Freehand Surface Construction

Still going through my Scott Robertson DVDs. I decided these studies don't need to be too tight, so I'm free-handing ( with my tablet ) all the surfaces and shadows.

Some Days Are Better Than Others

One day you're on top of the world where nothing can go wrong and all of next week you get to pay for the high :) Art training is one crazy roller coaster.

Time to upload everything I've been working on in my spare time lately. Been focusing on the techniques section of Beginners' Guide to Digital Painting, Reilly Abstractions and Bridgman studies.

I've signed up for 3 CGMA classes for next quarter, so I'll be posting those when I start producing. Here are the doodles (30 minutes each):

Force Equals Function

Hey everyone. Long time. I've been busy studying with Mike Mattesi and and doing some contract design work for a mobile tech start-up.

The 10 week class with Mike over at drawingforce.com is over. It's been quite a ride.

I can only think of one other instance in my life when I made so much progress in such a short period of time. Mike is an amazing teacher and one of my favorite artists, which is probably why I kept improving so fast. He's also a very analytical artist, which is very rare, but works great for me, since I learn best when I combine analytical study with muscle memory practice.

I would like to get good at what Mike taught me, so I intend to keep training and work my way through Mike's Character Design and Animals Force Drawing books in the next few months.

Thanks to Mike's instructions, I got drawing a full human figure down to 30 minutes or less. This is how far I got in the last 2 and half months:

Force Drawing Week 3 and Freehand Construction

Hi everyone,

I'm posting all my force gesture drawings for this week's class with Mike Mattesi. I'm also getting to the end of Scott Robertson's "How to Render" Vol 1 DVD. I was hoping to finish this construction and value study project quickly today and start watching the next DVD but ended up getting bogged down: plotting shadows is hard and figuring out what's wrong with them is even harder. I think I caught and fixed everything.

All images are freehand with my Wacom tablet, as always.

And I submitted these 2 for Mike's review:

More basic surfaces

Here's some more stuff. I'm working on improving speed and precision.

The sketches are a bit messy, as I was focusing on understanding the "halfway to black" system through value studies and getting used to sketching (with minimal clean-up) spline surfaces in perspective. I ended up buying most of Scott Robertson's instructional DVDs (except the one with airplanes) - working through them now.

Been producing about 50  force sketches a day for Mike Mattesi's class, but everything still looks way too crappy for public display. I hope I'll get better in the coming weeks.

I'll be posting more soon.

I Miraculously Disappeared

Hey gang! I haven't gone AWOL. I've been busy working, going through Scott Robertson's DVDs and last week Mike Mattesi's Drawing Force class started.

Doing a boat load of basic exercises. I'll post interesting things when I make them. In the meantime here are some of my exercise sheets.

Hope everyone is doing well.

 

Almost end of CGMA quarter and some new curves

Hi everyone,

I'm on my last week of Michael Hampton's Analytical Figure Drawing 2 class. Week 7 was composition, which I always find very enjoyable to explore

I've been practicing drawing straight lines, curves and ellipses with my tablet for a few months now. I'm using Scott Robertson's excellent Basic Perspective Form Drawing DVD as my main training tool. I've been getting better and better, but still far from the speed and accuracy I'm aiming for.

My first goal (and benchmark) was to train up to the point where I would be able to freehand a decent perspective grid and use it to put together a few mirrored curves. I did that 2 weeks ago. It's rough, but adequate for a target mark.

This week, I felt I had enough control to attempt my first complex curves object. And it came out quite well. I'll need a lot of practice before I will be satisfied with my quality and speed, but for a first freehand constructed complex shape - this one is not too bad.

I'm going to go practice some more now.