Walent's sketchbook

[AngeliquevdMee]

Loving the amount of work in this sketchbook. Don´t really know what else to say :) Great works!

[tbnkaron]

I have gone through the entirety of the sketchbook, super inspiring!
You have a clear way of indicating form, and I really like the traditional feel of your digital sketches.

[walent]

Thanks AngeliquevdMee
tbnkaron, thanks for taking the time, I really like your figures, as I already said, and I'll make sure I get back to see more

Nothing much to show lately, I've been trying to fit the gaps I have on anatomy, mostly upper legs, some head studies... and a lot of crappy quick poses.

[walent]

Haven't done a lot of personal stuff in the last few weeks, but I'm kinda done with my commissions so I should be able to sketch a lot more every day.
















Also finished a more complex illustration, I'm pretty sure I've never done something this big before

[walent]

Some more sketches and studies:

[AlCo]

Woah, amazing sketchbook man, seriously! I really love that traditional feeling of your sketches, I can spot a Ian McQue influence :)

I'd love to have you as my mentor!

Crazy good work though, keep it up!

[walent]

[DK]

Lots of nice work in here. Love the way you're incorporating the studies into your personal work. Almost seems like a mesh between the two, which is how it should be. Keep it up.

[walent]

Hey, thanks, Dennis!

Not much work lately, here's some stuff though.

[RottenPocket]

I like the way you break down faces and expressions into simple forms. It just makes a lot more sense to me than what I try to see in others' work. Excellent studies.

[walent]

Thanks RottenPocket

I'm back. Here are some more updates:

Oh and btw I made my first Gumroad video, I'm planning on doing 3 (so 2 more coming up) for now. I'll talk about some basic steps to figure drawing - gesture / form / value. Check it out here: https://gumroad.com/l/yjEaO

[Hobitt]

Very cool sketchbook, love the tradinional-esque feel to it, great use of colour and good stuff overall, looking forward to seeing more!

[walent]

Cheers Hobitt!

More:

[walent]

[Nick C.]

woah so much work, i like the way you render one brush man? :D, cant wait for moar

[walent]

Thanks, Nick! Yeah, kinda one brush for soft forms, one or two brushes for hard shapes.


Today, instead of sharing work, I'd rather share my struggles. I think I wrote about this before, so here we go again...

I've been watching Sycra's videos on Youtube lately, and every time I hear him talk about something I'm like "yeah, that's what I do too" and "yeah, that's what happens to me too" and sure, it helps a lot because he's talking about some cool concepts and interesting ways of fixing your art related problems.


So a couple of years ago I was struggling with basics and finding a style for myself. A style that could represent me, so that I could look at my work and say "yeah, that's me"
Today I feel like I achieved that, I'm pretty satisfied with my style and my knowledge for basics (flow, construction, anatomy, perspective, values and so on)

What I CAN'T find though, is the exact thing I wanna focus on.

Before I could get any projects on concept art, I did a lot of web designing. And I kinda liked it, to a certain point. Maybe it's too much sharpness, everything has to be exact, it's about pixel measurements and I'd rather have more looseness in my work. I hate using tools to paint, like lasso and pen tool. I believe those ruin the entire fun factor of painting.


I'm not the kind of guy that does them all. I love taking one thing and mastering it. Just like when I'm playing games or stuff, I always like having one character that I focus on. Sometimes I find that character, sometimes I don't, because it doesn't always fit with my playstyle.

But this time it's for real, it's not a game that I can just stop playing if I don't find my character.
And I ended up making a list of things that I absolutely love doing. Things that I'm having a lot of fun with, but the problem is I can't relate them, they're totally different.

Here's a list:
- figure drawing, anatomy
- mechanisms, sci-fi stuff - I'm passionate about puzzles and adventure games
- buildings, stairs - I could say stairs are a fascination of mine, because they can connect shapes in so many ways and can have so many forms while still being functional
- clouds, trees, rocks/cliffs - fascinated about cliffs and the ways you can simplify an incredibly complex arrangement of rocks - create a pattern from something that appears to be random
- also love drawing SOME animals, like elephants, horses (even though they're so damn hard to draw), rhinos, bears, crocodiles and I kinda like drawing fur, even though I need a lot more practice

I love form, if you'd give me a pen and a piece of paper I'd probably start drawing boxes.
And I also love playing with shapes, like creating a city with boxes that intersect, overlap, creating variety

I love the figure and I draw a lot of poses, but I obviously crave for design, because if I didn't I would've just settled for being a figure artist.

