital): Monstrosity

I wanted to say this is the last half-baked sketch for some time, but I think as far as sketches go it does at least have a sort of conceptual development value(?). Anyway, this was another doodle developed from a blob. Sort of rushed this one out like the last, but now I'm caught up on daily sketches. 

daily sketch (digital): Battle Girl

So obviously this one is REALLY rough. I'm going to need to really start fleshing these out a little more but I guess maybe I can get away with the technicality of it being a sketch... well... it's still a really rough sketch. Anyway, sorry for the slackin', I keep falling behind one day and having to double down the next day to compensate (so I end up rushing out a couple of half baked sketches). Trying to learn from this and keep scheduling my time better.

daily sketch 23 (digital): "Crabo"

That's not just some ordinary crab, it's a "Crabo."

daily sketch (digital): Kor'Timni

A grasshopper-like humanoid with some subtle East Asian influences in its garments. By the way, this will be the first sketch with a video! The entire process was recorded and will be uploaded as a speed paint soon.

daily sketch (traditional): "Tortan"

Working on improving those watercolor skills as well as putting colors in shadows. I always run to black but this is an attempt at putting some blue instead.

daily sketch (traditional): king

This is a pretty cheap one, but whatever. Enjoy this simple doodle.

daily sketch: butterfly wing study

Sorry no sketches yesterday. I was feeling pretty sick. Expect two sketches tomorrow!

daily sketch (traditional): Happy Easter!

daily sketch (mixed): man-o-war study

My dad is pretty big on the "Master & Commander" book series and has gotten me a lot more interested in old wooden ships than I thought I could ever be. I'm also surprised by how technical illustrations of these ships get. 

Daily Sketch (mixed): "Do Not Pet"

I recently found out about the phrase "petting the line"- it's when you keep applying strokes to a line in a drawing until you get the right look/ shape. Pretty normal thing to do, but sometimes you can go overboard and get distracted by minute details. I drew this with all single strokes, no petting involved. 

Daily Sketch (digital): "Farmer Toop"

Daily Sketch (digital): "Hopper"

Daily Sketch (digital): "Sock Eye"

My coworkers are pretty big on hunting and fishing so this one is for them.

Daily Sketch (traditional): "Cabblosz"

Sketched this during lunch at work today. Tried to draw something with loose lines and tried to not overwork it. Is it a crab? Is it a lobster? The world may never know.

Daily Sketch (digital): Faces

I'm trying to get better at characters and something I've never taken much time with was actual faces.
Above are some sketches of slightly different styles.

Daily Sketch (digital): "KuhKlang"