Back to the 2015 Recap Post

I still have two speedpaint posts coming up soon, one for November, and one for December, but today I'm just going for something fairly quick and easy, one of those Review of the Year things that all the cool sites are doing these days, plus some thoughts on my goals for this year.

I don't recall ever doing one of these before (I have done year end speedpaint reviews, but those paying attention will know those usually come around in May, for reasons), so here's the format - I'll give a quick overview of what I've done, and then pick my 4 favourite pieces to show again and cover why I like them, and one piece I hate.  These are ones I personally like (or dislike) - not the most popular, and my preferences for my own work might seem a bit strange.  All good?  OK, let's begin.

This is almost every image I painted (outside of my day job) in 2015, with one major omission which I can't talk about except to say it exists (a shame, it would have made the top 4), and a couple of others I just remembered (but aren't worth redoing the image for).  If you click on it it'll blow up to a size where you can actually see what they are.  They're not in any particular order, and not all of them have had associated posts yet.

There are 72 images on the sheet, but some of them contain what I'd consider multiple pieces in one (and some contain multiple pieces I don't think count as more than one), so it's actually well over 100 things (I make it 142, depending on how I feel like counting at the minute).

Of those, 64 are speedpaints, which is awesome for reasons I'll get to.  The rest are commissions and random side projects.  That's not bad going for something I do in my spare time, and even then not as often as I feel like I should.

So of those, which do I consider the most successful pieces of the year?  Well, I'm surprised at how difficult it is to choose (you know I'm rarely a fan of my own work, but I have to admit, there's some good stuff tucked away in there), but I think, at least today, the following qualify:

White on Black

Photoshop Speedpaint taking 110 minutes, based on an older Skullcandy advertisement.

I liked this one so much I did a companion piece, and also considered doing others along the same theme (this may still happen).  This one was one that came about really quickly - I saw the image it was based on, thought "I should paint that!" and did it almost immediately.  In addition to that I made changes and choices that I wouldn't usually make, and I think the result, especially given the time I spent on it, is a quite striking and polished image.  Everything just sort of works together, from the one bold colour (pink/red) in an otherwise subdued palette, to the more graphic nature of the composition and pose (actually fully intentional for once), to the strong light shape of the headphones in the otherwise dark (but not fully black) surround.  One of the few pieces which turned out almost exactly as I planned, rather than turning out OK due to some happy accidents.

Me

Photoshop Speedpaint taking 120 minutes, based on a snap from my cellphone 2 minutes before.

Well, this one is awkward.  Not only is it a speedpaint I have yet to post in a speedpaint roundup (that'll be the next post), but it's also a self portrait.  I'm not the best subject for portraiture, by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm generally available, and this was for Self Portrait Day (November 1st).
So, if I'm a terrible subject, why is this here?  Because despite the unfortunate subject matter I'm of the opinion that this might be the best portrait I've ever done, speedpaint or not.  Everything about it came together, and speaking as the person probably most familiar with the physog in question, it looks exactly like me.  The colours work, I like the feeling of depth that it has.  Really, the only things wrong with it is that it's of me, and I really can't remember how exactly I did it (I usually keep those step by step images for my memory's benefit as much as yours, and in this case I neglected to capture any).

So that's how my ego managed to make the top 4 of the year :/

Urban Assassin

Artrage Speedpaint taking 115 minutes, based on this photograph from DrunkHobo-Stock

Much like White on Black, this piece was a concentrated effort to do something a little bit different.  I worked looser, and with very different brush settings from those I'm usually comfortable with. This is the case for a handful of speedpaints - sometimes it works out, other times it's a disaster.  In this case it worked out, and I've used a similar technique twice since then, once for the book cover featured in the last post.

In this case though, I think the original worked out the best.  I'm slightly amazed by how well this piece works myself, given I know what went into creating it.  Small things, like exactly how little work went into painting the hands and face, but how they still came out looking really effective.  Usually capturing those elements takes quite a bit of work, but here there was very little repainting - what you see is essentially what I painted, stroke for stroke. Now if only I could work out how to do that every time I'd be set.  In the meantime, some of the techniques learned creating this piece led to two other fairly successful pieces, and that is enough to get it a spot on this here list (also, he does look pretty badass).

