Demon on a Rock

Well, I got bored the other night and decided to have some fun with my Wacom tablet and this was the result. A lot of it is based heavily on options available for characters in the City of Heroes game. Like many of my drawings, this idea (the one of a demon type character standing on a rock with flames behind him) has been running through my head just waiting for me to draw or paint it.

This piece took me about two hours to complete. I spent about 30 minutes on the actual sketch and then about an hour and a hlaf painting it. I was not trying for perfection with this, but rather I was trying to gague what I was able to do in a limited amount of time. This had it's roots in my 30 minute sketches, but trying to take it up a notch. I wanted to work fast, have fun, and get a decent, semi completed look to it. I think it was successful on all accounts and I am very happy with the results.

I did not use any referrences for this, but rather tried to just make it up as I went along.

PhotoShop CS2 and a Wacom tablet.

30 Minute Quick Sketches

In an attempt to try and work on my figure structure and gesture drawing I decided to try a new approach. This is what I call the "30 Minute Quick Sketch". The five drawings above were all drawn and colored in about 30 minutes.

My goal with this exercide was to visualize a pose for thses characters and then draw it quickly and with very little care for fine detail or extras. I was specifically looking for dynamic poses that worked well with the individual character. I felt that this would help me visualize the pose and be better able to draw it.

So far I have really like the results. I have made some glaring errors in some of the anatomy, but overall I feel that it helping me to better understand the character's structure. As I get time, here and there, I figure that I will continue to do these. They are fun for me, and it seems that people always like to get free drawings of their characters.

All the characters above are from the game City of Heroes, and so I do not own any rights to them. All rights belong their respective owners. All the drawings were done using Adobe PhotoShop CS2 and a Wacom Intuos3 Tablet.

Tundara - Art Trade

I did an art trade with a person on the City of Heroes forums. I offered to draw a picture of their character and they offered to write a short story about one of mine. Anyway, the image above was my half of the art trade. This is her character, Tundara.

This was done entierly in Adobe Illustrator CS2. It was drawn with only a mouse. I have trouble using Illustrator and a tablet. My goal here was to create an image that had no gradiants but still had a sort of cell shaded look. I am actually very happy with this piece.

Self Portrait - School Project

Well, school is back in and I have decided to take a Digital Painting class. I felt that this would help me round out my abilities and help me improve in some areas I need help in. As the first project we were asked to do a self portrait. Part of the assignment was to somehow mix our image with something that we really like, enjoy, or that makes us, us. I chose the beach as my subject, since I love the beach, and tried to add my face into the clouds.

I think the attempt so far works pretty well. I still want to make some changes based on feedback received from my teacher, and so this piece is still a work in progress.

So far I have spent around 8 hours working on it. It was done using PhotoShop CS2 and a Wacom Tablet. The reference photo was taken by myself using a Olympus Digital camera, but there was no tracing of the photo. I only used the photo as a referrence and painted the image while looking at it.

I have also been working on some other stuff that I may be posting pretty soon. I have a digital painting that I am working on (not school related) that is based off a story that a person wrote for me. As I get closer to completing it I will post it. I have also been drawing people's characetrs from the game City of Heroes because it is good practice for my figure structure class. One of my new ideas to help me get better is what I call a 30 minute sketch. I will post more on this later, with images that I have done.

So, even though I have not been posting much recently I have been busy with projects, probably not as many as I would like, but I keep letting other stuff get in the way...

Jenny - looks like I need more practice

So, this is my attempt at painting my sister, Jenny. Or, at least it is *supposed* to be my sister... I guess this just means that I still need more practice. While it is possible to identify who it is, the likeness is not quite as close as I would have liked.

There are just so many things that are wrong with this painting, that I have identified. I will need to work on improving those things in future paintings. But it is progress.

Other than the likeness not being quite right, I do like the painting as it relates to my progress in digital painting. While there are many things I dislike, there are also many things that I do like.

This was simply good practice.

Ashly

This is a painting of my niece, Ashly. She is my brother's daughter.

Overall I am very pleased with this one. Although, I may have to go back and do some additional clean up on the hair because parts of it still bother me. I was very happy with the skin tones, and I think the eyes work pretty good.

I am still working on improving my abilities with a Wacom Tablet, but I also think that I am getting a lot better. I must say that I really like to work digitally because it is so forgiving and much, much easier to make correction and fix stuff that is not quite the way I want it.

My next goal is to start working on backgrounds and sceanery. I have been looking through old photographs that I have and trying to decide what would make a good painting. So, I am hoping to have some landscape or, as I am thinking of them, "background" type paintings in the near future.

Larissa Rasputin

Another City of Heroes character. This character belongs to person from the game forums that has been very supportive of my artwork and so this piece was made as a thank you. This was actually a pretty fast sketch, with that in mind, I am pretty happy with the smothness of the skin and the overall feel.

Sir Bronco

This is another City of Heroes character. This character belongs to a friend of mine.

The character's name is Sir Bronco because my friend is a huge Denver Bronco's fan. The pose was inspired by a picture of John Elway throwing a football, and since this character's special powers in the game is throwing fireballs it worked out very well.

Girl with Red Hair

This is a digital painting of a picture I found over on the DeviantArt web site. The original photo can be found Here.

This painting was done using PhotoShop CS2 and an Intuos3 Wacom tablet. Around 7 hours of work.

I have two monitors on my computer, and when I paint digitally I load PhotoShop up on one monitor and use the other monitor to display my reference picture. This painting was done while looking at the picture. There was no tracing or grids used, and if you look at the original picture you will see that there are a lot of little things that are off. I may go back and rework some of the parts because I am not completely happy with everything. But for all intents and purposes I am very happy with the way this piece turned out.

I am really liking digital painting.

City of Heroes and Digital Painting

This painting is of a City of Heroes character. Her name is Absinthium. This piece was done as a Birthday gift for graver13. Graver13 is a great artist, you can find his stuff here: graver13's DeviantART page

This piece was actually done before my All Hollows Eve painting. It took about 6.5 hours using only PhotoShop and a Wacom tablet.

For those of you that don't know, City of Heroes if a MMO game like World of Warcraft. MMO means Massively Multiplayer Online. It is a game that is played entirely online with other people from around the world. You can team up and play together or just solo. City of Heroes is a very fun game where you get to play a super powered hero fighting the forces of evil in Parogon City.

And since CoH is based in comic book lore it is only natural that people would want comic book type images of their characters, and while I do not offer much in the way of pure comic book style people still enjoy seeing a painting or drawing of them. I have been trying to practice up on my digital painting skills because I would really like to do this for comissions.

...Painting for money, who would have thought?!?