Arty Antics and Similar Stuff

[Raid]

I needed a reference skull. I actually tend to use skull references quite a lot as it helps me to understand facial structure on creatures where fur or feathers obscure shape of the head. In this case the first reference file that opened was Opus', where I'd used it for Kuraku.

I do however also have skull references for Farley and Corvus. You never know when they might come in handy when playing a necromancer...

[Mantis]

So when I looked at your image from yesterday, Chris, I mistakenly thought it was Fortune and so did the day 11 prompt today for some stupid reason.

Luckily I had a bit of extra time. The actual prompt for today wasn't particularly inspiring for me either though, so I used it as an excuse to muck around with a bunch of my brushes to go for a bit more of a sumi-e style. It's a bit of a hastily done mess but it was fun enough.

Day 7: Drip

[Snowy]

Really like that Dave

[Mantis]

Really like that Dave

Cheers Ian.

Wasn't fussed about today's prompt either so used it as an opportunity to do a bit of a study on Frog from Chrono Trigger. I wouldn't normally spend more than 20-30 minutes on these Inktober challenges but this one took a good couple of hours. Probably could have done a better job on the values and rendering the details if I'd taken even longer on it, but it was pretty slow going to get this far with it.

Day 8: Toad

[Raid]

You have been granted an audience with Day 8: Toad



I've been really impressed with your last couple Dave. I'm finding lack of time to be a big issue for me this year. My glacial pace with drawing is partially what led to my giving up for a while, as a fully finished piece was taking me an entire month to create, and with vastly more free time than I have now. I know efficiency will come with practice, but at the moment I'm struggling to do *anything* in half an hour, much less fantastic waterfall paintings. Your depiction of Frog would probably have taken me a week.

[Mantis]

Cheers Chris. I think a lot of it is down to finding the right process and just building on it so you pick up speed with it. Any time I plan on using colour I do all the values in gray scale and then put a colour layer clipped over the top which makes painting the colours on much quicker. I'm still learning about value so the colours can be hit and miss but I think I can speed the process up even more by using the lasso tool to paint in the values.

I'd like to try and do a hyper rendered quite realistic piece in the future but I think it'd take me too long to get the values right and it'd just become a huge slog. I'd rather build up to it slowly than devote tons of hours to something which would be quite laborious and frustrating.

[Raid]

Day 9: Bounce

[Sly Boots]

Haha, that's great Chris

[Mantis]

Yeah, really like that one.

Nothing from me for a couple of days now. Got too much on.

[Snowy]

Loving these. Wish I had an ounce of creative ability

[Raid]

Another minimal time day today, so it's a continuation from day 6; Day 9 - Fortune.



The little dragon is getting bigger, and has entered his Scrooge McDuck phase.

[Mantis]

Very good. Even the ones you don't have much time to devote to the actual drawing, the ideas behind them are really good.

Had an unexpected evening free so I thought I'd do a cuter one today. I don't know cat anatomy at all and hate drawing fur, but it turned out pretty good in the end and I quite like this one.

[Raid]

I'm not particularly good at fur (or hair for that matter), and find it difficult to represent in a line illustration without the benefit of colour variation. I tend to replace the outline with short dashed lines that follow the curve of the body as a sort of shorthand, and I think it works reasonably well.

I think it's easier to understand cats in particular if you look at their skeletons; even short-haired cats are mostly just balls of fluff, it's basically impossible to make out their leg structure as there's no clear change in shape between limb and torso. It does make them quite easy to draw though when you understand what's underneath, as long as you place them right, you can represent their legs with just a couple of ovals, do a little bit of fur texture around the edges, and you're there. I was actually incredibly pleased with the little cat I drew for Day 1, given that was the first thing I'd drawn in months.

[Mantis]

Yeah that's what I would normally do. DrawABox hammered into me the importance of construction so I do like to look up what's going on under all the fur of creatures normally. I always do a rough sketch layer of just the gesture and skeletal structure of something to get proportions right before I start putting the neater line down, though it was just two ellipses for the cat in this instance.

[Mantis]

This is the one I did at the weekend by mistake because I don't know how dates work.

Day 11: Wander