Not So Innocent

Photoshop work, based on this photograph by AmethystDreams1987

This is going to be a fairly short writeup.  There are actually a few elements in this picture where I think I did similar things better elsewhere (such as her hair), but I'm picking this one for one reason - that jacket.  It took a really long time to paint it, but the end result is probably worth all the time I put in.  That, combined with how much this piece transforms the photograph it's based on is really enough to place it in the top 4 despite its flaws.

Well, making that list was remarkably difficult.  Much more difficult than I was expecting when I started this post.  Looking at the four, I'm interested with how dark each of them is (in terms of lighting, but also in terms of subject in two cases).  Does this mean I just like strong contrast in a piece, or is it just a coincidence?  Blowed if I know.  

I do know the next section is easier though - what was the worst thing I did this year?  Scroll on MacDuff, and discover the horror:

Crap Tarzan

Crap speedpaint taking 25 minutes in Photoshop, and not worth a minute of it.

Really, I'm not even going to try and justify it, it's just pure crap.  There might be a kernel of an idea that could work quite well, but as it's own thing...  Yeah, no.  I can't blame the short time spent on it either - I've done a lot better in a lot less time.

So that covers the year, more or less, with one other thing to cover.  A year ago I said my resolution was to do more speedpaints - one a week.  I pretty quickly changed that to four a month, as that seemed more manageable.  

This grid (or at least 75% of it) was created then to track the speedpaints I was doing, but at the time all the green boxes were black.  Three columns of 16, so 48 cells, one for each image I needed to do - each time I completed one, I would fill in a box with green.  I'd filled those by mid September, back when I painted Bruce Lee, so I had to add another Column.  Since then I've done another 16 paintings, the last of which I'll be covering in the next two speedpaint posts. So I blew past my personal challenge to get a total of 64 speedpaints done (to varying degrees of success). Rather more than 1 a week - Go me.

One thing I realised while doing them though, was I'm still too reliant on direct reference.  Nothing wrong with that (especially when painting at speed).  I could probably work from nothing but straight reference from now until forever and nobody but me would mind.  It's not like I'm ever going to stop working from direct reference completely either - It's can be too relaxing for that.  

Even so, I want to go back to working on some of the fundamentals, and if that's at the expense of the number of speedpaints I'm cranking out then so be it.  This year's resolution is to work on those fundamentals, which will also aid my painting from direct reference in the long run.  Things like proportion, human anatomy, perspective, composition, and colour theory. 

I also realised that the speedpaints were getting to the point where they were less speed and more just paints. so I'm going to change my personal terminology a little.  Anything under 100 minutes can still be a speedpaint (that's still pretty fast for some of the things I've managed to do), anything over becomes just a quick painting.  The intent is to do more speedpaints, and just the occasional painting - even if that means they go 'unfinished' when the time runs out. 

This doesn't effect much as far as you're concerned - they'll still all come under the speedpaint umbrella as far as posts are concerned with the same internal gut feeling on whether they count or not.  There will also be Studies, which will be where I'm tackling something specific.  Those might be as little as a few brushstrokes, as long as I learn from them.  You'll get to see those too, but possibly under a different post.

Oh, and my other resolution is to get the rest of the sketch posts up to date ASAP - if some of this study is going to be traditional (and I intend for it to be) then it might be beneficial to get it up where I can easily find it - and by extension you can see it to.

So this year things are shaking up a bit while I go back to basics.  Back to the drawing board if you will.  Hopefully the only difference you'll really notice will be in the quality of the results.

Until the next post, Happy New Year! I hope 2015 was a good one for you, and 2016 is even better.

Sketching for May/June '13

I've not been terribly good at keeping up on the blogging of late have I (and long term followers will know this is nothing particularly new)? To be honest I've not been terribly great at keeping up on the art either. That's not to say I'm not doing any, but a good chunk of it is for work, so you'll either never get to see it or you won't for a few years. The work stuff is a big learning curve right now, and as a result it's having a knock on to the art-as-hobby area. In all honesty this last week I might have gotten back on the horse properly, but Saints Row IV was out and I was too busy playing to actually draw anything (I did work on it of course, but even so there were plenty of surprises in there I'd somehow missed during development, and I had a blast). Plus it's right in the middle of allergy season, and I hate drawing when everything is slightly blurred from the results.

So yes, the art and the blog have not been my priority of late (there have been other things going on too, but I won't bore you with them), but now SR4 is done and dusted and there's less pure knowledge being assimilated at work I should be getting back to it. But not this week - I have a deadline of sorts this week.

Anyway! Sketching.

