Zombie's Book of Sketches

[ZombieChinchilla]

Thanks for the comment, Adam!

I touched up a painting of Chell from a while ago:


A watercolor painting of a butterfly for sci ill:


And all my tarot card illustrations! My crit was earlier today:
















I'm especially proud of The Moon and The High Priestess. May or may not continue this series.

[ZombieChinchilla]

Just wrapped up a weekend exhibiting at my first con early today. It went very well! I reached my goal of breaking even for the cost of the table, so I'm very pleased. It was good experience and I learned a lot, and enjoyed myself overall, so I'm excited to do it again later on.

Since I've been going kind of crazy with it, I haven't been doing many studies but I do have a couple.

[ZombieChinchilla]

Oh man oh man. I just scrolled through the past six pages of this puppy and it's kinda depressing me. I have not been studying as much as I should be hahhaha. The stuff I was doing a year ago was great, and compared to where I am now I may have taken a step or two backwards. I always struggle keeping up good art habits while also doing something else like school or work. I say it every year but I'm gonna try to be more proactive with doing more personal work this summer. 

Then next fall I'll be studying abroad in Scotland!! I'm attending the Glasgow school of art for illustration and I am SO excited. I'll be sure to keep yall posted with what I'm doing while I'm there.

I'm not gonna post any stuff right now since I'm on my phone and posting pics from your phone is a nightmare, but I will tomorrow. Just reminding everyone that I'm alive and ready to WORK.

[Adam Lina]

Glad to hear you're alive (or undead?) still Zombie. Keeping good habits is a problem for most of us I think. We cant rely on spontaneous inspiration to motivate us usually. Discipline is whats needed most of the time to keep improving at a steady pace. Unfortunately discipline isnt something you can develop overnight. It takes discipline to build discipline XD Its a muscle that needs to be used in order to get stronger.

Have you tried meditation? One of its many benefits is that it builds discipline. I need to do it more myself. Its taken me from the most undisciplined person ever to a moderately disciplined person. For a long time I didnt understand what mediation was but a few years back I got more interested in learning about it. To sum it up briefly I could say its all about not identifying yourself with your thoughts. You practice identifying yourself with the awareness of your thoughts. How many times have you known what you wanted to do but your thoughts crept in and prevented you? Your thoughts convince you you'll fail so you dont even try. You can try and counter the negative thoughts with positive thoughts but all this does is add fuel to the fire and puts you in conflict with yourself.

Mediation allows you to identify negative thoughts when they appear in your mind and gives you the ability to simply disregard them without adding fuel to the fire. You're not turning thoughts off but just learning to see them for what they are. A tool our brains have evolved in order to solve problems. Its so good are finding and solving problems that it creates problem that arnt even there in order to solve them. All thats needed to meditate is to pay attention to the sensation in your body. Things like the rising and falling of the stomach (breathing from the diaphragm not from the chest) as you breath. The feeling in your hands and feet ect. Thoughts will sneak back in. When that happens and you catch yourself getting wrapped up in thought bring your attention back to the breath. Each time you catch yourself in thought its like doing a push up with your awareness. The more times you become aware the stronger the awareness in you will get until its strength will more easily overpower thoughts. That wasnt so brief and forgive me if I seem preachy.

Also I know the feeling of going backwards. Just remember that its next to impossible most the time to see your own improvement happening. That and your abilities in art are like any other abilities you have. You need to warm up before your eye (or visualization ability) and hand (or muscle memory) start to work together. It takes typically an hour to warm up before you get in the zone. So some days you'll start drawing and get discouraged because your rusty and you think you should be able to draw better than your best drawing from a year ago. But that best drawing you forget only happened after you had thoroughly warmed up in both your eye and hand. So stick in there and dont get discouraged. That ability you used to create your best work is still in you. It just needs some coaxing to emerge.

Sorry for the wall of text. I got kinda carried away... Good luck in Scotland!

[KurtJeremy]

Yo man thanks for checking out my sketchbook!
Im actually doing a personal character right now and Im having a lot of problems painting it especially the portrait.

Im gonna give you advicw of a good habit to do everyday.
Try to do gesture at least 30mins or 1 hr a day. Its a good warm up , but also teaches you movement and fluidity in lines.

The schedule is a test for me and im gonna start tom. I , ay have to adjust it later on...

[ZombieChinchilla]

Adam- Hey, thanks for the response! I agree, discipline is my problem as I tend to skimp out on regular drawing practice and will instead play video games for an hour, haha. But that's my goal, to try to do that less. I have tried meditation in the past and it has helped, but it isn't a regular thing and I've never thought to try to do it to focus on my art. I'll have to try it! And I really appreciate the response, thanks so much for taking the time and I'll try to listen to your advice.

Kurt- No problem! Your character stuff sounds pretty sweet, will you be posting them or are they under wraps? Gestures is always a fun exercise I enjoy, so I'll be sure to try it. Good luck with your schedule!

Here's some drawings I've been doing in the last week, I'm slooowly moving from digital work to traditional since my tablet pen hasn't been working lately. Copics are my favorite right now.

[ZombieChinchilla]

I have a few gestures I did last week (I was a bit rusty), some more marker enviros from ref, and some faces.







For the faces I'm trying to do this challenge, so I'll be doing 50 from refs then 50 from imagination. These are all from ref, and I need to focus more on construction rather than copying if I want my second half to be good.

