My second experiment to make a pencil sketch a digital painting. I was reading one of Bod Eggleton’s books and he suggested trying to draw yourself as one as exercise. Since I’m not a dragon, I cannot attest to how accurate this self portrait is 😀 I’ve tried this once before (https://maugryph.com/2012/10/24/dragon-self-portrait/). I was very happy to give the painting a more watercolor like aesthetic. The sketch took me twenty minutes and painting took about a hour and fifteen minutes. Painted in photoshop.
The best sketches from the last couple days. Someday I will upload my sketches to dragonsketches.wordpress.com.
First was a suggested exercise in a Bob Eggleton to draw yourself as a dragon. So here it is. It’s not the first time I attempted it, it’s the second time. here is the first https://maugryph.com/2012/10/24/dragon-self-portrait/
First was a study of two dragons from a Bob Eggleton book.
Then a light study of a sheep and a rock. exciting.
My first wyvern painting. I tried a different method to painting this time. I painted a silhouette and then blocked in the forms into the silhouette. This painting method worked surprisingly well for me. It got me out of my artist block. I spent about three hours on it. Painted it in Photoshop. Let me know what you think.
Update: Really goofed up. Fixed some issues Weaver pointed out. Added some more refinement to the shading. The most annoying thing I did was draw the body using modules but I drew the stupid face as a symbol. oh well.
Story: This is a happy go lucky kid that lives in dark town hiding many secrets.
Starting a new 30 day project like I did with the 30 day portrait challenge a few months ago. The theme is characters. I thought I would start out with something simple. A young boy. I shouldn’t draw so late. I think it came out decent but it could of been better if I did a little more research and a few more prelim sketches. Maybe a more interesting shirt would help? I made the hands ginormous and had to shrink them down. I prefer the black and white version to the color one. Let me know what you think. Don’t be shy, I won’t bite.
Update: I decided focus on my portfolio with design and illustration projects. So I wont be doing this list for a while
List of characters I will be drawing during the 30 day challenge. Each will have a different background story, gesture, and I ‘hope’ I can give each a distinct personality.
Still trying to get back into the grove of drawing with a pencil, I’ve been spoiled by Photoshop and my Computer Tablet. Here is the best of the sketches today. A Lighting study of a crocodile, Shawn the Sheep ‘fan art’, and Cumberbatch’s Eye.
Cumberbatch himself admits his secret shape shifting powers “I think my eye will open at the end of the first film, and then you’ll get the rest of me in the second.” .. what .. you mean it’s mocap?.. never mind. But Weta could save a lot of money just by using Benedict Cumberbatch as is in the film, they wouldn’t need to design and render a dragon, Cumberbatch looks enough like one already :D. Sorry that was a bad joke, sometimes my jokes seem to drag-on.
Ok I will stop, I just recently seen the new Star Trek movie (In Darkness) and Cumberbatch did a excellent job as the villain. The movie was great and borrows quite a bit from the original Star Trek 2 movie but cleverly swapped things around.
A experiment. I’ve been using little realistic animal figurines set under a spot light for lighting studies and practice. the figurines include a leopard, crocodile, wolf, sheep and a forest dragon. I started sketching with a pencil again, which I admit at first felt rather odd. One time when I made a wrong line, for a split second I looked for the undo button before realizing I was drawing on physical paper. I kid you not.
After looking though my sketches, the forest dragon light study was the best of the bunch. So I scanned it and painted over it in Photoshop as normal. I wanted to see if I could take one of my studies and experiment with the best way take a pencil sketch and paint over it with Photoshop. Then I wanted to see if I could color it with just masks and and adjustment layers. Spent a hour just messing with adjustment tools. I then gave up and painted the color layer manually.
This painting could be pushed further if I dared. Painted in Photoshop. 30 min for the pencil sketch, 15 minutes wasting time with the smudge tool , 30 minutes for painting the sketch in Photoshop, 1 hour messing with the adjustment tools with no success , 30 minutes painting it in color manually. Total = Too much wasted time.
On the plus side I was watching “Shawn the Sheep” on Netflix while doing this charade. It’s a brilliant stop animation kids show. It’s similar to Wallace and Gromit with sheep and no vocals. Since all the jokes are visual gags, both adults and children can enjoy this show. It’s great background noise as well. Maybe I do some sketches of the characters.
Finally got back to working on this painting. Put more details into the scales, and rendered the mouth more. I just need to do some more scale rendering and finish lighting it. Then I can start coloring. Painted in Photoshop. Time spent so far: About 3 hours. Let me know what you think so far.
Was watching Captain America: The first Avenger while painting this. The movie was pretty well made and had great production values. Chris Evans did a good job at portraying Steve Roger. The story was predicable but enjoyable nether the less. I was impressed however with the ending credit sequence, It was very interesting how they took the images from old U.S WW2 propaganda posters and animated them.
More character ideas. I’ve been trying to give each character a little story so they are more interesting. This is a alligator merchandiser.
“There once was a gator merchandiser. He resets the shelves at local stores. He always got stuck with resetting the freezer sections of the store. One day he got stuck in a freezer and froze to death. The end”
Ok. So Maybe I exaggerated the freezing to death bit 🙂
I haven’t painted in Artrage in a while, so I thought I would sketch a quick little painting. It started out as a croc, but it begun to looked more dino like so I altered it to be so.