Only two images this time, of which this is the first. There's nothing terribly great here, but there are some areas that even I can tell are showing improvement. There's an improvement in the way I'm defining twisting motions, I think my representation of the abdomen is getting better and even hands and feet are showing a slight improvement from where I was a year ago. So that's all good. The only reference used here was for the lower abdominal and legs image in the lower right, where I worked from my anatomical figurine, but had a go at making the results more feminine (it's a masculine figure). Not perfect, obviously.

I did draw quite a bit more of it, but it's not so much that it was 'bad' as it was quick. The figure in the top right is representative of the stuff I've left out. Just quick near gestures to focus on small things (in this case the jut of the abdomen as it meets the pelvis).

Not much to say about these. Some of them were very successful (I particularly like the girl in the top left and the one with the mohawk), some were pretty disastrous(There's something very Shelly Duval like about the girl in the top right - but not really in a good way). Not much else to say really. No references used across the board, and facbook friend identification though the woman in the lower centre was the same as the person leaning against the fence in the first image when I uploaded these to my gallery there. I'm not sure if that means I've fallen into a rut of drawing everyone the same, or if facebook just plays really fast and loose with it's facial recognition (I suspect a bit of both).

And that's your lot. For now. There will be a little more coming, very soon indeed.

Sketching For March '13

I don't have much to say today.  Yes it's been a couple of weeks since I last posted, and yes this sketching post is a bit late this month, and yes I have yet to complete part two of the last A Musing post.  I could give reasons and excuses as I usually do but what's the point?  Sure, my wife was sick last week but since she spent most of that time in bed I could still have snuck off and written a blog post, but obviously I failed to.  No, I was far to busy playing video games (Bioshock Infinite and Tomb Raider mostly, I preferred the later, but they were both pretty solid, even if I preferred the original Bioshock to Infinite), and watching TV.  And sketching!  I did do a lot of sketching this week (though you don't get to see it until next month of course).  OK, more at the bottom, lets go look at some "Art."   I'll keep writing it to a minimum until the end of the post though.  Most of it would be what I say every month anyway...

Free Sketching

Given how divided my sketching topics have become of late I'm thinking of simply calling Free Sketching Head Sketching or Face Sketches from now on.  Nothing terribly exciting came out of March, but there's some reasonably solid stuff and I'm getting better at necks and positioning the head on a pair of shoulders (I've done well at that a few times in the past, but it was usually more down to luck than judgement I think).

Figure, Anatomy and Form

Again, nothing earth shattering here, but some half competent stuff all the same.  Very happy with the progress I'm making on twisting forms and a feeling of solidity, but it's clear there's a long way left to go before I'm actually happy with most of what I produce.

Sketch Failures

The only really good thing I can say about most of these is that 18 months ago these would have been in the other sketch collections and something far worse would be in the failure image.  It's an odd way to gauge progress, but it's the only objective one I really have.

I realized that the only way I was ever going to improve at this anatomy m'larky was to just draw, and draw, and draw some more, and refer to my books and such as I went along, and I've been really trying to do that over the last few weeks, even when I've not really wanted to.  I still have a long way to go, but I'm doing better with the abdomen and chest and a little better with the hips.  You can see a little of that progress in today's images, though not as much as I would like.
I need to work on poses a little, and a lot on the back, and then a huge amount on the legs (I'll probably get to that in earnest next month).  It's slow progress, what with me pushing 40 and my brain not being as fast to pick up on things as it was, but I'm hoping that this time next year will see me able to draw a full figure as well as I can draw a head now.  Not perfect, but much improved.  Time will tell if I succeed in that goal.
Okay, for someone who had little to say today I've sure just said a lot.

And that's it for this month (probably).  Next month will mark the third anniversary of the blog, and I plan on looking back at some of the progress I've made in that time (That may be a short post then ;)).  Until then, have a good one, and stay out of trouble.

Sketching for February '13

Yes, it's been a little while, and I'll be honest, this post probably wasn't worth the wait. Various things either prevented me from sketching, or just made me not feel like doing so much last month. This is not to say that I didn't, or that I sketched a lot of junk (well, yeah, a bit), just that I didn't get as much done as usual, and certainly not as much as in January (about the same amount as December, maybe slightly more). I also didn't really focus on anything, and discovered that the focus I did on arms a few months back was probably a waste of time because I've forgotten how the darn muscles go in the forearm, again (why do I have so much difficulty remembering this - I need to come up with a mnemonic or something. Seriously.

