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?"

Painting Class: Squares and Mutant Rabbits

I blame Assassin's Creed III and our cats on my lack of productivity lately (not really, it's entirely my own fault of course). The cats can prove a constant distraction, especially Ferris, who seems to be going through his kitty teen years and therefore doing the one thing he's not allowed to do, which is go on the table and counter-tops in the kitchen, and then stare contumaciously at everyone until you do something about it. He especially likes to do this repeatedly when I'm sketching and there's no-one else around, so there's more cat moving and less sketching than there should be.

Assassin's Creed III however is just a really enormous game with lots to do and fills me with conflict as it involves murdering my countrymen* in large numbers in a bid to remove them from American shores (It's set during the Revolutionary War of Independence - That's a combination of both the US and UK names for it if you were wondering).

You're not here for excuses though, you're here for ART. Not much to be found unfortunately, but carry on if you fancy a giggle at my expense.

Yes, it's a little sad and unfinished, some of the reasons why can be found below, as well as why I'm not terribly disheartened by it (though I am a little embarrassed).  The photo quality is dreadful - I'll need to work on that if I want to post paintings from now on - ugh.

Nine weeks ago I started an eight week painting class. Some of you may recall my last attempt at painting way back in January. I was planning to have another go soon after, but I realised that I really had no clue what I was doing and should probably take a class to at least learn the basics such as how to mix paint and handle a brush.  It took me almost ten months to get there, but I finally did it.  Cost a fortune too - not the class, all the paint.  Good paint is expensive!  If I paint a picture with a lot of red I'll need to take out a loan (Cadmium red is particularly pricey, although you can get a hue version which is cheaper).

I didn't bore anyone with my background beyond what my job is, so it was nice not being in a situation where anyone expects you to actually produce something spectacular (and them being subsequently disappointed), especially since I really know next to nothing about actual paint.

The first few weeks were spent painting simple things, such as a colour wheel and some transitions between various shades and colours. I'm not going to scan those in as one colour wheel is much like another, except mostly better than mine, you'll just have to use your imagination (or possibly google if you don't know what a colour wheel looks like).

That's me painting squares. I think I was painting transitions between various yellows and blues and blacks to make green. I didn't know mixing black with yellow would give some excellent greens prior to this (that's the sort of thing I took the class for).  Actually, no, I lie, it's me painting transitions between complimentary colours - the greens were the week after.

So on week three we started on a still life. We had a choice of two, and I chose the bunny one, because who doesn't like a bunny? The photo above is from week six of the class because I forgot to take one the first two weeks we were painting this.

I roughed it out in pencil and started painting. Then the next week I painted some more. I forgot to get a picture of the painting the first week as well, so this is how it looked on the second week of work.

After that I... you guessed it, painted some more. It's worth noting that the class was one day a week for three hours (about 2 to two and a half hours of that was painting), and between sessions the still life was struck and then put back for the next time. There were a lot of variables that could move, and did. You'll note the ribbon in my picture, and some of the locations of things is different than those in the photograph. That's because they moved, as did the light, as did I. I could blame all that on my Rabbit looking a bit wonky (because he was at a slightly different angle each week), but in all honesty I'm pretty sure I sketched him in a little wonky and a little fat, so it's far more my fault than any slight variations in position.

I'm not particularly pleased with it, but the rest of the class seemed to like him, mutated though he is. Apparently the colours I chose for him are appealing and his eye went down well (with a nice Chianti and some fava beans, probably).

Despite having little desire to finish it, and not being happy with the current result, I'm still pleased I did it because I learned a lot in the process. Some of which will hopefully be reflected in my next piece (It's in progress - the class has finished but I have a little more to do on it before I'll call it done). One of the things I learned was that painting for real takes a lot longer than painting digitally. Most of that time, for me, comes down to mixing the paint. Digitally you just pick the colour you want and go at it, but real media takes time to mix for every single variation - there were quite a few colours here, so it took a while (~6-8 hours total?). If I was painting this digitally it would be a lot faster - I'm guessing I could speedpaint it in 90 minutes without issue, and probably more accurately as it's easier to fix mistakes... I may even do that at some point.

Still, painting from life rather than photographs also has it's challenges, and I don't do nearly enough working from life in general. Maybe this will inspire me to do more of it in future.

So Turkey-Day is fast approaching, and I'll be away for that. I'll try and get some sketching done. When I get back I have something to keep me busy for about a week (not going to spoil it too much, but it's another Doctor Who picture, my last for a while), then I'll finish my next painting from the class and post a write up. Somewhere in there I'll get October's meager sketching scanned so you can see that too. Things to look forward to, or dread - I'm almost back to full speed again though I think, and that can't be a bad thing.

Sorry for the large amounts of text and small amount of pictures this post - but not half as sorry as my fingers, because they had to type it all.



