I haven't done any digital work for quite some time now because I've been spending time studying perspective theory. So I thought I'd try doing some master studies. This is my first time at it, so I'd thought I'd try studying someone who's work I really admired but also simple to approach. I grew up watching Batman: The Animated Series. It was so different from anything that was airing at the time and Bruce Timm was probably the first artist whose style was etched in my head. I started with the Joker. I also made a video for the entire process, it's a bit lengthy but I hope you guys take a look. I should definitely try and shorten the time but that shows how less confident I come across when working digitally compared to sketching with a pencil. Here ye go!

I wanted to do these studies (more coming) because for the longest time I've been studying from references and trying to draw them as realistically as possible with very little creative effort. And that can be daunting. I wanted to take a break from doing anatomy and perspective studies and just have fun with it doing a study. After all that's the point of it right?

2019.09.20 joker finished.jpg2863x3508 2 MB

Continuing with studying Bruce Timm.
BATMAN

BATGIRL

Just as the new year started I bought a yearly subscription to Schoolism. I 've been rather disappointed in my lack of progression in the past few months and I think a lot of it has to do with not giving myself proper assignments and short term objectives.
After giving it much thought, I realized I want to move away from the comfort zone of always doing portraits and value paintings and move to color. So with January (once my college exams are over) I decided to start Schoolism with Sam Neilson's Fundamentals of Light which dwells quite a bit into the technicality of light.
This first post is from the first lesson which is about value. I didn't spend too much time on this (especially the cleaning up) as I'm quite familiar with the fundamentals of painting in grey scale and I'm really eager to move to color. The assignment was a line art that I was required to paint in value with certain things like Bounce Light, Ambient Occlusion and Cast Shadows.

Another portrait study. This was just more about getting myself familiar with a certain routine of rendering, which I often get lost in and end up losing motivation simply because I let myself get dragged on by being indecisive on certain things like knowing when to use separate layers to make the workflow easier.

I completely forgot about this painting. I wanted to put to see if I can replicate Bruce Timm's style. A couple of things of note:

• It was surprisingly difficult to keep myself from straying more towards a realistic drawing of the reference which would be how I would go about normally as I prefer a style that is somewhere in between realism while also emphasizing gesture and simple shape design.
• In case of Bruce Timm's, GESTURE is the determining factor for how he creates his characters.
• When rendering, Timm's color palette is limited but that doesn't stop him from making very interesting light and shadow shapes. I actually had a lot of fun with the limited palette.
• I would say my only shortcoming would be the hair, I struggled a lot with keeping it simple, this might have to do with the fact even in my portrait studies I tend to ignore the overall shape design of the hair and flatten it out quite a bit and not spend enough time rendering it. So when looking at the hair on the reference, I struggled to find a good flow in design.
  Its always good to find things to improve on.
  

One more study of Bruce Timm's work, this time its Harley Quinn. Also I've included the video process, hope anyone who comes around this thread checks it out!

It's been a while since I've updated this thread. I really need to figure out and curve out a time and day for just posting and keeping my profiles up to date.
Earlier this year I did some arm studies as part of my anatomy study series that I have planned for this year.

The intention of these studies are as follows:
1. an understanding of the skeletal anatomy and building the muscular anatomy on top
2. make observations about the motion of the anatomy which include the overlaps, contraction and extension and the overall shape and gesture
3. Value rendering as means of understanding both the form and also how light interacts with anatomy

In this first piece I was pushing the values just a little bit too much in the shadows. I was definitely struggling with the subtle changes of the values in the skin. The drastic difference in each value in some areas gives the anatomy a semi-realistic look. It's great with muscular people, as the contrast in values separates the forms of each muscle really well, but it doesn't work well otherwise, especially with females. I found when working with anatomy that has muscle definition, it was easier as there were more shapes to work with as opposed to female anatomy where there's not a lot definition but to make up for the lack of it, I needed to work on making my values blend correctly to represent the skin tone so that the arms don't look like simple cylinders.

[Study] Arms.jpg3885x2914 1.34 MB

I was constantly reminding myself of the observations that I made on the first set of studies when approaching these ones, as you can see I have started to pay more attention to the shadows and how much of I push in terms of value. The use of reflected light really sold the 3 dimensional aspect of the arms, especially when the reflected light is on the side of the shadow.

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There's nothing new to add to this set aside from the fact I started softening out the reflected a little bit more to add the illusion of subsurface scattering that occurs in the skin due to its translucent properties. I also started to put effort in the mid tones and blending them to properly indicate the roundness of the forms. At this point, I've started noticing patterns in the forms and the motion and which allowed me to work a faster in pace when drawing and rendering.

I've gotten better at noting the subtle value variations in the mid tones, but there's still work to done in defining the forms of the muscles. But at the same time, I really need to focus on gesture as well, as I've noticed when focusing entirely on the muscular anatomy, they end up looking just a bit too rigid.