Frank!

Ok, super quick post here.

A fellow student at ACAD mentioned Bobby Chiu last week in reference to learning digital painting. I looked him up, and it turns out he's got a ton of stuff out on the net. Not a lot in the way of actual tutorials, but still some great vids.

Anyways, he does some challenges, and one of the ones that came up was Frankenstein. I started doing quick sketches as warm ups for my day, and figured it would be fun to share.

So BAM!


























There ya go. Enjoy!

Advice

Ok, so my good friend Sho hit my last post with a comment on/critique of the work I posted. At first I found it to be a bit harsh, but in the end I thought it would be worthwhile to put some more work into the piece he took issue with.

Sadly a lot of what he saw as wrong in the piece were things that I also thought were off, but thought I could get away with. I find that this can be a tough thing to juggle in terms of art making, as you never know who's looking at your work. Given the amount of time an artist spends looking at their work, it makes sense that we see issues that most people wouldn't notice at a glance. And when it's going to take several hours to repair a problem that most people won't pick up on, you're stuck wondering if it's really worth it.

It is.

In the end , if someone knows what they're doing, they'll see all the flaws right off the bat, and then they'll have a hard time seeing what's good about the piece. You don't want that. So if you can see problem areas in a work that you want to shine, take the extra time to fix them. Instead of cringing at the idea of reworking something from scratch, see if you can figure out a way to edit it without having to redraw it. That way you will have learned a new skill (or polished up on one you use often) and it will still feel like you're moving forward on the piece, instead of scrapping something you liked so that you can draw on top if it.

Here's the corrected version of the Suited Indian illustration I did up for The Connection.





What do you think, and improvement, or a waste of time?







I'd like to throw a thanks out to Sho for being one of the only people to really take a hard look at my work. As nice as it is to get compliments about a piece, a well thought out critique is a lot more valuable.

HOLY CRAP!

So I just took a look at the date stamp on my last post and it tells me that it's been almost 2 months since last I posted anything.

Despicable.

Given that I'm back in school, and there lots going on in my life (my gal and I just bought a house!) I can come up with lots of excuses. In the end though, 2 months without posting kinda sucks, and I'm going to make an effort to keep on top of it for the rest of this semester. Look forward to at least 1 post a week!


Anyways, the reason I actually came on today was to post a couple pieces that I just completed for a gentleman named Jason Eaglespeaker. Jason runs a not for profit organization called The Connection and a little over a year ago I hooked up with him to make a monthly comic. I handle the art and he does the rest. Last week he contacted me looking for a couple illustrations, and I just managed to finish them.























Jason's request was for an Uncle Sam style pic of himself, and then a pic of him in a suit. I'm pretty happy with the sketch of Uncle Eaglespeaker. The inking, however, doesn't appeal to me all that much. I may have to go back in to rework the shadows, specifically on his face.

The suit pic was a bit trickier as I wasn't entirely sure what Jason was after to begin with. Once I had the first image done I sent it to him and he came back asking for some feet. Since I had pretty much filled the page when I drew the original I had to add the lower body digitally. Then I took some time to throw some quick tones in, and voila! I'll admit I'm tempted to go back into it and give it some gradation in the values... some softer shadows and highlights say, but I like the clean look it has at the moment, so I'm going to leave it for now. Maybe I'll break go back into it later ;)


That's it for now, later folks!


-Dave