De Leon's Sketchbook

[DeLeonxxx]

Howdy:

I've been lurking here for a while and you all have taught me a lot, for which I have to thank you.

One of my recent goals has been to come out of my shell and join the art community again, so here goes **deep breath**.

I've been a graphic artist most of my career, but started practicing illustrating with a tablet about two years ago. My progress has been slow as I haven't always been disciplined or dedicated enough to study as much as many of you.

I'm well aware of my short-comings: values/anatomy/perspective/backgrounds, so I'm going to be studying to overcome them, as embarrassing of a process it will be.

Most of my older work can be found on my DA page and blog, so I won't block up the thread with it. Thanks for listening and thanks for the community, I really love the inspiration here!
Mike De Leon

[DeLeonxxx]

Thursday's sketches and a WIP on a pinup that I intend to finish.

Haven't done much since I've had some kind of plague for the past week, so now that I'm feeling better I hope to get much more accomplished.







I wound up losing all the tones that I had in the grayscale version of this WIP. Once I started putting the colors down, they seemed to disappear. Things got a little muddy in some areas and I started rendering way too early. Regardless, I press on.

[DeLeonxxx]

I spent about 2.5 hours on this one. I blocked in the shapes and then started getting more specific with it, eventually zooming in pretty tight to get some areas to read a bit more. Looks amateur as hell, but I'm definitely out of my comfort zone with this sort of thing.

The thing I've been looking at with other artists is how to convey the "idea" of bricks and structures without adding every single shape and block. In this case the strokes looked pretty plain and flat and my attempt at suggestion didn't really work out.

Finally, the perspective is wonkier than I thought while I was working on it. I don't think my underlying perspective grid was what I needed, but ultimately it was just an oversight on my part to keep track of the perspective. The poor thing looks like it's about to collapse in on itself.

[DeLeonxxx]

Just some short sketches I did, most of which are an hour or less each, all from reference except the green thing. Motivation's been up and down lately since I've been pretty beat from my weekend.



60 second poses...