I love painting, so I'll find ways to simplify things enough so I won't have to use photo textures or 3d. If I use textures, they'll be very subtle. I hate doing those texture heavy artworks - that's what I was doing back when I started digital and I've had enough, everything was based on happy accidents and I had no idea what I was doing.



I have this need of protection, for example, in most games I like playing characters with shields, and the most awesome character I've ever played was the holy paladin from WoW, which is basically a heavy armored healer. So I also like being a support, helping others, while still being protected (unlike those light armored classes that have to do a lot of kiting)
Another character I could've settled for was the Diablo 2 amazon with a shield and javelin.
Maybe the Diablo 3 crusader gets close to the character I love playing, but it's not exactly that.

So if I think about it, those are all hybrid classes. They can all do more than one thing, but they excel at one. The holy paladin can withstand a lot of damage and can heal single target very effective, the javazon can deal huge damage on single target but also decent aoe, and the crusader... maybe this one doesn't excel at anything, that's why I'm saying he's not exactly my character, but gets very close (maybe because of the high protection)


The point of all this blabbering is I'm thinking maybe life choices can also reflect art choices and maybe if I look at things I like in other areas of my life, maybe I can figure out what I really love doing art related.

I also love the night. Precisely the city lights at night. They fascinate me, the way the city looks like when you can't see anyone else on the street, the feeling. The fact that there are a lot of dark areas and only some areas are lit by the street lights, so there's a beautiful variety of light and shadow.
There's actually a Google night walk for a part of Marseilles city, and when I first found out about it, I think I've spent a whole day just walking around and looking at pictures.

But I get bored very very fast. Doing the same thing every day kills me. I really admire people who can get to the same job every single day and do the same exact thing. I would never be able to do that more than 3 months.

So now the question is how do I focus on ONE thing when I have days when I wanna draw mechs and I'm really excited, I start studying stuff and thinking about designs and the end result is pretty shitty because obviously I need more practice. But the next day, guess what, I'm not in the mood for mechs anymore, I wanna go back to figure drawing.
And this is extremely frustrating and I get depressed and I feel like I just wanna fucking quit once and for all. But I've already spent too much time doing this and I really like it. So quitting is not an option anymore.


I'm really thinking I need to find one subject matter that is kind of hybrid, that contains a little bit of everything I like.

Trouble is I keep bumping into different artists, one day I see someone who does amazing mechs and military vehicles and I feel inspired, the other day I see some art from Hotel Transylvania movie with some environments that just blow my mind away, another day I see some cool fantasy stuff and so on.

I hear people talk about artblocks and not knowing what to draw next, but I think I focused so much on basics in the last years that now I'm being in a constant artblock.

IF I wanna go for environment, why would I wanna practice figure drawing?

These are my thoughts for the last couple of days.
Thanks for reading.

[JavierP]

Hi Walent,
I really like your work. Great draftsmanship and attention to detail. As to the focus and work related stuff, I can totally understand what you mean. My advice would be to just start doing something. Many times a preconceived idea, about what any job is like, can be totally wrong. Especially if you've never done that job for a living before. For example: just because you start a job doing environments, doesn't mean you will do environments forever.
Doing lots of things is great, but usually people just want to pay you for one thing at any given time. From my point of view, your figure and character work is some of your strongest work, and is definitely worth pursuing to a professional level.
If you haven't already, I suggest you check out Feng Zhu's channel on Youtube and watch/listen to his most recent design cinema podcasts about work and business related stuff. It could be really helpful for your current situation.

[walent]

hey JavierP,
I completely forgot about Feng's design cinema. I found an episode where he explains what's up with illustration, concept art and industrial design. And now I'm sure I want to focus on illustration, since there's some stuff in concept art that I can't stand, like photobash and orthos

So thanks! It was really helpful.

[walent]

[walent]

new stuff