Outside of sketching I've been working on another book cover (It's actually pretty much done now), I recieved my copy of the Doctor Who Anniversary Special that I did a spread for, and it turned out looking far better than I was expecting at such a large size. The book has some wonderful work in it, both written and drawn. I was plesantly impressed :). In other news, I have family in town, so this month is going fairly slowly too. I'm really going to work on improving things somewhat once they leave as I've clearly been slacking since about November, and there's really no excuse for it. OK, on to the sketches...

An interesting aspect for February is that I've compiled almost everything I drew. The only stuff I left out were things that didn't scan well, or that I was interrupted while drawing and never got back to. There's not a "Sketch fail" section as there usually is as the quality band in which the work mostly fell was pretty close. There are failures, and I'll point them out, but nothing so bad as to get an image to itself. As with the previous couple of months there's nothing drawn directly from a reference - this is something I really need to work on.

For the free sketching the guy in the lower Right (with the white highlights) is a bit of a failure. there's something really off about his face, but I'm not sure what. Maybe the perspective is off, maybe the lighting. Whatever it is it's all a little wonky. Yes, that's Solid Snake in the middle (or maybe Big Boss), it's not a terribly exciting rendition, but at least it's probably recognisable. The success of the month is the woman in the bottom centre. I really like that sketch, it just came together quite nicely.

After the fairly successful torso sketches from last month most of these are pretty disappointing. Also, see what I mean about the forearms? Yuck. Still, progress of a sort is being made - I should be able to draw a half decent figure without reference in about 8 years or so. More anatomy studies will be happening throughout this year though, so by the Blog's 4th birthday I hope to be able to more consistently draw things such as hands and feet (right now it's random as to whether I can draw them successfully, or even bother trying).

After the failure with the guy I commented on in the first image I decided to concentrate on some facial features. it wasn't a focus or anything, I just did a few sketches one morning. I think I pretty much understand the basics here, but I have some difficulty drawing eyes on the far side of the head when I have no reference, or eyes from more extreme angles. Something to work on. I'm really happy with the mouths though. Oh, and I didn't lie about reference - that ribcage was drawn from memory. I think it's a little off; I'm only seeing 18 ribs and there are supposed to be 24. Also, the angles are off somewhat. Darn.

And that's it. Really, not much stuff at all. I am planing to have a couple of extra posts before the end of the month, but one of them may fall at the beginning of April. Time will tell if I succeed.

January '13 and (December '12) Sketching

They say it never rains but it pours. I don't know who 'they' are, but they've been saying it for an awfully long time. Right now, with the rain streaming down the windows this seems a particularly apt term, as I do seem to have rather a lot to be getting on with after a month of relative artistic calm. Much of this comes from work, and so you may never see it dealt with here (though it's not out of the question eventually), but some of it I'll be dealing with here eventually. Eventually is an important word there, as I won't have much time to update the blog or do side work to show for a little while, so if this is the only post during February I hope you'll forgive me. But you're not here to hear me bemoan my work load, you're here to see art (come to the wrong place I suspect), so lets get on with it.

I did rather a lot of sketching in January. This may be the first time I've ever had to leave out "good" stuff because there was actually quite a bit of it. Usual fare here, although I really like the girl on the right, she turned out rather well. Here hair is actually based on hair I saw in a photograph, but I don't consider it from reference as I did the sketch sometime after seeing the photo, so I didn't refer to it directly.

The second set of Free sketching is more experimental than the first I guess. Quite happy with the Elfish girl with short hair, and the more cartoonish fellow to her upper right. The chap with the extra large nose didn't turn out as well as I'd have liked, but it's fine enough I guess. But anyway, this is more a sheet of characters than I might usually do.

The final free sketching of the month (and yes, mostly portraits this time), and I have to say I'm really pleased with these ones. I especially like baldy at the bottom there - the scan doesn't really do the shading on him justice because he really came out rather well (in my opinion).

I realised I'd been slacking off learning anatomy and such, and so during January I made an extra effort in that regard. This sheet is mostly my trying to visualize high level shapes and forms and how they fit together. I've done nothing really from a direct reference over the past 2 months, so this was a nice way to find my weaknesses so I can focus some reference drawing time on them this month (if I get any time anyway). Twisting and bending (and combinations thereof) seem to be especially weak, so that's a place to start when I next approach this sort of thing.

