INKtober Day 17: General Brutus of the Mastodon Marines

After receiving a commission in the Continental Drift army, Mr. Brutus went on to forge a 

distinguished career for himself as a General. It soon became clear that when fighting

Smilodon Guerrilla forces, there were few as skilled as General Brutus of the Mastodon Marines.

INKtober Day 14: Her Royal Majesty the Queen

When Her Majesty the Queen commands, you'd better obey.

(My apologies again for the strange image quality on some of these... I don't understand

why some images are showing up grainy and blurry and others aren't?

It seems no matter the resolution I save as, it still happens).

INKtober Day 13: Royal Guard

Life on the Calormene/Archenland border frontier is not easy, but being in the pay of the Tisroc's Royal Guard is a good way for a Narnian Dwarf to learn the secrets of the Calormenes,

in order to better inform The High Kings and Queens in Cair Paravel of enemy movements.

INKtober Day 12: Mr. Tortoise in His Sunday Best

Well, I've missed 4 days of Inktober (is it more? I don't really know!) So I'm trying to make up for it.

I drew this one on Sunday, but it really was supposed to be Saturday's drawing. I have some more

drawings in the works, but they're going to have to wait until tomorrow. 

Sorry about all the crazy confusion!

Mr. Tortoise always wears his Sunday best when he goes out to call on his neighbors. He is particularly proud of the blue feather in his fedora and his yellow necktie, which was 

lovingly sent to him by his grandmother Gertrude some years back.

INKtober Day 11: Elf

Today's Drawing: An Elf! 

This may or may not be a Legolas from The Lord of the Rings.

INKtober Day 10: Chobo the Warrior Tabby (Spera Fan Art)

Chobo the Warrior Tabby is also a character from Spera. He's a treasure hunting, no-nonsense cat.

He's one of my favorite characters from the comic, and it was a lot of fun drawing and painting him.

INKtober Day 9: Yonder (Spera Fan Art)

So, this is the second thing I've drawn for Inktober this year that is on fire. I'm okay with that.

This is Yonder from the webcomic Spera, which you can find here. I enjoy reading it periodically and I really enjoy the diverse set of artistic styles and sensibilities that the project brings to the table.

I've wanted to do some Spera fanart for some time, so Inktober seemed like a great chance to make it happen.

INKtober Day 8: Hipster Cat

"Hipster Cat"

*NOTE: Drawing the Sword is unaffiliated with Starbucks, Inc., and does not condone the consumption

of Pumpkin Spice Lattés or any beverage containing pumpkin flavoring

of any kind. The views expressed here belong solely to the cat.

Viewer discretion is advised. 

INKtober Day 6: Bison

Bison are magnificent animals. And they're really nice to draw.

The color was really fun on this one. I enjoyed sneaking in reds and greens into the fur, just to play around and see what type of effect it would give. I've really enjoyed experimenting with watercolor on this project. Hoping it'll start filtering through to my more serious work.

INKtober Day 4: Chivalry

 Chivalry isn't dead! But it might be about to get stung.

I like this one - it was a lot of fun to draw & paint.

More tomorrow!

INKtober Day 3: Phoenix

Inktober Day 3: Phoenix

Trying to experiment more with the watercolor side. This one got a little crazy. Also, all this wet on wet that I do is just deforming my paper. I need to practice more (and get less lazy) with making sure my surfaces won't buckle.

INKtober Day 2: Triceratops

 

Today's drawing is a dinosaur - triceratops, to be exact. Honestly, he looks like he would be more at home on the Barney show (although I doubt Barney would condone the smoking of tobacco). But what had at first hoped to be a rusty red, quickly turned into a mediocre pinkish-salmon color and my meager watercolor skills were exhausted beyond their capacity. That combined with the fact that Barney had appeared suddenly and had begun singing the "I Love You" song quickly put an end to my efforts at creating a worth-while piece of art.

Also, some of you may be wondering what materials I'm using for these drawings/paintings.

Here's a quick list:

Arches Hot Pressed 140-lb Watercolor Paper

Prismacolor Non-photo blue Pencil for underdrawing

Pentel Pocket brush pen (black)

Watercolors (all kinds, but Winsor-Newton, mostly)

More tomorrow!

