CGMA: Weeks 2,3,4,5

CGMA Fundamentals of Architecture Design class weeks 2,3,4 and 5 on a single sheet. Love this class. I'm learning a lot from Alex.

CGMA Fundamentals of Character Design class weeks 3 and 4.

CGMA Fundamentals Environment Design class weeks 3 and 5.

Alex Ruiz Tutorials

Alex Ruiz is my Architecture Design teacher at CGMA. Not only is Alex a spectacular instructor, an amazing artist and a wonderful guy, he is also responsible for making some excellent art tutorials which he offers at a ridiculously low price on his website.

I spent a few hours today going through his Custom Brushes tutorial and doodling with my new set of custom brushes, which I can make on the fly now, thanks to Alex. The whole video was just under an hour and I got all the information I needed to start moving in the right direction. I'm really happy now :)

 Here's my tutorial-inspired doodle:

CGMA Spring 2014: Weeks 1 and 2

Started a new quarter at CGMA. Took 3 classes: Environment Design, Architecture Design and Character Design. Now I'm getting my butt kicked. Learning a lot though. Here's what I've done up to this point.

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: