Hello everyone. I thought I'd try out doing a sketch blog on this site now that I participated in the challenges.

It'll mostly be concept art and illustration stuff, but I hope to sprinkle in some 3D and design once in a while.

Also feel free to offer any critique or advice you'd like. I could use more of that.

I have things here too if you're interested:
Instagram - Portfolio - Tumblr

Also, I've been trying some different thumbnails out for this week's challenge. I want to eventually make the large character in the image something more unique than a generic snake or human, but for now it's my placeholder for figuring out the composition.

Hey, welcome! Good illustration for challenge, but don't be scared of high contrasts. Use most contrast combination of value near to focal point, add darks to slits where almost no light (read about ambient occlusion). Use different intensity of lights to highlight differences in materials. For now it looks like the whole scene was made from piece of plasticine. As in terms of reflectivity, as either in terms of material behavior. The hair of girl look too heavy and shiny. The cape is also too clumsy and angular. Try to analize references for acquiring right information, before painting. Also try to economize your brushstrokes, and, instead of "licking" of image, try focus on things that I mentioned above. Good luck with this! :sparkles: :octopus:

I'm very much impressed with the thumbnails you did, and would like to learn how to do such compositions, both conceptually and technically, so could you recommend some books I could read on the subject? Also I want to improve on drawing characters withing a perspective sound environment. Any advice is appreciated :smile:

Glad you liked the thumbnails. Overall technically I would say try to research about atmospheric perspective, and local values. This is a pretty good tutorial for it. -->
The other three parts of those tutorials are really good too, if they look like they're a level you can learn from.

For books, I would recommend "Framed Ink" by Marcos Mateu. It's for storyboarding rather than landscapes, but pretty much all the lessons transfer over. It teaches overall how to capture story and make an interesting frame. It has good explanations, but the art in the book is really where it's at.

For characters in perspective, I would recommend Proko's stuff:
Cubebrush Store
Youtube
His Store

On Youtube you'll have to go back to his older videos to find ones on gesture, the robo bean, land marks, and mannequinization, or it will be the figure drawing course on his site. From there, you can start just constantly thinking of the body as an object in 3D space, and you'll get much better with time and practice.

Conceptually these aren't too complicated if you take it step by step. I just liked the idea of a giant as a starting point. From there I thought that having it in a valley or cavern would make it more "insurmountable" for the challenge. And the army is just there to add conflict/interest. Concepting isn't too hard once you have your pieces and aren't working with a blank document any more.

Hope this helps you out, and good luck!

Thanks for the advice dvlfsh. Materials and brush economy have definitely been my main struggles for a while.

Thanks a plenty for the advice. I've just gotten Framed Ink and I'm loving it already.

A WIP for the challenge due tomorrow. Feeling like I'm failing pretty hard on this one, but hopefully I'll be able to turn things around. Going to need to do some landscape studies after this.

4 months later

I've been meaning to keep up on this site, but definitely fell off the wagon, so I will be art dumping for a couple of days to get caught up with things.

To start off, here's a painting I had a lot of fun with. I wanted to do Super Smash Bros. in a style I'd enjoy playing a bit more.