More of the same, but this one also features the focus I gave to the muscles of the upper torso. I still need to do some work on these, but I'm also going to move on and work on the musculature around the hips and upper legs soon. After that the back, the legs, arms (again) and so on. That lightcycle is based on a toy I own - technically that's from reference, but I didn't see the point of having a From Reference sheet with only one thing on it, and also the angle it's shown here was not the one I was looking at - it was an exercise in extrapolation.

And lastly, as always, the sketching disasters. Some of these don't look as bad as I remember them looking, but really it's a great sheet to look at in order to think "must do better". Top Right and Middle left were an attempt to try something a little more Picasso like. That didn't go so well.

And that's it. If I don't get time to post again this month I'll see you in March some time(really, circumstances beyond my control and all that - not that I'm really complaining). Next month is also the Blog's 3rd anniversary, so I'll try and put something together for that. Not like a cake or anything, but maybe a progress so far type affair.

Sketching for November '12

And here is the second sketching post this month, which brings us all up to date on that until January. I still haven't got much juice back for additional sketching/speedpainting, though I have manage a little of both - most of it appalling. You still get to see it along the line though, because that's the entire point of the blog, yes? I'm also hoping to finish the painting I was working on at my painting class this week. That said I've meant to sit down and work on it for the past 3 days and haven't managed to, so we'll see if I can manage it.

Really though, I don't have a great deal to cover in this post, so I'll cut to the chase and get on with the images.

Free Sketching

Very little of real note here - mostly middle of the road stuff.  The woman in the top left (also the icon for this post) is somewhat disappointing since she looks good in my sketchbook, but terrible scanned (I think the sketch may have been a little light).  The rest very between good and almost terrible, though I'm really quite happy with the eye and the girls tu-tu.  On the left, under the woman, are two stylistic experiments - the man I just decided to draw quite narrow and quite liked the result, while the girl is clearly a ailed attempt at a more Manga look, but I think it's interesting enough to show.

Figure Practice

That the figures I'm predominantly showing here are female is mostly just a coincidence; I drew lots of guys too, but they were either so sketchy it wasn't worth scanning them or I'd done them too light to really make them out once I had scanned them.  None of them were particularly great anyway (though few of them were complete failures either).  Sketches of note here are the girl in the lower middle - this was a failed attempt at drawing a flat-chested woman - instead she looks like a woman with a guy-chest.  The woman in the lower right... I don't know what I was trying to draw - is she pregnant? bloated? infested with alien plague?  No idea, but it's an interesting visual nevertheless.

I still really need to get back to practicing hands and feet (and all the other anatomy in between).

From Reference

My Father-in-Law, Sister-in-Law and Chewbacca the dog (terrible likeness), along with "random dude in a restaurant," were the only things I really had to show after Thanksgiving (with one more in the failures below).  Not sure why, but it was particularly difficult to draw this year - fewer people moving around more or something, I don't know.  The other two sketches are based on Stock photographs from  PhotoStockMarket and im-stocking-you from DeviantArt.

Abject Failures

At first glance these may appear fairly respectable, but the person on the left looks like neither a guy nor a girl but somewhere creepily in between, the person in the middle was another experiment with style but turned out creepy instead of cool, and the right most sketch is of my Brother-in-Law but could not look less like him if I had tried.  So, while there are worse sketches in my sketchbook, these were definitely the most disappointing.  Yuck.

So, until the next time, have a Merry Christmas, or whichever seasonal alternative you celebrate   I'll probably not post until afterwards, but hopefully before the new year.

Sketching for October '12

I was going to do a mixed post for October and November's sketching, but then I forgot to scan November, so November will be a few days coming. I also had a post planned for the piece I've been working on over the last month, but the publishing got pushed back to January, so I'll write one then. I've finished that piece, and working on it, as well as some head expanding problems at work have left me little artistic mojo left over for much else. The piece is finished now though, so I can resume speedpainting guilt free. We'll see how many I can do between now and Christmas so I can cram another post into December to make up for the lost one.

Anyway, sketching. Didn't do much in October or November (as I've mentioned frequently), but there's enough for a quick post I think (albeit one with a mere three images). On we go then...

