New Sketch - Holly & Pigs in Blankets!

Here's something I sketched today whilst feeling festive! Merry Christmas Everybody!

My Art Plan

I want to work more on my art. I love doing my art and never spend as much time on as I should. One trouble I have is when I actually find the time to sit down and draw, I find I don’t know what to draw.

So now I have a plan! A To Do List for my Art, then I have a list of ideas for images I would like to do, especially to challenge myself and help me improve. Then whenever I have the time to sit down and draw, I will be able to pick an item from my list, and start work immediately! :)

My Art Plan

(collect reference images for the following items)

• A movie scene / DVD still (e.g. Mal & Badger in Firefly)
• Space scene - nebula, planets, spaceships
• Reptiles - lizard, frog, snake
• Plants - foliage, unusual flowers, wild plants
• Street scene - an urban street, building, window, door
• Elegantly dressed lady, fashion, catalogue figure
• Music Star - Sophie Ellis Bextor, Shakira, Muse, Mika, McFly
• Unusual Still Life - keys, bank note, promo cards, tokens, keyrings, a box, plug, deodorant. Things you use every day, but never think about.
• Weapons - guns, knives, bow & arrow - maybe in use. Find a dynamic way of using them in a scene, or part of a scene.
• Actors & Actresses - posing in pictures. Dancers too.
  
  

New Sketch - Lady Hawkmoth

I've started my 'Lunchtime Sketches' again! Here's a new sketch I've just finished of a fairy. I've been looking at Amy Brown's art, and thought I would have a go at emulating her style of doing fairies and see how I did at it. So I thought about doing a sketch of a fairy dancing, I expected to do Amy Brown style clothing on her, with the striped tights that I love so much. But as I started drawing her, she seemed to take on a life of her own. I started thinking more and more how my fairy would dress, then how I wanted her wings - I've now discovered how difficult it is to draw the wings, trying to get them even in size and shape, and as symmetrical as possible. I've now decided that if they aren't symmetrical, not all things in nature are, so it makes her look more natural! :)

I love Hawkmoths, so used them as inspiration for the decorating of the wings. At first I was going to have the wings behind her, so you would only see the tips, but then I thought as she was dancing, she would probably have them out on show, a bit like a Peacock does when trying to impress a potential partner. So maybe this is the dance of love, and she is trying to impress a potential fairy partner?

I'm having fun inventing my own fairy world to play with!

Today's Sketch - Blair (Terminator)

Continuing my daily sketches, I tried something a bit more taxing today - a figure study of the character Blair Williams from the movie Terminator Salvation. Yesterday's sketch was completely easy and lots of fun, this one certainly strained my meagre art skills! I enjoyed doing the details on the clothing, doing zips and curves in the clothing is fun for me, but getting features right, the hair, and especially the hands, is really hard work for me! Just shows what I need the most practice with! It's only now I look back on it I really see how big I've made her nose - it's actually smaller than her mouth! Ooops! Perhaps I should aim to do at least 1 - 2 portrait/figure drawing sketches a week, that way I will make progress on my people and make them more realistic - and easier to draw!

Any constructive criticism would be gratefully received!

45min Sketch - Space Pod

After being inspired by the Lunchtime Sketches by DCriler in my last post, I had a go at a short sketch myself. As I work part time, and only have two official lunch breaks each week, only half an hour long, I don't think I can call mine Lunchtime Sketches. But I would like to do a 30 - 45min sketch each day, that would be similar to a Lunchtime Sketch. Today I sketched for 45 minutes after tea, I sketched a Space Pod from an exercise in my "Awesome Things to Draw" book. It may be a kids book, but it shows you fun things to draw in easy step-by-steps. Great for when you want something planned out for you!

I like how my space pod turned out, even experienting with using my eraser to create highlights on the nose cone and a little on the tail exhausts. Perhaps the nose cone is a little too dark, but I still had fun doing it! Just click the image above for a larger view, and feel free to comment below - I'd love to hear some constructive criticism, or even just that you like it! :)

Inspired by Lunchtime Sketches

I stumbled across an artist, DCriler, on the DrawnToday blog, where I found the Lunchtime Sketches post there, and Aspen's Story post on his own blog. I love how well detailed these sketches are, and how they're fantasy themed. These sketches took a couple of lunchtime breaks to complete, so it's great practice every day, and fun too. I'd love to try this, I only have half an hour lunch break, but I'm sure I could find some time each day to sketch. These look great, and would be fun to try.

I see on the DrawnToday blog he also did a quick master copy when he ran out of ideas - another great way to practice when you don't know what to do. This could be a good way to kickstart my creative juices and get me producing more of the art I want to! If I can sketch every day, as well as working on a piece or challenge each week, I should be able to improve and complete the work I want to do get done. Thanks for the inspiration, DCriler!

Planning a Naga - How to draw a monster?

The weather is gorgeous, and I have two days off work this week! Woohoo! I'm going to tackle my next drawing challenge - Wetcanvas' Creature Feature - a Naga. A Naga is a mythological creature, usually seen with a female head and torso, and a serpent tail from the waist down. It has the ability to change form either fully human or fully serpent.

I am not at all experienced at drawing a make-believe monster, or planning out how I want it to look! The links on the Wetcanvas Creature Feature forum lead to images of statues, the Naga creature appears to be depicted as a many headed snake, and I really fancy having a go at that. I will need reference photos of snakes, especially angry looking snakes. I want to do individual heads all looking angrily at the person viewing the picture.

Looking at some other artists work to get ideas as to how they do their monsters, I was looking at Marc Scheff's website, and found this image of a "Scorilla". Not only is it an awesome and imaginative creature, but I noticed he gave it a background that it seems to fit into. So I think rather than just do a dark background, I could do with thinking about where my creature is likely to live, where will it be found? My first thought is a D&D dungeon, though it could also be in the water.


Another artist whose great at doing Monsters is Christopher Burdett, a couple of his images really caught my eye, Galog Bullfrog and Post Apocalyptic, both are action shots that appear to tell a story, and both have extra characters in them you either feel sorry for, or will to fight and overcome the monsters in the images. I would like to include another character in my image, but I'll have to see how I can fit them in. I'm thinking of doing the image in colour pencil on A4 paper (English Letter Size), not sure how much room that will give me to do detail on the secondary character. Although having said that, Christopher Burdett managed to fit his extra characters in easily, although I don't know what size he was working on, probably digital so I guess the size doesn't count the same on the computer!

I'll also need to come up with a pattern on the snakeskin, either similar to that of a real snake, or one made up. I might use a real snake's pattern but change the colours - I quite like the greens and yellows from the first picture of a Naga at the top of this post. :)

This picture is definitely going to be a challenge, but again looks like it will be good for me to improve my skills! Any help or advice anyone can offer would be gratefully received!

Triffid - Finished?

Here's what I have now! I have darkened it a lot, and it does look more improved. I'm wondering if I should call this finished or do some more work on it? So I'm going to allow it to sit for a bit while I figure out what to do next! Besides, I find when I've just finished working on something I never think it's that good - then after a while, I look back and think it's turned out much better than I thought it had!

Please let me know what you think! Constructive Criticism very welcome! :)

Triffid - WIP

Taking part in a Wetcanvas Challenge, I've started by doing a yellow crocus in coloured pencil, and now it seems to have evolved into a Triffid! As always, just click the image below for a larger version:

It's not finished yet, still needing some more layers and a darker background, but this is what it looks like so far - I hope you like!

Art - Teaching Myself

"Frozen in the Moonlight"

I am a self-taught artist, and still in the process of improving my skills. You can see a sample of my art in the header of this blog, plus some of my works I have uploaded here. Just click on an image to see a larger version of it.

"Gargoyle"

"House"

"Spider"

I haven't done much drawing in a while, I like pencil and colour pencil art - that's what I do best. I'm just not skilled with a paintbrush, probably due to a little too much playing and paint fights in school for me to learn much!

I want to be a fantasy art, I was first inspired by Boris Vallejo, I got a calendar of his back in the 90's, and it kicked off the fantasy art bug in me. I've since sought out new fantasy artists to add to my inspiration, I moved on to the works of Chris Achilleos, Luis Royo, Clyde Caldwell and Greg Horn. I would love for my meagre art talents to reach these standards, then I would be so proud of my work!

So what do I need to do to improve? All the above artists tend to focus on people in their artwork, very realistic figures. My figure drawing leaves a lot to be desired (in my humble opinion), and I want to be able to do amazing and realistic figures. I also don't have a lot of experience doing fantastic creatures, monsters or dragons. I would also love to do more backgrounds to my images, so landscape, and most especially cityscape, I would love to improve on. The simple answer to this - Practice! Now I've figured out what I want to imrove upon, I need to find reference images for these types of images, and practice them over and over again until I improve! So here's a simplified list of what I want to improve:

- Figure Drawing
- Fantastic Creatures, Monsters & Dragons
- Landscapes (Greenery)
- Cityscapes (Buildings & Architecture)
- Still Life (Weapons, Fantasy Objects)

For the fantastic creatures, monsters and dragons, I will need to collect reference images of animals, both furry and reptile animals, to be able to draw fantasy creatures. Once you can draw realistic normal animals, you can learn to draw fantasy animals really well. I've added still life as it occurred to me I don't have hardly any practice of drawing weapons, and the few I have done, have not been very good at all. So it's time to improve on them as well.

If I stick to this plan with my art, and work on these various subjects, by the end of this year I should be able to do these subjects with much greater ease, and be much more able to produce high quality fantasy art of my own. Wish me Luck!