Bjulvar's Sketchbook

[Bjulvar]

Vegard and Vasburg, you two sound like a duo or something! You should meet up and start a band!
VegardS Hey thank you man! Yeah the plan is to finish it when I have time :D Imma try man!

Vasburg I'll echo a thank you then!

Yeah I usually do that to pieces, but it's often only one at a time. Which I probably could extend! But I don't push concepts very far. I call it when I have a solid idea that I can transfer over to a piece instead.
But I probably should push stuff more. I'm stuck in a quickpainting loop! Help!

MrFrenik
Hey babe!
This doesn't sound like ramblings at all. It's great information!
I guess this made me realize even more that it's not always very effective to have diffrent focuses in one study. Doing both likeness and value won't solve much. But going to the core of the problem and restricting the means in which to find the solution gives a clearer result.
I'll definitely keep this in mind, might have to write some of it down!

A lot to think about and process! Really thankful man!

Pretty sketchy work with this update.

Quick study with two values for the hand. Felt the power of Frenik.



Batman skeetch, don't be jelly of my camera.



Tried sculpting these horses. Started out with very broad strokes and erased in the silhouette. Kept the color quite simple.






Did the studies for this little thing. Doing a boardgame with some friends. Really fun to practice. Going to do fairly quick pieces and find a workflow for it. I feel that this one is a bit too rough for my liking, but it's going to be a small thumbnail on the card so might not matter.



Spitpainting, reincarnation!



And some sketches

[Adzerak]

Great to see such a steady flow of updates from you vikingbroder ^^
Nice to see a traditional render also, I like that you aren't afraid to venture into the darker value territories when shading, so you get that contrast and nice lighting going!

Keep up the studies and the creativity. Have you tried painting really zoomed out in PS? So that you can block in basic mood and value with brushes before zooming in and defining details?
And I'm talking reeeeally zoomed out xD
I've tried it some. Really speeded up my process and helped me get an atmospheric feel more quickly. Also helps if you're short of ideas and just want to get inspired by shapes and colors.

[MrFrenik]

+1 to this. Zoom out for most of the piece. I've gotten to the point where I feel uncomfortable if I zoom in at all. That's probably a bit extreme of me, but it's helped me out a bunch. Good studies and sketches. I like the spitpaint of the energy coming out of the guy's eyes. Cool idea. :)

[Jamesxwu]

cool speed paint studies, would suggest to start doing more refined studies once in a while. do a lot of short ones as warm ups then do one that takes maybe an hour or more.

[Warburton]

So much work since I last dropped by 0_______o It's beautiful to see!

Great job man, keep it coming

[smrr]

Cool Batman sketch man o:

Nice to hear about that boardgame, the horsey studies look great and the piece below looks cooler! Can't wait to see some of the work from it!

[Jaik]

Nice to see you are playing a bit here and there with edges (I may be seeing things and you aren't, but I like to think you are xP) The speedpainting is fun, but I think you would benefit more from speedpainting studies with a clear intent in mind. Like, speed paint the same spoon every day from life and see if you can get faster. (I'm planning on doing this too, what were you saying about you projecting unto me :P )
All in all, good stuff, keep up the good work and listen to Frenik, the value masta.

[Bjulvar]

Hey guys, your beautiful comments make me happy on the inside and the outside! Thanks a bunch! :D

Adzerak
Yeaah, thanks vikingbro! Took awhile now though :P
I love drawing traditionally. Out with the 4b's!

I haven't done it a lot but it sounds like a solid idea. Tried it after reading your comment and haven't zoomed in much on the quicker paintings that I've done this week. Also helped me keep it looser! Which I like! Wonder if it carries over well to longer paintings, would certainly be interesting to try out, since I really like zooming in and rendering stuff out.

MrFrenik
Definitely! I might be reaching that point now aswell! Glad to hear that it helped you. Thanks man, was fun to paint. Gotta get more abstract feely feels!

