Hello my name is John, I live in New Hampshire and have been drawing since I was a we young lad. Back when I was a pre-teen/ teen in the early 90's my influences that got me into art were comic book artists like Jim Lee, Todd McFarlane, Alex Garner, many others. I also had a huge interest in the art found in D&D books and Magic the Gathering cards. When I got into my twenties I had "some" issues with substance abuse and lost close to 10 years of my art life to it. When I finally decided it was time to sober up I took to painting landscapes traditionally, It was great but it's not completely what I wanted to focus on, so recently I started drawing again with the help of sites like ctrl-paint and Andrew Loomis books I've spent the last couple of months trying to rebuild my foundation skills, slowly mixing in still life's in digital to get used to the stylus and Photoshop.

A number of you will know me from CA and as I'm missing a decent art forum I'd thought I'd give CD a go (even though I hate the colours) and I have enjoyed some of the livestreams. As with any new forum that I join, I'll lurk around getting a feel of the place before pouncing.

If you want to know something about me, I'm a 52 year old accountant, who spends pretty well all my spare time drawing or painting - mainly daubs, but I hope I'm improving.

Hello everyone.

I found Crimson Daggers while was looking about art and useful resources, and someone mentioned the forum in article, I came to check.

It looks as a great community!

All the images and artists history are much inspiring, and I like the possibility to learn with them and see I have too much to learn.

I will see some more topics and learn more about the forum.

I could swear I joined and posted on this site a while ago.

Oh well, it seems I totally forgot to do that. In that case, the name's Peter.

In a nutshell, drawing/painting's my passion, so it's only natural I joined. Been doing this stuff for a living since december, but it's always fun to meet fellow artists.

Looking forward to meeting you people, and seeing your works of course.

Cheers,
Peter

Hey poeople I'm Zafer Dogan from Noah's Art Camp.

I liked the idea of this "art partnership" a lot and decided to put myself out if someone was interested to do that with me.

Let me introduce myself:

I'm soon to be 24, male and I live in Switzerland. Ethnically I'm Turkish. I do speak 4 - 5 languages, Swiss-German, German, French, English, Turkish. Although atm French is the weakest link in the group, with the others I'm pretty fluent. I have finished high school 4 years ago and and started 1.5 years ago my college level education at the technical university HSR, studyin' computer engineering for 4 semester's now. In the time between high school and college I did my military service, which I later changed to civil service due to some complications, plus I visited the ETH Zurich for a year studyin' physics, but after one year there I found out that this path wasn't for me so I changed for computer engineering.

Now as for the art side: I wasn't into art at all my childhood years, I'm not the typical artist who drew a lot when he was a kid etc., but I always had something for great stories. I watched tons of movies, series, animes, cartoons, read a lot of books, played a lot of games... I was a Dragonball geek, a Digimon fan back then, I'd try to draw something related to them, but no real stuff really, for a certain time I made up my own stories through stick men comics, but no real art either hehe.

At the age of 15 - 16 I was using Photoshop intensively for "wallpaper" stuff and it was my first friend in the digital world. This "friendship" became pretty useful later when my cousin opened an informatics bureau for web site programming and the like, for the first time, I was doing design work for real clients, of course at the time very scarsly, but at least something. I "worked" there for about 3 years, learning what it meant having a business, what it meant to deal with clients who don't pay, who don't like what you did, that contracts are crucial etc., also, with the rising demand, I started learning the Adobe Master Collection software's towards expert level. I can say that I'm a photoshop pro, and advanced Illustrator, Flash and InDesign user and a mediocre After Effects and Premiere applicant. Why learn such a broad software spectrum? Because we needed stuff like that for websites and the like, for design work, brochure work and I was the only one emerging in design, the other were programmers and we were in total 3 people.

Then came a big change for me, the moment I decided to be an artist: My cousin got invited into a businessmen meeting and there they were supposed to show of an animated logo of their company logo. In my researches how I could do that I came into contact with the 3D software, like Maya, 3ds Max, Cinema4D, Blender etc. and it blew me away and I knew, I need to learn that stuff. So I started with Maya as it was industry standart. There was an awesome tutorial at 3dbuzz.com at the time, Masterin Maya: The Fundamentals, which was my first challenge in self-education, because it was so complex and long, but I finished it and now I'm also at a level where I can produce intermediate, mediocre modelling, animation, rigging etc. in that field, too. I'm still evolving in these branches and have subscribed to a lot of online video tutorial repositories like video2brain, digitaltutors, cmfX etc.

During this phase I realized, I need to learn art as it is the base you work from, even when modelling, animating etc. As at no time I had the option to go for only one thing, like only being a rigger, modeller etc. due to us being so few in the company and me being the only one doing artsy stuff, I needed to learn all of them, and it stuck with me until today, it means I a little slow progressin with one branche, but I'm dead set on mastering all of them.

