For the past 10 weeks, I’ve been taking a digital painting class at the Gnomon School. Digital painting has always been a foible of mine since I’m rather impatient and have no clue to what I’m doing. So I felt that a classroom setting would help address those problems. I can see the improvement in my digital painting skills, but I’ve only done about 5 or so bad paintings: I still got about 995 more to go until I’m half decent at it.
Anyways, here’s a concept I’ve been working on for the class. The final assignment is anything of our choosing, so I wanted to design a pirate vampire hunter. I would have gotten a lot farther in the rendering, but the coat is giving me the most grief. I so wish that I never got sick during the winter and missed a whole bunch of Karl Gnass’ drapery class. Still a work in progress, so let me know what you guys think.
Went to Bob Kato’s Drawing Club after my internship tonight. It’s like a reward for sitting in front of a computer screen for about 8 hours. Haha. Anyways, I actually had to stop by a CVS on the way there to get some Ibuprofen because I had a splitting headache alway. I’m prone to headaches, even more so when it’s hot outside.
Luckily, the medicine kicked in as we started drawing so success.
Anyways, I learned my lesson from last week and decided that if I’m going to experiment with different mediums then I will stick with it for the whole session. It allows me to adapt to the medium instead of frantically trying to find one that works like last week. I decided to use a gel-roller pen instead of the usual ballpoint pen. I also tried out my artstix and that is interesting in the sense that it’s like using pastel but less messy.
So tonight’s theme was Oktoberfest and luckily the model wasn’t boring. It was fun and I think I got some good drawings in. I’ve been noticing how much I’ve learned from Mark McDonnell’s Costumed Gesture Quick Sketch class (try saying that 3x fast!). I find myself changing the model’s facial expression because it tells the story better. I’ve still got much to learn from Mark though, so I’ll be going for a second helping in the fall at LAAFA. I want to be a character designer: so it only makes sense that I take Mark’s class and go to the Drawing Club as well.
Anyways, let me know what you guys think. Cheers?
Titmouse Internship
This past Thursday I started my internship at Titmouse Inc and so far it’s been cool beans. I get to sit in on dailies and work on a cintiq: i so want a cintiq now. However, I’ll try to hold out until they make a cintiq with the intuos 4 features. Anyways, the people there seem real cool, so hopefully i’ll get to know them better as the internship progresses.
Every morning I seem to get there about a half hour early because traffic on the 101 freeway does things on it’s own terms. Because of that, I’ve been using that extra time to do some morning warmup drawings to improve my skills. So the images above are of expressions. I didn’t really plan on doing expressions at first. But once i drew the first head, I wondered how she would look in different angles and moods.
Little Tokyo Skechup
On Saturday, I hung out with a few friends down in Little Tokyo. We met up at the Kinokuniya bookstore to start the day. Now me and Kinokuniya have this love/hate relationship going on: they love taking my money and I hate that they always have cool art books. I also bought a new pocket brush pen while i was there, i can’t wait to try that sucker out.
Anyways, we decided to eat at Daikokuya afterward and I felt ashamed of myself for not being able to finish my ramen. I never ate there before, so i had no idea what i was getting myself into. I felt like a teenager again: making decisions that seem good at the time but you end up paying for it bigtime. The last time i felt like that was at a claimjumpers a few years ago: i got full off of their appetizers. For those of you that know me, I am a heavy eater. So imagine my feeling of defeat from a bowl of ramen.
In order to fight off our food comas we ended up doing some people sketching. The sketches were done in ballpoint pen. My line quality is slowly getting there, but it still needs a lot of work. But compared to my pen drawings from a year ago, i’ll settle for anything better than that. haha.
Let me know what you guys think. Cheers!
Just got back from another session at Bob Kato’s Drawing Club. Unfortunately, I wasn’t too pleased with a good chunk of my drawings: it happens. Ah well. Hopefully, I’ll get more consistent as I build up them drawing muscles. The model’s poses lacked variety, so I made an admirable attempt to “plus” it like Mark McDonnell would teach in his book, “The Art and Feel of Making it Real,” and also in his Costumed Gesture Quick Sketch class at LAAFA.
I still have to sit myself down and actually read the text portion of Mark’s book: it’s so hard when the pictures are so awesome.
Anyways, the drawings you see above are the ones that I was satisfied with the most. They also happened to be the last drawings of the night: it took my forever to get a decent groove going with my drawings.
So let me know what you guys think. Cheers!
*sidenote – Mark’s going to be teaching that class again in the fall on sunday mornings. So check out because that class has helped a bunch in giving my designs more character and personality.
Link Em
The Drawing Club
Mark McDonnell
Costumed Gesture Quick Sketch w/ Mark McDonnell @ LAAFA
Progress report: Maid Marianne & Sheriff of Nottingham 50%ish?
character & creature design, concept art | Carl | 
August 31, 2009 2:32 pm | 
Comments (2) 
Flyboy Animatic
day 31: enough with the Zeus already!
day 30: zeus again?
day 29: zeus part deuce
day 28: zeus? not so much