What ImSkeptical learnt this week (Sketchbook)

[ImSkeptical]

Here is this week :D! Did something to try test all the figure stuff I'd been doing. I'm probably gonna do more of those. Did a few studies trying to nail down a painterly style for figures, not really happy with where I got, but defiantly looking forward to doing way more to develop something natural and faster.











I promise I did more traditional work, I'm just not bothered to photo them :p. I actually did spend some time getting back to watching movies. I had the movie 'Her' downloaded sitting around for ages. I didn't know what it was about other than it was really good, but having heard the synopsis from Miles's podcast ( http://mixlr.com/miles-johnston/showreel/ ) I was like, why haven't I freaking watched this movie already its exactly what I like. I then went on a little spree trying to catch up on my need to watch list.

Thanks for looking! Next week should be a little bit of color again.

[JonHop]

beautiful figure studies, you're really capturing a great sense of volume and movement in the figure, keep it up!

[Cyprinus]

Thank you so much for stopping by my sketchbook the other day!!!

Your stuff is awesome, I totally dig your little gestures, they look amazing, also I can only agree with JonHop! Keep up the great work, I'm looking forward to what you post next!

[Wardy]

your sketchbook is freakin awesome dude! keep at it!

[Flo]

hey man,

I just can say the same as the ones before me, good to have you back. Your work-ethic was always inspiring and it is great to see how much you improved.

Those 3 flying women are phenomenal, I will so study those ^^

Cheers,
Flo

[Rindoukan]

dude your stuff has gotten crazy good.Love the values on those painted nudes.Love the line control on the traditional stuff too ,but those angled photos are killing me.Either way alot of cool stuff.Keep it going it's heading in an awesome direction.

[smrr]

Welp, you're just absolutely killing again it aren't ya Skeptical-?!

Way to make me feel bad about my figures and pencil work in general ;_;

Haha but in all seriousness, love it all! Keep it up, can't wait for more juicy work

oh and I am looking forward to this meeeetupppppp :D

[Kaffer]

Your sense in dynamic poses is mindblowing. Inspiring stuff! Right now as I was reading your SB I was getting enough for todays gesture drawings - I think I'll just go back a little while :)

[ImSkeptical]

Hey thanks everyone!

JonHop - Thanks man, i've been really working at it last couple months, glad to know its paying off.

Cyprinus - No problem, its a pleasure to check out! Honestly I think your linework is way better, shows way more confidence. I like draw every single shadow pattern every time because i don't have the ability to put a really accurate line down, so I put a bunch of stuff that is sorta right and it looks okay :p. Need that confidence and mental fortitude to get more accurate so I can simplify.

Ward217 - Thanks man!

Flo - It's really good to be back in the swing of it, but I am starting to feel that boredom/lazyness creeping back in, not a good sign wasting time looking for music and trawling facebook :p. Oh and I wouldn't reccomend studying it :p, study the people I studied, they got it way better. I think its Richard Schmidt, Steve Huston, peleng, and izzy. Those guys are who you should look too.

Rindoukan - Thanks man, good to know I'm making some kind of improvement. You know how its always hard to tell. And yeah, cool angled shots of traditional drawings covering up all your proportion mistakes ftw :p .

smrrfette - Thanks! But don't feel bad, I actually a couple days ago went back through your hole sketchbook. Holy crap, that's what someone can do in the time I spend working! You got so good so fast you did that thing Hannes did and broke your arm xD. As legend goes, this means you take it slower, think more and become the best or at least most famous imaginative realist digital painter. But seriously, super awesome, be really proud of yourself; I can't wait to meet both you and jaik, meeting people in real life who know what its like to lock yourself in a room and draw and paint all day angry at being frustrated about being lazy in a place where you 'should' be happy :p.

Kaffer - Thanks dude!

Everyone's commenting on my dynamic sketches, I think I should recommend people if they want to start getting into it, to look into gathering more specific reference. Although those quickposes and lovecastle sites are great for quick lazy gestures to warm up (there better than just for that, I'm exaggerating, I did a ton after Alex Negrea recommended to at Bali workshop, helped heaps, I think I talked about it a bit last page), they do have some pretty amateurish looking photos/models. Which is cool and all, but if you find a tumblr or pintrest of professional dancers, gymnasts, mountain climbers, athletes, etc. These people have such a visible grace over most of that stock imagery. So just download a bunch in a folder and use a timer to manually do 1 to 5 minute studies. Choosing reference that looks good to you I think is a big part of it. Yes you're supposed to be enhancing the reference, but you don't really want to handycap yourself by starting off with poor reference; at least for learning, that's how I feel.