*That's my actual countrymen by the way, not the character's countrymen, and a distressingly large number of the rooftop guards seem to be specifically Welsh and yell things at you like "Oi, get down! Are you deaf? Ge'down before I come over there!" Which is slightly creepy and uncannily accurate as I'm usually yelling the exact same thing at the cat. I'm starting to sound like my Dad...

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!

Intermission...

Normal service will resume soon.

Keep Calm and Carry On up the Khyber.

A Psychochronography in Blue (Part 2)

Okay, before you go any further you need to click THIS LINK in order to get some background on this post, because I'm lazy and it saves me typing up a "Previously on Back to the Drawing Board..."

All caught up?  Good, then I'll continue.

Philip emailed me at the beginning of August asking if I'd be interested in doing his second volume of TARDIS Eruditorum since his original artist had seemingly vanished.  If I said yes I would get to do any other books in the series (on the assumption I don't also vanish presumably), including a reissue of the first volume when they finally release the newly discovered Galaxy Four footage so he can write about it (don't stress if this means nothing to you, but it's a big deal in terms of Doctor Who history).

Well, I said yes didn't I?  I mean obviously I did or there would be no post, but really thee was no way I would turn it down.  So here we are about 18 months 6 weeks later and it's finally gone live on Amazon and Phil is about to announce it, so here it is...

There you go, my fist actual book cover - click it to zoom in (though I've only uploaded it at half the res of the final). Pretty snazzy eh? Well, I like it anyway.

The book is based on the blog of the same name (as mentioned in the above link), and is available to purchase in both paperback and digital forms via Amazon. Click the links, buy the book, make Phil rich.

If you read the previously linked post you'll get the jist of why it's in the style of an older and worn book. Phil preferred the idea that the "old" cover was the actual cover rather than being a cover within a cover, and I was just fine with that. I didn't want to just reuse the basic concept of the original cover wholesale though as if I do get to redo volume one then I think it's well suited, so it needed a new look. Or possibly a new old look? Whatever, I knocked up some roughs.

Of these I think the second one was the most true to the concept of volume 1 (and I quite like the sketch I did) while both myself and Phil felt the 4th one had the most late 60's feel to it and we should head in the direction. Unfortunately I used a photo to get that effect, and using a photo was a definite no-no, so I decided to keep the basic layout and head in another direction.

Since I had the layout there I started with that, basing it on the layout for scale sent from Amazon via Philip.

Then I needed something to go in there. We'd been focusing on shapes in the Open Art Group and I'd vaguely wondered if I could do a portrait using just triangles. This seemed like the ideal time to find out.

I didn't work directly from a single photograph, but rather just started laying down triangles and moving them around until it started to resemble Troughton without being so detailed as to get us in hot water over the resemblance. After doing this for a bit I checked how it was looking on the cover and added some elements to the spine.

I decided to change the nose area of his face, and went back to work on the separate image I was building the picture in. You'll note the I've chopped off a good chunk of the bottom of this final image. Mostly that was because even though I'd spent a while laying out all those triangles they really weren't needed for the effect I was looking for (that was all done by hand by the way, not with some clever exploding triangles filter). Maybe I'll get a T-Shirt printed with it on or something...

All the slight tears and damage to the book are hand drawn masks to a paper texture scanned from my sketchbook. I was initially going to just rip them from some old worn books I'd bought as reference, but it turned out that lifting them cleanly from the scans was not as easy as I'd thought, so I did them manually using the scanned reference books as a guide; it took ages but I think it was worth it. I also used those same reference books to decide on a back cover layout. This is nothing like any of them, but the simplicity of it ties in with them thematically. The quote is one I liked from The Doctor that felt suitable to me. The text on the back is the traditional Lorem Ipsum stand-in text while Phil wrote the actual blurb. The dates are wrong for this Doctor, and somehow that slipped by both myself and Phil until I'd submitted the "final" image and a friend of mine on Facebook pointed it out (thanks Ash!). You'll note it's fixed in the final cover - it would have been rather embarrassing if we'd completely missed it. The white "label" on the back is where the barcode will go as in 1968 they didn't have barcodes. I don't think they even had ISBN numbers.

This is the final "fat" cover (still with the wrong dates). This time I've included the bleed area that has to be included in case of incorrect alignment when printing. It's just rough paper texture - so I guess how damaged or clean the edges of the book will appear depend on the alignment during printing. I quite like the idea of it being slightly random. The front cover here is also the Kindle digital edition cover as at the time we didn't know that would need to change.

But it did change. Comparing the full cover up at the top with that last cover you'll notice a few small changes that actually took days of back and forth to do.

Firstly there was the width of the spine. Phil had to guess the pagecount when I started it, and so the width of the spine is based on that guess (actually the pagecount of volume 1). When the final pagecount came in I had to change it accordingly, which was harder than I had initially planned. I'll know how to do it more efficiently next time.

