Devin's Sketchbook

[devin]

damn thanks so much guys!

one more before bed:

[devin]

couple of studies:

[BjorkJT]

ooooh it's you !!! :D let me just stare at your stuff for a while haha, love your style ! really good job! ^^

[Archreux]

Man, I just saw your sketchbook and it's very nice. :]

Your colors, lighting and brushwork, to me, are definitely your strongest points right now. I really love your first few posts on some interesting imaginative stuff, I'd really like to see some more of that after all these studies.

[devin]

Thanks guys! Archreux, I just started working on some stuff for the summer pitch between the studies. I need to push myself to apply more, imaginative stuff is still way less comfortable haha.

Here are today's studies:

[matt_radway]

Just looked through you're sketchbook and blog Devin. I'm seriously blown away by your work man, you seem to have all the bases covered. Thanks for posting these, can't wait to see moreeee. I feel like I'm learning stuff just from looking at your work :D!

[devin]

thanks so much man!

some sort of infected fish monster in between summer pitch work:

[devin]

warmup sketch from this morning before workin' on my pitch:

[devin]

Another lighting study. Chased the light as it went down, I think I documented 5 different lighting situations over 30 minutes in one painting Better next time!



I posted some stuff in the pitch forum too, check it out!

[devin]

[Mannequin]

Sketbook full of awesomness. Especially those brushtrokes are great. Simple and clean :)

[devin]

Thanks! Just some quick studies this morning:

[HiddenMyst]

Damn those are some nice skull-studies. Sweet!

[devin]

thanks!

[Andantonius]

Great stuff, Devin! Your sense of color and markmaking is really solid, and you're doing some great studies!

I think my only suggestion would be to push yourself to do a little bit more finishing on some of your studies, like the Asaro Head and a few of the ones on the first page. Not that you have to hyper-render everything you do, but I think a wee bit more cleanliness and refinement would go a long way in adding some solidity. Maybe even look at Jaime Jones' stuff as a touchstone.

Great stuff, can't wait to see more! :D

[devin]

Thanks so much for the crit man! I totaaalllly agree, I find it really difficult to work an extended amount of time on any one piece. There are so many interesting problems to solve at the beginning of a painting and rendering doesn't hold my interest as long. At a certain point I start to get self-conscious about the marks I'm making and I don't feel like I'm advancing the painting any further. When I push myself I'm usually satisfied with the extra time spent but I still feel like it's a large hurdle, and one of the most important, for me to get over. I guess I hit a wall where the extent of my knowledge about rendering form ends? If anyone has any input or advice about how they got over this I'd love to hear it, I really want to extend my art attention span.

Anyway, here's a study from today:

[Andantonius]

Yeah man, I totally hear that. I think it's definitely a mixture of obstacles, one being that rendering often just isn't as much fun as starting something new and playing with the composition and idea, but to get to 'finished' work it's a necessary evil at least to some degree. :P

I think there's a couple ways of overcoming it. If you want to go batshit crazy hardcore you could do an Atelier style cast drawing where you spend 80 or 100 hours drawing a cast of an eye/hand/torso from life in charcoal. This will drive you up the wall, but once you've done it you can pretty confidently say that you know how to render a form to its absolute fullest extent, and will make spending 40 hours rendering an entire multi-figure scene seem like a cakewalk. If you haven't seen that process before, I've got one up on my blog, here and here.

The other thing is, as you said, rendering can be annoying because your knowledge of form is stretched past its limits. It's easy and fun to block something in with quick gestural marks and get something that looks cool, but when you actually get down to refining it and deciding what all those marks actually mean it can start to break apart and it's tempting to just leave it loose and gestural. But I think if you get to the point where your understanding of form is really, really solid, your gestural work becomes just as potent and doesn't need as much finishing, a la Jaime Jones. I think the way to do this, once you've got the patience and knowledge that exercises like cast drawing gives, is to just do a lot of paintings studying form. Lots of black and white paintings of casts, portraits, still lifes, and whatever else shows the properties of light on form. Once you've got a few hundred of those under your belt, you'll probably be able to render more quickly and convincingly and it won't be such a hair-pulling process.

Soyeah, that would be my two and a half cents. Either way you're doing great, that last portrait is really nice and I think is already going in the right direction! I think it's getting down in to the subtleties of things by really doing some refined studies is what's gonna give you that next level up; like the forms in her right cheek seem just a bit puffier than they should be, and you could probably paint the eyes with the same conviction as the nose and lips.

But yeah, great stuff, keep it up! :D

[devin]

Damn, thanks so much for writing that up! Everything you said is spot on. I was definitely thinking that cast drawing could be a really good way to tackle this, I'm gonna check out your process. Just wanted to say thanks again, really solid advice.

[devin]

worked a bit more on an older sketch:



trying to apply that last study:



some older creature designs from a couple months ago:





and some sketches and a quick study:

[devin]

updated my summer pitch thread, here's the second boss from the game:


and a doodle: