Darantha's sketchbook

[Darantha]

Hello all,

a bit of a mix of different studies and sketches to kick off this sketchbook. Mostly digital, need to scan some stuff.

Onwards, towards learning!

A few still life paintings







Metal studies


Couple of movie screen studies, Pirates of the Carribbean and Brave.



And a pencil sketch, based on my player character from Dragon Age: Origins by Bioware.

[Darantha]

Figures and drapery studies.

[pugsloth]

Wow, really great start to your sketchbook, I think what would really help is to exaggerate the materials a bit more (I hope I make sense), at the moment a few of your paintings look a lot like the same material, which I think is caused by the lack of smooth gradations/transitions between values, you're doing some really great work and your deviantart/tumblr is great :)

[raz]

Welcome! I'll second what Pugsloth said about materials looking too similar to each other. You really want to pay attention to edges (mostly hard edges all around now) and texture, as well as color. You could also exaggerate bounce light to unify the piece. I'm looking forward to see more of those, still lifes are definitely fun ;]

[Darantha]

Hi,
thank you both, I definitely see what you mean. Might be one of those things that's weirded me out about my paintings lately. I did a couple of still lifes this weekend and tried to keep it in mind when painting.







Amazingly enough I was able to paint with light from the window, rather than my kinda horrendously yellow desklamp. Don't really get a lot of light into this room normally at this time of the year. The sun started to set while I was working on the first one, so it's a bit rough.

Some face sketches too, I really need to work on my faces, aha. Noses especially.

[Heavenwill]

soo good :D

[Darantha]

Oh thank you :)



Skyrim inspired sketch, thinking of trying to finish it.



Bunch of character thumbnails. Got a pretty bad habit of getting caught up in linework when doing character thumbs, so I tried with the silhouette method. Got a few I want to develop further.



I've never felt particularly comfortable with environments, really need to work on that too. Soooo many things to improve, soooooo little time.

[Darantha]

Got some pencil sketches and quick environment sketch studies.

















I've been trying to get more movement into my pictures for a while now, feel I often do somewhat stiff poses. I really do sketch pretty loose and rough a lot of the time.

Here's a WIP that I'm working on too and from.

[Darantha]

Some form turnarounds, leftmost ones are from the reference and then the other ones are drawn from other angles without reference.








And something I started working on but I don't think I'll finish it.

[Darantha]

Busy times, busy times. Participated in the Crimson Arena challenge though, theme was children's of Zeus so I went with Eris, the goddess of Discord. I do love doing these sort of illustrations, the research is so much fun. Just... digging down into books and museum collections for material.









Got around to finishing a picture of Freyr from the norse mythologies too. With his boar Gullinbursti.




Sketch based on a previous pencil sketch.

[Kaycee]

Such pretty work! You are a talented artist!

[Darantha]

Well, a year later, let's try this again shall we. Some backlog stuff. Critique is very very welcome.















Aaaaand a WIP image.

[Darantha]

Couple of sketches. Finished the WIP image too.





Warm up sketches for some Dragon Age characters.




I've been experimenting a bit with layer masks lately. Feels pretty nice to use, even if I do so sparingly.



And here's another WIP. Feel like I'm in over my head on this one to be honest. Environments isn't my strong suit (Working on it).

[Darantha]

Took one of the sketches I posted before to try bringing to final. I still feel like I hit too many bumps when it come to faces, the mouth and noses in particular. And too easily end up with flat colours. Did some eye studies to start with.

[Darantha]

Cloud studies, a master study, sketchs and some character thumbs. Been feeling a bit lost on my art lately. I feel like something is off, but I don't know what. Ah well.

[Darantha]

Black and white sketches. Was playing around with some new brushes on the second one.

[Darantha]

Master study after William-Adolphe Bouguereau.



Quick sketch afterwards from imagination.

[Bearlaser]

You've got some really cool stuff here. I don't know that I'm in a place to give you too much of a critique and it's somewhat nitpicky but the fingers on the left hand of the chick with horns casting a fire spell seem a bit noodly. I'm excited to see what you'll do in the future :)

[Darantha]

Thank you Bearlaser, very kind of you. :) And yeah, I see what you mean about the hand!







WIP progress.

[Darantha]

Pff, hah, no wonder I couldn't log in, I never changed the password after the last reset. Stupid me.

Anyway, got distracted by life and artstuff, but here's some stuff I've done over the past months.

Character design






Random merman



These two artworks are from some months ago, but I recently updated them. First one is original, the other is Cullen from Dragon Age.






Some other Dragon Age artworks.














Rivani from Pathfinder



Sylvari doodle, Guild Wars 2



Sketches












Will post studies and stuff a little while.