Jaik's Sketches & Thoughts

[Blewzen]

Is nice that u try things out of your comfort zone, great thumbs i love the 4 and 5, cool designs!

[Jaik]

Thanks Tygerson, Danny, Raz, Cracked, Mario, MrJovi, and blewzen! :D I appreciate all of your support.

Yolo: Thanks I will look out for those next time. Sometimes seeing the back muscles is hard especially when the people in the pics aren't body builders lol. Looking forward to life drawing to apply these lessons.

Lyraina: My monitor is 27", it works alright, since its a beast of a screen. Though I sometimes wonder whether a M wouldnt have been better or sufficient. But I didn't want to buy an M then think 'oh I would have loved the larger one'
Also its a chainmail brush I made after looking at the ref and trying to work out repeating patterns. And yeah, edges are my arch nemesis at the moment and values.. >_> sigh.

Thanks Kidult. I will try and apply that to this upcoming illustration.

Dracken: Haha yeah, I think that definitely is one of the harder things to do, especially with long illustrations. But I will get back to it.

Samszym: I tried the black silhouette thing, it didnt work for me, I think for sci fi my visual library isn't strong enough to actually see what shapes are, instead they just look like mess.


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Alright, so bloodsports moved along this week. Next week may have a lot more or a lot less. I am house sitting for my bosses over on their property, nice in nature and all that jazz. Beautiful house. So I am not sure how disruptive that will be to my study patterns, however it could also be beneficial since I would be alone in the middle of no where with no family to distract me. We shall see.

Bloodsports continues to force me to make a basecamp wayyy outside my comfort zone. Doing turn arounds isn't something I have had practice with and they seem to take a lot longer than I thought they would. Implying detail still isnt easy for me, so I have to render out everything.. I need to watch more sci fi movies or play more sci fi games (yeah, right.. games :[ ) just to build up what is in a sci fi design..

Anyway anatomy first, finished off the beans, I will replace my daily warm up (which is usually 60min of gestures) with the beans for a month or so just to really nail them. They also really help with line quality, I find I am drawing much smoother lines since practicing them.








Starting arm anatomy


Bloodsports ----

I am not sure whether I will continue putting up the early thumbnails for stuff like this. I am not sure whether people want to see it, and it really extends out the length of the post lol.

Pet thumbnails, decided to go with the fox. I enjoyed it more than the others.




Char turn around.


Pet design (based of the study lol, I am lazy >.>)


Final composition thumbs






And the studies, the jaime jones study was for how I wanted to render the final image. I am not sure whether I will succeed in this because I tried to do it in my character turn around and it just failed...

[Samszym]

I tried the black silhouette thing, it didnt work for me, I think for sci fi my visual library isn't strong enough to actually see what shapes are, instead they just look like mess.

Ah, in my opinion that's exactly what's supposed to happen! working in silhouette forces you to decide on the design in terms of simple shapes and readability, so there's no risk of getting lost in details or things that won't really read. Once you come up with a shape you're excited about the next step is going into it and drawing to make sense of what the shapes actually are. Sorta like seeing a really awesome cloud shape and then saying " that cloud is a _____ "
But if that technique doesn't work for ya I won't push it any more, do what works best!

Bean shapes and torso studies are looking great, especially those boxes. great way to really decide where things are going in space. Hoping to see some more developed figures built with the bean as a starting point! You're sure to improve fast with that much work going into it, best of luck dude :)

[rioriorio]

the bean practices is great jake, for jaime jones study, no one can success in one try, so keep trying and find the problem and solution in the study. Keep improving jake.

[VegardS]

Great studies, keep it up! I gotta draw some bean myself look really helpfull:D

[Lyraina]

The nice thing about a huge wacom is that you can always make them smaller if you want. The active area I mean, not the space it takes on your desk :p

Aah, bean and robo bean.. you wouldn't think something simple like that bean thing would really help with drawing figures, but they really do! If you grow bored with the beans (60 minutes every day sounds aweful boring after a few days), why not try to do figure gestures applying the bean-body? Bean with limbs or so...