Free Sketching
So these were from October, as you may have gathered, that explains the presence of Dracula and Frankenstein's Monster here. I quite like the Monster - he ended up cute rather than menacing, and I am A-OK with that (though I guess I need to practice menacing lighting and expressions now). Vinnie Van Gough to The Monster's left was just some practice with facial hair and not intended as a portrait of the famous 1.5 eared impressionist (I hear his Napoleon was uncanny). Yes, another girl with Elf/Vulcan ears on the left there. I like pointy ears, they're cute. There's apparently a big fuss as as you can have your ears pointed surgically these days, and "All the kids are doing it, under the influence of Spock and Arwen!" etc. Good for them, it's certainly more attractive than those giant earning implants that stretch your ear lobes out like silly string - and unfortunately that's a lot more prevalent. if you have those ear implants don't be too offended, that's dandy, I'm happy for your choice, but I don't have to find it aesthetically pleasing either. I should probably do a proper pointy eared painting soon and get it out of my system.

Figure Drawing Practice
Not much of any real note here. I clearly still need to work on hands a lot, and all that stuff I learned about arms recently has apparently already escaped me. I'll be working on more anatomical studies from reference over the next month or so, so hopefully things will improve a little. I am fairly please with the back on the guy to the right, and the girl to his left (except her witch hand and his stumpy legs), but there's clearly a long way to go here.

Failures
OK, so only 2 of these are out and out disasters, the others have some merits but are still failures over all. The upper half of the girl on the left is pretty good, and I quite like her head and hair, but the lower half. oops. The Bat-mobile looks OK in a retro kinda 60's way, but my son told me it was terrible. When a 5 year old thinks your Bat-mobile is terrible you may as well believe them, they know their Bat-mobiles.

And that's it for today, short but sweet (I have a headache coming on or I'd waffle more). More to follow, probably next weekend.  In the meantime, here's a pointless picture of the Lego space fighter I built for my son, a sort of mini "Daddy can you?"

Belated Sketching for September

It's been a while hasn't it? I skipped the first whole month since the blog began (actually closer to two months at this point if I'm honest), and I've not done much art in order to say "Well yeah, but check this out!" either. You may be thinking I've been resting on my laurels after that book cover, or that I've just been slacking. Those in the second group would be closer to the truth; I've totally been slacking, but not without reason.

Some of you already know that the beginning of October (and the end of September) is a particularly hard emotional time for me, and this year saw an anniversary that made it especially so. Before I could get over that little funk there was another emotionally trying time (Mostly for my wife, but obviously what effects her rubs off on me to some extent), and then my Son was sick, and then my wife was sick, and now I'm sick - but it's now more irritating than "feel like death", hence my finally writing a post.

So the emotional stuff basically nuked my inspiration and drive so I did very little for the month. I did enough to get some more posts, but no speedpaints and not much sketching. There goes my one speedpaint a week intent - I'll get back on it soon. Anyway, before all this I did scan in September's sketching, so I have that to show at least...

Free Sketching
I may as well start with some reasonably good stuff. These are the best general sketches I did back in September. If the girl with the straight blonde hair looks familiar it's because I realised afterwards that I had inadvertently drawn her looking quite a bit like the girl in this post, except there she was drawn from a reference, and here just a random sketch that looks amazingly like her. Kinda creepy that. Other than that just another month of general sketching. I do quite like the blending on the chap in the top left, although her looks slightly creepy (the hair doesn't help either).

From Reference
These ones are taken from reference. Unfortunately the three on the right are takn from Pins on pinterest that were un-credited and "uploaded by user" so I don't know where they came from - they're just lose interpretations anyway, I don't think they look much like the original photos. The girl on the left is based on Megan Morris, but is also a poor likeness. Megan was on America's Next Top Model once and got kicked off early. I think she was robbed personally.

Focus Task 1
Focus this month is profiles. This was for the Open Art Group, but that's slowly fading away unfortunately - I'll have to keep doing these sort of things just for myself (now I'm getting back into it that is). These aren't in order, so you can't really see the improvement through the month unfortunately. My favorites are 'Asian looking science guy' and cap girl (both on the second row).

Focus Task 2
I also did some arms. I find arms abnormally difficult to draw, so I gave them some focus time. Most of them are wrong, but I think they're an improvement on what I was drawing before. Some of the hands turned out okay too. Since I've not drawn much since this I've probably forgotten everything I learned. So it goes.

Gesture Drawing
Just some gestures. Highly variable quality. Nothing much to add except that I haven't done any since. I must rectify this shortly.

Sketching Failures
I think the awfulness speaks for itself don't you. Basically revolting.