Then Amazon bounced the cover. There were slight wrinkles in the barcode label that should have fallen outside the barcode area but didn't, and the barcode area must be flat white (I guess). Wrinkles removed, back it goes. Bounced again.

This time it was because the word invasions was obscured by the barcode area. Apparently Amazon figured no-one would ever do this intentionally and put in a check for it. You can't say "yes, I know, that's intentional" and get it through, so the text on the back had to be moved so it was higher. Moved, and resent.

And bounced, again. This time it was the front cover at fault (why they don't check all of this at the same time so it can be fixed in one go is anybody's guess). The first volume (and the Kindle edition) had the author as Phil Sandifer, but I guess since the first volume was published they now check the Author name on the cover against the one in their records, which was Philip. so I had to change Phil for Philip so it would go through. Oddly this check isn't performed on the Kindle edition, so that cover was approved ages before (Though it did give Phil some aggravation because some of the book closely resembled text from this website the plagiarism checker had found. Funny that).

So after all that it finally cleared and is now available from the links above with slightly different covers for Kindle and Paperback (Click and buy! Not that I make any money out of it, but making Phil rich means I can ask for more moolah next time ;)).

Phew! None of this would have been a terribly big deal if the file size of the image wasn't close to 30MB and needed to be sent to Phil and then sent by him to Amazon. Ah well, we learned a lot about what not to do next time around.

Finally, here's the cover without all the wear and tear on it. It would probably still make a pretty nice cover, but for me it's the wear and tear that really sells this one as being a book published when Troughton had just recently been the Doctor.  Man, I hope it prints OK...

More to life than simply Speedpainting

It's not very often you get to start a post by paraphrasing Ghandi, so I think when you get the chance you should go for it, don't you. This month has been a little sparse on posts as you may have noticed. Generally this happens when I get busy elsewhere, and I'm plenty busy right now. Tomorrow I start a 6 week painting class on Wednesday evenings. It worked out as expensive, but I feel it will work out cheaper in the long run (and faster) than pulling out some paints every six months and grimacing at the results. it may turn out I just suck and the whole thing will be a disaster, but at least I'll know, and so will you as of course I'll post the resulting detritus here.

As well as that I've been working on a commission (the one I said I'd be a fool to turn down). It's actually finished, completed last night, but I can't post it for a while (which is something you should be used to with the commissions by now). The good news is that I'm sketching a lot more than I was last month, although quite a bit of that is for the Open Art Group (Which you get to see anyway). Two of this month's speedpaints are sort of for the same, so I suppose I should get on and show them.

Time Taken: 45 Minutes
I wanted to work on fabric and cloth a little (not a huge amount - I'll be focusing on it at some point when my anatomy is better) so I painted this flag at work. It's my flag, you get bonus points if you recognise it. That blurry thing in the foreground is my monitor, which you can't see from this angle any more as I have a new one. Actually I can't see the flag either now because it's a larger monitor.

Time Taken: 75 Minutes
This one is for Open Art Group. The focus was Self Portraits (you may have guessed). I've posted a few self-portraits before, but this one is peculiar in that I was painting from life, using a small mirror propped against my monitor. It looks like me I guess, so I'll call it a win. You may note a few of these go over the hour I usually reserve for speedpaints. That's just how it's been going of late - they're still under two hours which I think is my official cut-off time for speedpainting these days.

Oh, and there's a step by step, just because.

Time Taken: 100 minutes
I don't know why this one took so long, but I'm quite pleased with how the silk turned out. It actually started as a profile study, but then I got into painting the fabric instead of her face. I quite like it, though I should have left her hair as an outline too, I think it looked better that way. Profiles of faces are a focus of late by the way, due to Open Art Group, though it was this one that made me decide I should work on them.

Taken from a Stock photo by the wonderful charligal-stock

Time Taken: 110 Minutes
Another profile, this time of Matt Smith as the Doctor from Doctor Who (copyright and trademark BBC), from the episode Asylum of the Daleks. It's not the best likeness, but it's rather better than the last speedpaint I did of him ;) My friend says his hair's too small, my brother says he looks to old - they're probably both right. Amusingly I think I spent more time on the background than I did on the Doctor. Clouds are hard!

Time Taken: 100 Minutes
Another paint taken from a Sci-Fi still, this time from Pitch Black. That's supposed to be Riddick in Cryo at the beginning. Looks nothing like Vin Diesel unfortunately. At one point it looked a lot more like him, but his head was at a peculiar angle. I fixed the angle but lost the likeness. C'est la vie.

Time Taken: 30 Minutes
Last one, real quick, this was just something quick and reference-less I did in Photoshop in an effort to reacquaint myself with its brushes. Might do more in it, might do less, but this was the result regardless. Annoyingly she looked a lot better earlier on, but there was next to no contrast, I increased the contrast and messed it up a bit as a result. Getting to be a running theme...

That's your lot, off you go.

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.