Elderscrollers Sketchy Stuff

[Elderscroller]

[Elderscroller]

The painting sketch below was done in watercolour and gouache. I first applied a watercolour wash, establishing the colour palette, going darker with watercolours as the next step and finishing with gouache. I want to do more practice sketches with gouache as it is a nice medium that can even be reactivated with water after some time.
I´m also planning to do more plein air with it. I always admired James Gurney´s homemade sketch easel, so I´m trying to build one myself. Frankly not an easy task where I live, as the components are partially hard to come by as it turned out....Spent a week looking online and ordering as our local homestores really have no clue at all what I´m talking about when I want a tee nut 1/4 inch or a torque with adjustable friction.....

[Elderscroller]

Been on holiday for the last almost 2 weeks and I didn´t actually get to draw much. Next to nothing...so getting back into routine feels really strange as I haven´t been away from drawing for such a long time since I started to draw :) Pose on the right is awful....

[Elderscroller]

Sketching is normalising after the long break...Drawing some guy and a couple of classic movie monsters

[Elderscroller]

Small update with a gouache sketch from a beach near Dunnotar castle in Scotland

[Elderscroller]

Some stuff I´m working on for a demon book for a RPG called Arx Temporis (unpublished yet). These demonic items can be summoned from a chaotic mass and shaped into whatever you like. There is a demonic bag of holding with a link to another dimension to store stuff, a chaos beast, a demonic armor and a demonic sword.
All is made from living tissue and suppossed to evoke disgust from the summoner,because the demonic mass feeds off of it.
All concepts are WIP except for sword and armor

[Tygerson]

Total sins against nature, yet oddly hard to tear your eyes away from. Really tough balance to strike but you managed it. The creature doing the handstand is the most difficult to stop looking at, I think because my brain feels like it can almost puzzle out how the parts fit together.

On the sword, I think the ick factor might increase if you got the impression some of the moving parts (like tentacles) could reach your hand while you were holding it. Or maybe if one of the tentacles wrapped around the grip looked alive, or not totally glued down. Love/hate (in the best way possible) the eyeball in the pommel.

[Elderscroller]

@Tygerson: Thanks very much, glad you like my disgusties :) I like your tipp with the grip tentacles, I´ll work that in

Been on an excursion with my university today, naturally I brought my sketchbook. The monster on the first page was done during the bus ride, the sketches below are from my secondary mini sketchbook (which is more for doodling and very quick sketching as it´s only an A6 pocket book, very tiny) which I used to sketch on-site (the small chapel) and during lunch

[Elderscroller]

Some half-studies today. Using a pose reference for the first one and changing it characterwise

[Tygerson]

Wow, really amazing pencilwork! This is the sort of stuff one hopes to find when opening up somebody's sketchbook. The monsters are weird, but believable, and I just love the archer at the end. The costume, the expression, the arrows just indicated.

By the way, it feels like a silly question, but is it just a regular pencil you use to get the nice dark shadows?

[Elderscroller]

Wow, really amazing pencilwork!  This is the sort of stuff one hopes to find when opening up somebody's sketchbook.  The monsters are weird, but believable, and I just love the archer at the end.  The costume, the expression, the arrows just indicated.  

By the way, it feels like a silly question, but is it just a regular pencil you use to get the nice dark shadows?

Thanks!
To answer your question about the pencils I use: They are regular pencils: HB, 2B, 6B and sometimes 8B, BUT you can´t draw to a really black value with pencils, you would have to combine them with charcoal (or draw in charcoal completely)
As charcoal needs to be fixed onto the paper with a spray, I don´t use it in sketchbooks, because it smears. To compensate for that, I adjust the contrast a bit in Photoshop as my scanner tends to wash out all my values.
The darkest accents in my pencils would be about an 8,5 to 8 on the original on a scale from 1-10 (10 being black). I adjust the contrast till all values are right again and use a curves adjustment to punch the darkest darks a bit more to about a 9 or 9.5. Hope that solves this mystery :)

[Tygerson]

Thanks, that helps! I need to spend some more time trying to figure out value...

[Elderscroller]

@Tygerson: There´s lots of value exercises you could do, like drawing value scales. Feel free to ask, if you need any advice!

Drawing old people´s faces is really fun...

[Elderscroller]

Some more pencils. The first ones are just ignorable doodles from my doodle sketchbook as we had a 2 hour meeting today at work. Always good for doodling. And I guess, I´ve seen one too many IT trailers as I´ve suddenly found myself drawing a strange clown....

[Elderscroller]

I´ll get to do a poster for a Terry Pratchett play in my town, so just warming up to it with some sketching

[Elderscroller]

Some more elaborate pencil sketch and an illustration I did for a client for a RPG book about demons. It´s sort of a conjured flesh covered room that allows the caster to summon a greater demon more easily.

[Elderscroller]

Turning a combined lighting/anatomy study into an elaborate sketch

[xelfereht]

cool stuff, have a bit off an old school fantasy art vibe.
i think your digital works have a bit too much black and white used for shadows and highlights.
you can get very good shadow and highlights with less black and white :)
good stuff though.
the most recent pencils especially are awesome. good to see pencil renderings!

[Elderscroller]

cool stuff, have a bit off an old school fantasy art vibe.
i think your digital works have a bit too much black and white used for shadows and highlights.
you can get very good shadow and highlights with less black and white :)
good stuff though.
the most recent pencils especially are awesome. good to see pencil renderings!

Thanks very much! I kinda grew up with that old fantasy vibe, so it does influence my style a bit :)
As for the digtals, I never use pure black and white, especially for shadows. For the last piece, I wanted to push the contrast a lot, but the shadows are on the blueish-violet side (dark and somewhat saturated) The only thing more or less white in the painting is the specular highlight in the middle eye on the wall.
I tried to push my pencil rendering a bit to the finished sidem but don´t get used to me posting only these in the future....takes about 3 times as long as my usual sketches :)

[Elderscroller]

Here´s a quick study with steps in between to show my workflow in it







And some faces from my small doodle sketchbook. The girl on the bottom right side is a quick portrait from a coffee shop. She had this strange defiant look on her face the whole time she drank coffee. Drawing people in the "wild" is fun and can be challenging. As it isn´t very polite to constantly stare at people, you have to train to quickly look, memorise and draw what you memorised