[Samszym]

Thanks for the comment skeptical! I agree with what you're saying, getting photos of real athletes in action is so much nicer for gesture study. how could it not be, they're in real motion! I get really sick of how "art-model-pose" some of the pictures you get on those gesture drawing websites can be

anyway, killer work ethic, really digging those figures and studies! In your paintings it might be cool to see some more really soft and lost edges. Try and lose all the information in the figure that you can and still having it read, so the viewer imagines what they need to to fill int he blanks. I love pictures that leave stuff up to imagination like that! Mayeb you feel differently though XD

Keep rocking!!!

[Jaik]

You crazy mother f**ker. Look at those beautiful studies. Who the hell do you think you are, thinking that you can leave us for almost a year and just come back and kick arse like this? What the hell man!

Totally stealing that idea of using dancers and athletes. Do you have any good links to some tumblrs? You know, just so I can steal all of your suggestions with minimal effort :P

Also in this image here http://i1046.photobucket.com/albums/b461...5d6591.jpg

Where you said its teres major, technically its not, as the teres major and the latisimus dorsi insert into the Humerus the latisimus actually encases the teres like a sling, so when it is pulled away from the body, only a very small view portion of the teres is visible. But yeah, I scoured the rest for notes, and I can't see any others that are wrong :)

[ImSkeptical]

Samszym - Your stuff is cool man, keep working on it! Yeah i'm still going crazy trying to figure out brushwork and edges. I defiantly want that lose impressionism stuff, but I think I always just try to render out everything out of insecurity. I'm trying some different stuff this week but not too happy with it, still working on it.

Jaik - Thanks :D. It was a bunch of different places, pinterest is pretty good just using words you would use in google (like climing / rockclimbing / fighting ). I think i got a lot of images off here http://actsoflight.tumblr.com/ but not too sure, it's just in my recent bookmarks. I use a tumblr viewer to make it easier to go through tumblrs http://tumview.com/ so they all kinda look the same to me xD.

So is it more correct to call it the latisimus dorsi? Honestly i'm pretty terrible at the names, i've seen your notes, you're way better than me at it :(. I've learnt and forgot twice now.

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Here's this week. Not too much, had a weird week. Got my hamstring (semitendonitis and abductor masses :p) pulled doing cartwheels not stretching properly; then slowly over several weeks of not letting it heal it got pretty severe. This is from gymnastics once a week, I'm not sure if i mentioned I started learning at a beginners course for adults for the past few months. Hella fun to learn a new skill, exercise, eventually be able to do backflips and parkour :p. But yeah, limping around from a pulled muscle, not fun.

Then went out to a game of thrones burlesque show. The running joke we had before and after the show - less nudity then the TV show. Was a fun night out. Then had minor cold symptoms for a couple days, dunno what from but I hope its not related to the leg. Seems to be okay for now.

But yeah, enough excuses, I'm almost certain I wouldn't have done much anyway if it all went perfectly. Watched the whole TV series Black Mirror. I was surprised to learn it was Charlie Brooker's show, his 'educational' tv shows on tv were cool. If you're one of those wacky people think there aren't any original stories left, watch this show ( I'm joking of course they are in some very real sense derivative don't crucify me :p )! I got the suggestion from Ash Thorpe's collective podcast, which everyone should listen too, its a bunch of really nice conversations with all the artists.



Pedro Covo study, he has this really awesome digital painterly look that I think I want to achieve. I didn't do to well with this first one, didn't structure my values as well looking at it now, so I end up with somthing a bit more muted and less emphasis on that cool light which I was trying to get. So yeah, concentrate more on the values. Managed to narrow down some semblance of brushes to use to emulate it though, but my execution needs to step it up a bit.




Eric Geist is the man, here are some studies trying to roughly interpret his charcoal in a digital style/workflow




Another attempt at the figure thing, not really that good, but I tried out a different lighting in an attempt at keeping it looser. Might mess around with it again later, don't feel so good about it right now, although it might be better to try again on something else.