Beautiful house out in nature sounds like a cool place to make art :D

[razvanb08]

Ohh man. The sci fi hunter and pet is coming out nicely. I wouldn't keep the mechanical tail on the fox, dosen't make much sense, but the exoskeleton idea around the legs seems legit :).
Keep it up man!

[dracken]

Great to see so many torso studies, and nice progress on the illustration, can't wait to see how it evolves.

Inspiring stuff here.

Keep pushing and Good luck!

[Tygerson]

Thanks for the lighting explanation! That was really helpful.

The sci-fi hunter and fox is looking great! You're clearly putting a lot of thought in it. I like how you tested out different values and such. Can't wait to see it done!

[smrr]

Whoa, Jaik!!!
Those Bloodsport designs are looking so killer! Especially digging the space-dog (as I call him :3)
As for the Jaime Jones study, great work so far! I like how you're doing it your way. You're making it you, you're challenging yourself even more so and that's super.

Keep up the hard work... you inspiring piece of man you!

[JonHop]

Awesome scifi comp, but i think you should enlarge the thumb instead of sketching it again as you are losing some of the thumbnails better traits (just a suggestion feel free to ignore it lol). and very nice design on the sci fi creature, looking forward to seeing how the final illustration turns out! Keep pushing yourself!

[Bjulvar]

Such a profilic update mate!
Love that you're redoing old Bloodsports and I assume that you'll try and continue with more! I like the designs too. I guess I would suggested thinking about having both of their designs connected in a way, could be a really small thing! Just to give that bond.
The initial design of the fox feels really dynamic and it's a bit lost in the line version. If I were you I'd go back before continuing and play with the silhouette.

Anyways, really inspiring stuff! Great work on the Jaime Jones study. Have a bunch of his stuff up when rendering the Bloodsports piece and try to observe and replicate his brushwork! Looking forward to seeing it progress dude :D

[ramalooke]

Tons of awesome stuff since my last visit. I love the knight study, it has some nice color going on. To bad you didn't finish armor monkey piece. I'm really curious how it'll come out ;) Anyway, great updates. Keep up the hard work ;)

[Jaik]

Samszym: I should give it another try. Maybe I will try it out with the next bloodsports. good suggestion :) I also tried out your suggestion of adding arms and legs to the bean.

Thanks Rio, you are right. :)

Thanks VegardS

Lyraina: I may or may not be set up on a dining table at the moment because it is the only place that I can fit in this house lol. :P

Thanks Raz :) The metal on the tail is actually as a counterweight for the added weight in the front of the fox. If it didn't have this it wouldnt be able to jump :P

Thanks Dracken :)

Thanks Tygerson

Yay Smrr is back :D I feel like I am a disappointment this week :(

Interesting suggestion JonHop, I'll try enlarging the small thumb next time, instead of redrawing. I think I can see what you mean, it does loose a lot of energy.

Bjulvar: Thanks man. You are right, the design link was one of the more important parts of the assignment and I didn't succeed at that. All those things you suggested I should have done if I had more time.. I will try and apply them to the next one though. I think that is the most important thing to take away from doing these BS's. We will be doing the next one soon, you should join us! :)

Rama: I will finish it! I swear >.> I put too much effort in to it to not finish it, just a few things in the works at the moment :)

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Well.. there is practically nothing to update art wise this week.

This week I moved in to the house I am sitting till the end of January and one of the provisos of this is that I work full time for the business, which is good because I need the money, but bad because it ups me to a full time work week as well as settling in to a new place.

This week also marked the end of the two week period for Bloodsports 1 for me and Lyraina. We will be doing Bloodsports 2 on the first Monday of February, so we are planning on putting up a thread in community activities so that other people can join as well. I think this is a very beneficial exercise as it allows you to see the areas you otherwise don't realise you struggle with (for me, finishing an illustration to the level I want in two weeks is insanely difficult).

I also have 90% finished the traditional oil painting I have been doing for my girlfriends birthday on Tuesday, which has been taking up a lot of time, because normally if I do a painting for someones birthday, it comes to them several months late. Doesn't quite work this time lol.

The website is about 40% coded into HTML, so that is moving along fairly slowly but steadily. Hopefully I will have it finished by the end of January.

This weeks two images:

Trying out the suggestion to add arms to my beans.