 

 

INKtober Day 1: English Robin

Happy INKtober! To start off this month right, here's an English robin for you. Top is ink on hot pressed Arches watercolor paper, and on the bottom I added some quick watercolor washes. Hope you like!

Beauty & the Beast: Watercolor

Taking a quick break from some LPG sketchwork to post my progress on the Beauty & the Beast piece that I worked on over the course of the TLC Workshop weekend before last. This is the final watercolor, with just one or two adjustment layers in Photoshop to bring life back into the scanned image.

I'm pretty pleased with the overall painting. Personally, I feel like this is one of the best "finished" watercolors I've ever done, although there is a great deal of room for improvement here. I really need to work on my application of the media - I tend to just mush the paint around with no objective for the strokes. In future paintings, I'll be trying for smoother layers of color.

The next step will be digital adjustments. Happily, I think I've gotten much more color information down in the painting than in the Winter Dragon one I did last time. Hopefully that will make the digital stage much easier!

Anyway, that's about it. What do you think? Keep at it, or go into a career in the Fast Food industry?

(JUST KIDDING)

TLC Workshop Recap: Monsters & Maidens

  

This past weekend I had the privilege of attending the TLC Workshop with Justin Gerard and Cory Godbey. It was a terrific weekend full of good friends, great artwork, and lots and lots of knowledge passed around! These are just a few photos from a very full weekend.

_________________

(Above) Justin Gerard demonstrated some methods of picture-making that he uses frequently, including techniques blending ink and watercolor that were used by Arthur Rackham (if you're interested in this method, a detailed description of it can be found here.)

Iain McCaig, who has worked as a concept artist for Star Wars and many other feature films, stopped by on Saturday to give us an energetic and inspiring talk on telling stories with our art and character design.

The "digital room" where I worked. The Arts Umbrella where the workshop was held was a terrific space. Small, but just right for a workshop this size.

This was the state of my Beauty & the Beast piece on Saturday night. Lots of reference lying around, and I had Just got the drawing transferred to watercolor paper and refining it. I had a pretty rough time deciding on a composition that worked for me,  so by this time I was ready to commit to a drawing just so I could try out some new watercolor methods.

Justin worked on a Beauty & the Beast illustration that was absolute dynamite. It was really nice to be able to see him work in watercolor over the course of the weekend, and I learned a great deal about the actual application of it, which has been something I've been pushing to learn recently. Justin was eager to share all kinds of knowledge about illustration and his working methods.

And here's a sneak peek photo of my drawing. It has lots of issues, but I pressed on. I told myself I couldn't go home until I had gotten watercolor on the page, which I did! I still need to finish that aspect of it, and I'll post the final when it's done.

And lastly, here's Mr. Cory demoing his digital workflow in Photoshop which he uses mainly for client work. Cory is a fine fellow, and it was great to hang out with him for the weekend. His drawings are mind-blowing works of art and I enjoy his approach to character and composition.

At the end of the class on Sunday, Justin & Cory did a Q&A with us on the business of art, how they got their start in illustration, and things that we as new artists can do to gain exposure and attention for our own artwork. It was a great session, and it really answered a lot of questions that I've had in the recent months about "where do I go from here?"

After it was over, we all took a look at each other's pieces. There was some terrific art being made over the course of the weekend. That evening we attended a farewell dinner at Vivendo's Italian Restaurant in the Country Village and it was so nice to just spend time with good friends who love art. We're all in this together! 

If you ever get the chance to attend one of Tara Larsen Chang's TLC Workshops, I would highly recommend it, especially if the guest illustrator is someone who has influenced you in your art pursuits. For me, Justin and Cory's work was a huge factor in my decision to become an illustrator, so it was a great opportunity to meet with them and learn from their work and experience. I hope that you will be able to do the same if you attend.

And with that, it's back to work for me! I have a painting to finish!

Buried Treasure - Illustration Process

Here's a quick piece I did. I've been really inspired lately by children's book illustrators like Jon Klassen and Isabelle Arsenault. Their work has such amazing texture and simplicity. I love it. I'd like to explore this type of work more fully.

I took a different approach. This guy was doodled in my sketchbook. I took a piece of watercolor paper, and painted all the different pieces I knew it would take to create him. Here's that page:

I then scanned all of this into Photoshop, and put every piece on its own layer. By doing this, it allowed me to maneuver all the pieces into place, re-size them and get it how I wanted it. A few color adjustment layers, and I was done! Below is a little .gif animation that shows the process:

What do you think of this style? I'm eager to explore this technique further for use in children's books, etc. Hope you like it!

Winter Dragon: Digital Finish

Winter Dragon - (watercolor & digital, 2013)

At long last, I have finished the Winter Dragon. 

What you see above is the result of close to 120 Photoshop layers, and much wrestling with color, lighting, pixels, adjustments, gremlins, and other adverse entities bent on making the life of a picture-maker total chaos.

It finally came to the point where enough was enough. There is only so much I can do to this image to make it successful. Ultimately, I felt like I was working very hard to offset the effects of a lack of planning in the early stages. This was a very uncomfortable feeling. 

Also, as layer upon layer began to accumulate in my palette, I began to ask myself: "why so many layers? Why is it taking this many layers to get this point across? Why wasn't there more color in the watercolor stage?" and on and on. A simple idea was requiring 20x the effort, layers, thought, and tweaking than it ever should have.

So to sum it up, I feel like in this painting, I won some and I lost some. In some ways it feels like it is succeeding, but in other ways it feels like it falls short of my original idea. But I'm ready to put this one behind me, and move on to bigger, better things.

Or maybe simpler things. If there's one thing this painting has taught me, it's this: Less is, more often than not, more.

Winter Dragon: Watercolor (Traditional Underpainting)

So in my last post in this series, I showed you the finished drawing. Since then I've plunged into the watercolor stage of my process. This piece actually marks a lot of progress for me, for several reasons. First, this is the first watercolor I've ever done that I've felt "good" about. I've managed to achieve some pretty good texture, keep the colors within a predetermined scheme, and get a fairly unified look to the whole thing. Secondly, it's the first painting I've done that stands alone as a finished watercolor painting, but still leaves room for some digital manipulation, which I will complete in the last stage.

The image I'm posting (above) was tweaked just slightly to bring up the levels from what the scan gave me, but otherwise, it is untouched by Photoshop. Over the course of the painting stage, I used these steps, which I will give you here in case you are interested:

 

Here's a very poor picture of what the underpainting looked like. 

Pretty rough, huh? 

1. Light underpainting - wash of warm brownish undertones to unify the colors.
2. First washes of local color. This was the stage where I added in my midtone colors, leaving my lightest areas untouched, and saving my shadows for a later stage.
3. Final washes of darker areas - adding in shadows, etc.
4. Final touches of local color, a little more fine tuning.

The final watercolor. Wrinkled, but still alive and kicking!

That being said, there were a lot of things I learned, and things that I will do differently next time:

1. Instead of doing a wash over the whole painting, do a light underpainting on individual elements of the image, such as the trees, the dwarves, the mountains, dragon, etc. This would eliminate some of the dramatic bleeds that I got.

2. Stretch the paper. I skipped this stage, but it was only because I forgot to do this before I drew on it, and didn't want to lose my drawing. Overall, the drawing held well.

And that's about it. I'm sure there were other things I noticed but can't recall at the moment. Anyway, I got through the whole ordeal without incident, and was pretty pleased with the result!
Now I will retreat into my digital laboratory and tweak the DNA of this thing with Photoshop. We shall see what madness shall ensue!

Character detail.

Up Next: Digital Process!

#162 Illustration Friday: Suspend

Suspend

8.5 x 11" Watercolor & Digital

Being cast from his ship, the noble Nordic warrior finds himself suspended between the inky depths of death, and a terrible sea monster. He has two choices: succumb to a watery grave, or take hold of a legendary sword to slay his foe and rise again to air and life. I think he will choose the latter, don't you?

Done for Illustration Friday, a weekly artistic challenge.

#153 Sketchbook 2012: The Falconer's Blade Part III: More Local Color

Sorry for the lack of updates lately - I've been busy with various things. This is the progress on the first painting for the sketchbook so far as of yesterday. I thought it was finished and ready for digital, but I started seeing even more areas that needed contrast and shadow. This really needs to be done in the painting stage, so some more work, and then we push into the wilderness of Photoshop! And after that, more drawings. Stay tuned!