[VoodooMama]

Hello!
Great gestures, loving all the hard work in this sketchbook.
If I may offer a small ciritique regarding figures, pay a bit more attention to proportion, sometimes your characters seem to have heads too big.
Seems like you're already on the right direction with the heads challenge and focusing on construction.
I'm looking forward for more :)

[ZombieChinchilla]

Hey thanks! I agree with you, I can often find myself...guessing when it comes to head size, hahaha. I'll have to work more on that eventually.

I have some more figures and faces!

[Adam Lina]

How long do you spend on these gestures? They look more like figure constructions than quick gestures. Its important to not confuse the gesture phase of a drawing with the construction/ contouring of forms. I was confused about gesture for a long time before I started to get it recently. You should be using one confident line to show the general direction and flow of the forms not worrying about outlining each form right off the bat. Drawing is a constant battle of resisting getting into detail too early. The longer you can stay light and loose with your lines the easier it will be to add the construction and anatomy later.

Always remember to work from large general forms down to smaller forms. For instance draw one big sweeping line for the whole arm instead of trying to draw the contours of the upper arm then the lower arm. Doing 30 second gestures helps you focus on the big picture and get you think the right way. They might not look like much but if you keep doing them as warm ups for longer drawings you'll see your drawings become less stiff.

[ZombieChinchilla]

Hey thanks, Adam, I admit gestures is something I always struggle with, especially when they're longer than, like, 20 seconds, hahaha. I get the quick gesture down too fast then for the rest of the time while the models hold the pose I tend to just go over it and over-work it. And I very often lose that battle of resisting getting too detailed too early. Something I need to work on.

Today I have a few more gestures from yesterday and today, along with some thumbnails for an upcoming illustration I want to work on.


Not happy with this...the proportions are off and the coloring isn't good. Blah.











I'm gonna be fairly busy this weekend so I'll start doing studies for the illustration next week. Not sure how I'll go about doing it, since digital is such a chore, but I really like being able to easily fix things in PS. Might draw it digitally, block in basic colors, then do it as a traditional painting...eh, I'll cross that bridge when it comes.

[Eristhe]

Hey hey, some lovely ideas here, seems like you have a fair bit of inspiration and you're thumbnailing to help that. I think what would really help you is study into construction and anatomy of figures. Michael Hampton has an excellent book on this but essentially, try to break up your bodies into 3D forms and apply perspective to them (and later on, do this to the muscles in the body too). Your figures are looking flat because you're observing only the edges of the figure rather than considering the whole form. Keep doing your gestures, try to break your figure work into quick gestures (30 sec - 3 minutes) and longer construction studies (5-15 minutes). Keep it up! : )

[ZombieChinchilla]

Eristhe- Yes definitely, thank you! That's something I've struggled with for years, with figures along with everything else. Trying to not mindlessly copy my reference is a never ending battle I will probably always deal with. And thank you for reminding me of Hampton, I've looked over his stuff in the past and loved it but forgot about it! So I'll be sure to go over it more this week.

I don't have much to post right now, as I didn't do much this past weekend. I hope all my fellow Americans enjoyed their 4th just as much as I did! I took advantage over the long weekend and went camping with my family, which was really nice. It rained some but once it stopped the weather was lovely and we ate lots of ice cream and hot dogs. I also got a few sketches of tourists posing in front of waterfalls, hahhaha.

But all that aside, it was a nice weekend to look on past work and reflect on my stuff. So for the next two months, I'm going to give myself some small goals:

- Work on doing better lines and messier, more impressionistic painting style.
- Studyyyy. Learn to study better, too, by making sure the info sinks in better so I don't forget immediately
- Have at least 3 finished pieces by September
- Try to keep the goal of drawing 3-4 hours a day, 4 days a week, but don't beat yourself up if you don't meet it every day.

These next two months are going to be more hard core and I'll hopefully be making strides. I'll post some more stuff tomorrow. Cheers!

[ZombieChinchilla]

All right, I have some stuff. Only got to work about 3 hour today because of an errand that took longer than expected, and then threw me off my flow. But I have some stuff.


28-33


34


Figures, some from imagination.


From reference.


Imagination.


Preliminary sketch for the potion illustration.

[ZombieChinchilla]

Today was kind of a sluggish day, but I do have some more faces.



I've learned that I need to do some separate studies of mouths and hair, so I'll probably do them before I move on to the 50 from imagination.

[VoodooMama]

Keep going Chinchilla!
Keep pushing in those studies,
I like your goals I do believe you can meet them!
Looking forward for those 3 finished pieces :P

[ZombieChinchilla]

Thanks, VM! I will try my hardest. ;P

Have some more faces today, some mouth studies, and a very early version of the potion illustration.

[ZombieChinchilla]

Not a very successful day...but I did work more on my painting. For some reason Autodesk Sketchbook doesn't like how large the file is and isn't want to cooperate with things like the lasso tool, resizing things, and even just undoing. It's very frustrating.



Once I put down the basic colors, I realized some anatomy issues so I changed the facial proportions, the arm, and picked some new colors. I'd like to get some critiques on this before I get too far in rendering, so I might post it in the critique section.

[ZombieChinchilla]

I had a very nice weekend with my family, sunshine, and music. It was very refreshing, and today I got back to the grindstone.

I finished the 50 faces from references and made progress on my painting!






I looked up reference for purple glow and found an image I had to adjust slightly to make it less blue, but that prompted me to change my colors completely...I think it makes a better image but it's still bugging me.

[ZombieChinchilla]

Made a lot of progress today!



I now realize he's looking off into the distance, hahaha. I'll fix that tomorrow.