I did a bunch of traditional stuff as well as always, but not bothered to photograph right now, its late and I need to wake up early to call customer service about my phone :(. Thanks for looking/ reading me complain about first world problems xD.

[DoubleThink]

Man, your values are great.
Fun studies to look at!

Keep it coming :)

[ImSkeptical]

DoubleThink - Thanks man, been really working on them recently!


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This week was pretty slack, catching up on killa kill and some movies (The Worlds End was even deeper than the excellence I usually expect from Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright), got a new boardgame so got some friends over to play that in the middle of the week. I dunno, taking it a bit easy. Sleeping pattern is really terrible now too. But got some stuff done! Here it is.

Random Traditional - as usually just uploading a sample because lazy to photo. It's really just a bunch of these Assaro heads though, trying to see if I can memorize it.





Studies - Focusing on mark making and values





Sketches - Random shit, tell me if anything pops out, I kinda want to work on a long piece no real ideas at the moment.




K random note, because I remembered I wanted to make sure people know, you can get some really sick lectures by Steve Huston at http://newmastersacademy.org/, I think pretty cheap too, it was 20 dollars a month for everything when i signed up, but i think they changed it. I used to be signed up to https://www.wattsatelier.com/ but its a bit more expensive (like 99 a month?), so I canceled when I stopped working. But I'm definitely going to sign up again when they release the next batch of material. So yeah, if you got the money, its totally worth it. Both are a little different, and to be safer, I'd probably suggest new masters over watts, but I strongly recommend trying both.

K thanks for reading/looking see yall next week :D .

[JordyLakiere]

Fantastic Sb :) Amazing work on the anatomy, keep it up. Great linework.

[Samszym]

Man you are rocking these studies!!! Since you asked, I'd love to see the thumbnails girl shooting fire form her hands and running at the huge monster brought more finished, those look awesome :o

[CoreyH]

Incredible stuff man. Your thumbnail style is crazy. I love it!

[Jaik]

Looking good man. Can't wait to catch up with you in a few weeks. And I really like the big thumbnail in the middle. looks great. Do that one. DOOO EEEEEEET!

[ImSkeptical]

JordyLakiere - Thanks man, my linework used to be horrendous so good to know its getting a bit better :D

Samszym - Thanks again!

CoreyH - Thanks! I stole the thumbnail style off Maciej Kuciara and Jama Jurabaev, who do it a million times better. Make sure to look them up if you havn't!

Jaik - Yeah can't wait to catch up man!

I shouldn't have put the one i wasn't feeling in the centre :(. Maybe i'll thumbnail out some different angles and comps. Or i'll just do my giant hammer one like i wanted xD.

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So this week I don't really anything. But I have a legitimate excuse this time, work called me back for most of the week! So yeah, in addition to being lazy, I had to work on a storyboard this week. Might happen every now and again, though to be honest it I hope it doesn't happen too much, makes me really lazy. Here's what I managed to scrounge together.

Traditional stuff




I actually realize I avoid photographing any of my really bad traditional stuff, usually the stuff without ref from imagination :( . I promise next time I'll upload it regardless for you nice people, but yeah, keep in mind my social pressure to look awesome means every time I was like I didn't bother to upload other traditional stuff, I was probably lying and hiding my terrible stuff :p. I also never upload when I copy other peoples sketches because, I dunno, I feel like I would have to somehow attach to the image that its after someone else and not my concept or idea or drawing or whatever. I think its a good exercise btw, studying a sketch, you can try glean some of the calligraphy and shorthand that artists use, also you get an idea of how careful/mindful/awesome you need to be to sketch something cool. Anyway, I doubt I'll bother uploading any of those ever, but I thought I'd put the idea out there for anyone who wants to try it. Just take like a kim jung gi sketch or a john park sketch or some awesome little sketch by someone you like and do a 'master study'.

Anyway, more random sketching



Portrait Studies




K thanks for stopping by. Hoping for a productive next week, should be starting on some longer piece! Unless work calls me in again :(

[Jaik]

That last ones looking good man. You missed the head tilt though, but got the tilt on the general shape of the head which makes it look a little wonky.

Nice work though, keep it up and works work man, just roll with it. xP