Minke's Sketchbook

[kittenile]

Let's learn hair and brushes!! While working on a somewhat ambitious piece I decided it might be time to branch out from hard-round and experiment with new brushes. I didn't know what brushes to get so I first did some experimenting with a free trial of corel since it's supposed to be similar to traditional brushes and might be a good exercise to just getting used to using different brushes and looking at the names of brushes I liked to see what brushes I should download.

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I then went to download a few brushes and keep only the ones I really liked (17 total brushes as of now). In case you're interested: most of the brushes I currently have are either adapted from corel brushes or self-made from scans/pictures of my traditional works, 2 are from Tatchit's 3rd brush set.

I decided then to test out my new brushes in photoshop with a portrait, then I realized I didn't know how to render hair. I had improvised a method earlier but it only seems to work with abundant wavy hair
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I then did research and looked at how several other artist did hair, mostly in CGHub and youtube. (if you're struggling with how hair works I'd strongly recommend this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLxYo5TmyO8)

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(I know it's not finished but let's remember that the main focus behind this was practice and learning, not a polished illustration)

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I also decided to try and apply this newly found knowledge traditionally.

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It's a dragon!! He might or might not be the evolution to the icon I've yet to finish, I actually wasn't thinking about it when I did this one but they ended up looking similar.
[img][/img]

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Due to school and college applications and family obligations I only had like 1-3 hours a week to paint and this piece was dragging on forever since every time I came back I saw things that needed to be fixed. I became really unhappy with the way the character looked since the anatomy was off and the clothes impractical, I tried fixing the clothes but my dislike for them remained.

I then decided to just focus on painting the background landscape.



I ended up liking the landscape more with a color filter though.

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I haven't been able to do much polished work lately but I keep on drawing little sketches every day to keep on practicing.


Also, on halloween after finishing homework I stayed around Warmic's livestream. Where I grew up halloween doesn't really exist and I've never really gotten into it but I was having fun at the stream and decided to draw something for the occasion.

(Sorry I forgot to erase some of my anatomy guidelines. Also, she was initially meant to hold a broom but the hand angle didn't really work well with a broom pole so I made her hold her skirt.)

I see several other errors in this such as the arm length and the tangent between her sleeve and skirt but overall I'm happy with it.

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Just remembered these sketches I'd forgotten to upload