Jamesxwu
Thanks! Yeah I'll have to do that too. Used to do them a lot before, but usually put down too much time in my opinion. Worth another shot! :D

Warburton
You're beautiful to see man! Thank you, awesome compliment, have to do more now!

smrrfette
Thank you smrrrfette! I'll have some more stuff to post in a near future! It's a really fun project to be part of :D

Jaik
Crap, I hope I am playing with edges! Not thinking about it too much, but it used to be more of a problem! Agree, that could be a fun exercise to try out. Just gotta find something that's worth painting every once in a while! Migraine drugs, of course! Haha we can project unto eachother and become supercool together.
Frenik is the man!


Held off from posting and the stuff has been piling up damnit. So here's the longest post that I've ever made! Woah!

Here's trying to apply what Frenik said about restricting values, so I just played around with 2-4 values at a time. It was fun and needed. One longer study too, but still simple.





Two spitpaintings, lord of lies and monkey temple. Abuse of sharptool is apparent!





60 second gestures!





Two longer gesture/model studies. I really liked the light and color situations in both of the original photos. Always have had a hard time combining two colors for light and shadow.





Lavadude and mistydude!





Finished another quick piece for the boardgame. This one is called Box of Whispers.



Badboy baroque



Here's a moviestill from The last of the mohicans. Had a swell atmosphere with the restricted palette. Fun to observe. Then two applications of the scene, playing around a bit with brushes.







And topping off this cake with a nordic bride sketch!

[MrFrenik]

The simple value studies are great practice, man, so good job on that! Don't forget to include your background as a part of the image as well. How we create edges on a form is how we "frame" our objects using the things in front of and behind it - in this instance being the background. Playing with gradations and different value patterns (black/white on grey, white/black on grey, grey/white on black, etc) we can get a lot different ways to play with values and edges.

[Bjulvar]

Thanks a lot man! Yeah, good reminder, totally forgot about it during these studies haha. But I'll definitely do more of these in the future. Felt relieving to do it as simple as this, and actually quite informative!

Played around with an environment a bit. The top one has a photo in it. Really fun to play with.



Sketch of a commission. Two dudes in space, with spacestuff. The brief escalated from a battlefield, to a battlefield with a spacedragon, plus fire. Always gotta have fire!



Migrainespray still life. Wanted to do speedstudies of it like Jaik suggested. But it feels like a very boring installation :P



And a little tentacledude

[Bjulvar]

Thought I could switch it up with some traditional sketchbook pages, for fun! Mix of studies from stuff around me, people, hands. Baroque-project and tribal dudes. I'm in a situation now where I don't have much time for digital. But I'm trying to keep at it. Good thing that I love my sketchbooks to death :D

[Bjulvar]

Quick dragon before bed. Have a nice night/day all ya'll daggerbabes

[Jaik]

Haha nice migraine spray! Next week I will start with my spoon studies I think, so we should totally do that together :P atleast then we when we upload we can be like yeah sure its boring, but look at this guys, his is also boring.. Everyone knows 2x the boring = still boring, but with comradery.. i guess...

That dragon has some really nice colours too it, but you are loosing a lot of form in the front, cant really tell what is in front of what. Doing things like elongating the hair on his back to past the turn of its body (if that makes sense) will show that the body is going back in space. Right now it is a bit of a tangent.

Keep it up though, some really good stuff you are pumping out.

[ramalooke]

Fuck. So much good work. I really need to visit your sketchbook more often, every time I'm dropping in after a while my mind is like blown away. I'd love to see a little bit texture variation in your paintings, you got nice brush strokes allready, just mix up some custom brushes. It should give interesting results. Some finished rendered stuff would be also great. Can't wait for next update. This time I wont miss it xD Cheers!

[Adzerak]

That traditional shaman-looking tribal guy is really sweet. Digging the shading and the detailing. Do you have any clue on how long you spend on a drawing like that? I loose track of time myself when i blast through my sketchbook xD

About the zoomed out stuff. I think it carries over very well to longer paintings. A problem I have with longer paintings is that I get into some kind of "render mode" and thus easily forget about stuff like atmosphere as I go on and detail and define things. Working zoomed out helps with blocking in the big areas first, so you don't have to paint over stuff later as much. This is how it applies to my process at least.