Well, that's all for now. I'll try and get what little I did in October compiled soon, and there's also the painting class I'm taking to talk about (plus my terrible paintings to show of course), and after that I should be basically back on track. We're planning to visit my Wife's family for Thanksgiving, and that usually gets some dreadful sketching out of me, so that's something to look forward to. Until then, excelsior!

Sketching for August (and the OAG)

Well, yeah. So I haven't been posting much in the past few months as you may have noticed. This isn't because I don't like posting (although prepping these sketch posts can be a real drag), more it's with me just not having much to post.

August was an especially dry month, it seemed to go by extremely quickly and I didn't do much in the way of sketching; I thought - Turned out I did more than I expected, just not the usual stuff, but more on that in a minute. I had promised another post last month, but in the end I felt that the contents of that were better blended with my regular sketch posts - the aims are similar even though the results are less exciting.

You'll notice some changes this time around - they may stay, they may not. Only time will tell. Oh, The ORG? Read on MacDuff!

Sketch Practice

So the most obvious change is that I've switched from a white background to a noisy grey for the sketches. This is because the new scanner introduces noise I can't fully get rid of without far more cleanup than I'm willing to spend, so the noisy grey hides some of that. Additionally I'll be using white more often than I have previously, and if the background is white you won't be able to see it. It's better than th epink I used to go with though right?

You'll also notice there are only two images (and none of them is the usual "bad" one. Well, I said it was a dry month, so with the exception of a couple of ones that were scribbled so quickly that of course they're bad this is pretty much all I actually did in the traditional manner last month. It's telling that it's now September the 7th, and I've already done half the amount of sketching I did for the whole of last month! So this is pretty much it.

Thankfully (and unusually) I'm pretty happy with most of it. Highlights (for me) are the high-and-tight haired guy in the lower right of the Free Sketch picture along with the three women in a triangle to the center left, also the girl to the left of the figure practice image came out OK.

High and tight looks a little like my cousin (unintentional), while the lass with the Afro was inspired by a girl serving at Little Caesars on the day we got our new cats, but nothing here is drawn from any direct reference.

Open Art Group

I mentioned Focus posts in the last sketching post (without actually explaining it seems), and then didn't post a follow up. Well, this is what it was about; the OAG or Open Art Group, aspects of which I'll be rolling into the regular blog posts where relevant.

Ben, one of the guys I work with (and a ridiculously good artist himself - puts me to shame) came up with the idea about six weeks ago. You have a group that meets once a week that consists of people who want to improve their art. Every other week you have a (fairly vague) Focus for people to work on, and then you all get together the following week and discuss them. Not necessarily critique them, just discuss.

We opened the idea up to the company and got a range of people attending, from our concept artists to programmers who've never held a pencil. It's nice to have such a good spread (amusingly the programmers are the most consistent attendants :))

So, the first focus was "Shapes & simple objects" the second was Gesture Drawing and so on.

For "shapes" I chose circles, and just drew lots of them. This was to loosen up my wrist and get the curved flow going as well as to just improve my circles -apparently this is recommended by Vilppu in a book I have yet to buy (shame on me). Lucky you, you get to see all 15 pages of circles (various media) shrunk down into one big image (click to expand of course).

So I didn't go completely loopy I also did a houshold object (our TV remote - photo for your reference, though it was drawn - badly - from 'life'), and a set of common 3D primitives (I messed up the lighting, though it took Ben to point that out)

The next Focus was Gesture Drawing. You've seen this in the past if you're a long time reader, but I let myself slide doing it, to my detriment it turned out. If you're new the idea is to get the feel and 'gesture' of an image in a short time span. This time it's ten pages condensed into one image. I should point out that reducing the size like this does make some of them look rather better than they did originally. Some of these, even at this size, are standing in for this month's "Bad" image (some are OK though - click to expand).  The time on all of them was one minute per figure and I used a range of media (Charcoal, graphite sticks, pencil, ink brush and Sketch Book Pro)

And that's it. I think part of the reason I did less of my usual sketching last month was because of all the OAG stuff on the side. This is likely to continue to greater or lesser degrees and so I'll continue to include them at the end of regular posts, or even mixed in with them where relevant (there'll be some in the upcoming speedpaints posts for example, as one of the speedpaints was for the OAG).

Let me know what you think of the idea of including the Open Art Group in with the posts if you have any issues (no comments will mean "I don't care it's fine").

Sorry this one was so wordy, the next one will likely be less so.