Now, why the long story? My background is complex and my goals are, too. I don't want to become an artist somewhere in a prestigious company etc., I want to open my own business and do advertisement work, short movies etc. my ultimate goal is to produce movies and animations of hollywood quality. But as a movie etc. isn't only about images, I'm also knee-deep into learning music, that's why I'm currently learning composing with FL Studio.

So for now and the coming two years my main focus will be learning art, I especially enjoy concept art and anime style paintings, I will use those skills later heavily in my own story-telling works. Because that's what I ultimately really want to do, SHARE MY STORIES with the world, share my emotions with world.

So if you think you can work with me even if I'm a little broad and a generalist, hit me up. I'm a faithful partner, if I enter this friendship, I will see it through, meaning I won't be absent for weeks etc. I'll make sure I'll be there for you and make sure at least that you advance no matter what.

Sorry for the long post :D, but you need to know that stuff in order to fully understand my standpoint.

Hi Daggers!

My name is David Metzger, I am a hungarian concept artist wannabe/student. I came across drawing when I was 12-13 yrs old, my main inspiration were comic books and fantasy/sci-fi book covers, RPG game illustrations back then. After high school I went to an "art university-preparatory" school, but was very disappointed in the ways of art teaching, and turned my back on the whole thing for a while.
After floating around for a couple of years as a musician (I am also a rock/metal drummer) I realised that this is my way to go, this is what I have the most talent in (and what I love doing the most) so I started teaching myself via tutorials, DVDs, etc.
A couple of months ago I started attending a concept art course in a local media school, and am very fortunate beacuse it is a load of inspiration to me :)
So here I am, wanting to learn as much as possible, contacting people, having meaningful conversations, listening to critiques, opinions, suggestions, and giving some useful ones if possible as well :)

,\m/

Hey fellow visionaries,

I heard about this website and got curious about it, all I really know is that this place is good if you are getting serious about art, which I am. I have always been interested in art, particularly concept art but never knew that it was a viable career choice. As it is my dream job I am now taking it seriously and wish to reach my potential as an artist. All the best to everyone who is in the same struggle with me and thanks for taking the time to read this :)

There are a lot of introduction threads today!

It's a little overwhelming, because most threads I've peeked in seemed to have some sort of awesome art education, or experience.

I have little to none. Wanted to go to school, for anything really, it never really worked out. But that doesn't mean I haven't stumbled around the internet, looking at different things and trying my hand at it.

Hope not to disappoint, will post some stuff in critique once some major lurking has been done. You guys rock, so talented and inspiring.


Oh, uh

I live in the middle of nowhere, enjoy long walks on the beach and making friends on forums with bloodsplatter backgrounds.

Hello folks!

My name is Alexander, and I like to draw! I graduated from Guilford College 2010 with a double major in Geology and Information Tech and minors in Drawing and Ceramics. I did that in four years, which to some people says 'motivated' but could be better described as 'indecisive'. If you are wondering what one does with a geo/IT/drawing degree fresh off the press the answer is become locally renowned for making hello kitty latte art at your barista job.

Amidst a sea of youthful professional hopelessness I found some measure of relief in my art, and I began taking classes again part time. I did quite a bit of printmaking, some painting and drawing, but I was becoming really fed up with people telling me my work was too narrative and that I relied too much on representation. I was starting to feel a little bit crestfallen until I took a fantasy illustration class with Matthew Stuart (magic card illustrator) where I was starting to realize there was a world out there where you could draw awesome dragons and not be slave to PoMo nonsense.

I enrolled in a Illustration/Design program at a local design school. (I also have a strong interest in Graphic Design. I think the highly mechanical part of my brain that enjoyed Science and Programming took well to font selection and type layout. I do some freelance design for my local library.) I made straight A+'s but unfortunately I found myself taking out new student loans to make a bunch of shitty collages and write papers about things I'd already been taught. I didn't draw a damn thing, and I felt a marked decline in my skills because I was too busy doing busy work to actually make art. I dropped out after a semester. I applied and was admitted to some much more prestigious institutions (SCAD, SVA) but I just cant swing the tuition.

So, I find myself here with roughly a sophomore's education in the arts trying to teach myself the rest of the way. I understand that I have some raw potential but not the technical prowess. THIS ARTICLE led me here. Despite some setbacks though I'm feeling hopeful about my future and even if I never make it as a professional artist or designer I'm enjoying making work. I'm looking for community and critique and hoping that I can be of value in return.

Hello everyone, I'd like to give Eva Props on helping us branch off into a smaller group. So i thought it would be a good idea to start a new thread where we can list some of the criteria that we would be looking for in an Artner Partner.

- Male or Female (doesn't matter)

-Personally I really would like a partner who is closer to my time zone (Hawaii Pacific Standard Time) although it doesn't matter as much if we keep in close contact

-Also would like a partner who is a little closer to my own skill level. I've only been painting for 3 years and I went digital back in early 2012. So I have a lot of catching up to do and i don't want my partner to feel as if they have to backpack me.

-Also would like a partner who knows how to Robot-dance