[Bjulvar]

Jaik
Haha yeah I'm up for that! Adventuring through boring still lifes is our quest and we will not falter. Now I'll have to find an interesting spoon around here somewhere. Totally ornate and all!
Who will be the lesser boring person?!

Really good point, didn't catch that tangent at all. But I'm also noticing that it's completely parallell to his body.

Thanks dude!


ramalooke
Hah thank you Ram! Really nice of you to say, but I don't want your mind to be blown away. The world needs it! I rarely do custom brushes but it would be fun to experiment with them. Are you thinking taking section of pictures and making something out of it. Or playing around with the settings on a standard brush?
I want finished stuff aswell, where's all my ideas when I need them :(

Adzerak
Thanks vikingman! I really dig him myself! I usually lose time too. Probably work around 3 hours on something like that. But it's on and off! Whenever I get free time :P

Haha I know exactly what you mean, it gets to a point where you almost paint it pixel by pixel. Does nothing to help the overall atmosphere! I really need to work on a quicker way to get my forms down. Since I spend way too much time just pushing values around. Gotta work harder!

Spitpaintings, soul eater and chain lightning!






Portraitstudy of Jet Li and an apply of it. Should've gone with the same background, looks very static right now.






Working on dat commission



Studying a concept art piece from world of warcraft, didn't grab the artists name though. Sorrrryy :(
Applying it late at night, really good idea.





Here's a border I made for my personal letter, jobhunting



A dwarfsketch, just wanted to play around a little.

[ramalooke]

Those portraits look really great. That what I meant suggesting to vary a bit your textures. It gave a nice result. You could push it even more. Consider doing some studies after painters like sargent or schmidt. jaime jones has some awesome brush work as well. i'm studying him right now and i find it very helpfull. just give it a shot. and keep up the good work cheers ;)

[pnate]

Yessss love the work ethic as always! Your colors look like they are improving, some cool moods and palettes you've got going on. Especially liking the jet li study and application. And I love how you are experimenting with the lighting schemes with the glowy blues and spotlight lighting. As a crit, I'd suggest copying the compositions of the art heroes because I think some of the placements of your figures is a little odd sometimes. I recommend some kekai composition studies, since, as we all know, he's awesome at that.

[Bjulvar]

ramalooke
Thank you man, yeah I'll try and push it as much as I can, moving forward slowly. Might have to try being a bit more bold. Good idea, will definitely try and get in more masterstudies into my schedule, I've done some Sargent before and learned quite a bit. Jamie is awesome!
I totally will, thanks dude!

pnate
Yeaah thanks man! I try to keep up :P Really nice to hear that finally! Atleast it's going in a better direction than before :D I found it incredibly hard before. I've taken a liking for blue lately! Great suggestion man, love the term "art hero", because they truely are! Took it to heart and checked out two of his paintings, so thanks a lot man! :D

Study of a kicking woman, this one had a lot of resizing! Feels like observational skills get put to the test when poses are out of the ordinary. Might be something to continue exploring.



Three-headed ogre spitpainting



Priest spirit spitpainting. Finally applied a sketch of a church I had in my sketchbook :P



Kekai studies, because of Pnate! Makes you feel better to channel the greatness of Kotaki the art hero. Pretty clear contrapost in the composition above, plus the Charr has a strong silhouette. That makes me wonder what defines a good silhouette.



And got inspired by this weeks ChoW, which was a shark-like aliendude. Wanted to go in another direction than all the space marine entries. (don't get me wrong, I love space marines) Not sure if I succeeded, but it got an interesting shape atleast, I think. Still a sketch though!



I've noticed that I've stopped zooming in now! Actually feels pretty good to work with the whole picture for the majority of the time.
Atleast I don't zoom in to pixel-level! :D

xoxo guys.

[ramalooke]

Awesome update man. Keep it up ;3