Okay now Bloodsports. I really am not happy with this. I failed terribly at the Jaime Jones style (thinking about stroke, value, colour and form all at once was too much when I didn't have a pipeline in place for even creating an image like this) so I changed tact and went with a borderlands 2 sort of style. It didn't quite make it, but it was an interesting style to try and emulate, I might try and do it again in the future. A lot of fun.
I wanted to add a second fox to show more of the design of the fox, but ran out of time. I will still try and finish the character turn around so that I can add that to it. I really did learn a lot about process in this but it also took a lot longer than I was planning. So there were no anatomy studies to do.

/end fail update.

[dracken]

Don't say you failed. You tried new things and used a new style. Of course it could be better but everything we do could be better :P

If you had fun and learned something you did not fail!

Good luck with the work and move and try to do even quick sketches when you have time down, it all adds up, even 5 minutes of imagination sketches here and there.

[Lyraina]

Don't push yourself too hard with all those things going on, different house, more work, gf's birthday and present etc - do you even sleep? D:

And I agree with dracken, as long as you learnt something you didn't fail! I still think it turned out cool. And hey, we still have a few Bloodsports left to make badass paintings ;)
We should let our hunters and the pets duel one day - my cat would eat your fox alive :P Not so sure about the hunter though...

[ramalooke]

Sweet Jaik. This new update and illustration wip is looking very promising. It's like completely new level. Go Jaik go!

[rioriorio]

the bloodsport looks clean jake, it's not fail when you can learn new things, one thing about the bloodsport, make interaction between the man and the fox. Like example, just make the man looking down on the fox.

Keep improving jake.

[Blewzen]

The bloodsport piece is looking nice mate, i can feel you tried hard to make it cool, just keep doing these things I'm sure it makes you improve!

[Jaik]

Dracken: Thanks, you are right, I guess its about the journey not the destination :D

Lyraina: We totally should.. I don't think my fox would do so well.. Your hunter definitely would have won if it was glowing pink.. Should have made the change!

Ramalooke: illustration wip? Oh god, it doesnt even look finished *crawls into hole and dies* lol jks :P

Thanks Rio, I was trying to make the fox look like it was smelling the thing in his hand.. which was supposed to be a story cue.. But I think I failed at doing that. The 'exaggerate everything an extra 30%' is something I need to take into account more often.

Thanks Blewzen :D I tried.. I tried oh so hard...

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Hey Guyssss, so it seems like the first month of 2014 is already almost over. Usually this would be the last post of the month, but after I have finished house sitting in this beautiful place I am off to the Hunter Valley, which is the local wine growing country around here for a weekend with the girlfriend for her birthday, so there will be no computer.. But I have been playing around with water colours lately so maybe I will be able to do some watercolors :D

So before I go posting work I really want to point this out (ImSkeptical mentioned it in his sketchbook) so I looked in to it and Holy Crap.. This is amazing. habitrpg.com It's like a video game.. except to win you have to succeed at life. Its so good. You level up and can eventually get pets, which you can turn in to mounts. You get stats that help and damnit, just look at the link. So amazing. Just dinged level 2 last night :D Which is good because I was at half health from being unable to get up 15min earlier every day -___-

Also this week I discovered the importance of diet. Since I am here on my own, normally at home I just eat what ever the family cooks, or at least I have the option of whats in the pantry.. Here I sort of failed at doing any kind of shopping.. so my choices were eggs, bread, cheese, grapes and onions.... The last couple of mornings I have woken up feeling so terrible and a multivitamin instantly makes me feel better. (Today was the worst, because yesterday I ran out of grapes and bread.. so I had an omlette and onion sandwhich for dinner last night, where the omlette replaced bread...) So yeah, all in all, diet is important people. Eat healthy and exercise and all that jazz..

if you cant tell I am rambling a bit because I haven't had a conversation with someone other than the post man for 4 days... god I am lonely... I dont know how freelancers do it....

On the plus side, I got into a routine, and although I had to work everyday, getting up at 5-6am and doing the days work before 9 meant I could still draw all day. And get paid more. Bonus. But because I don't have my family to 'distract' me to take breaks, I find by 9pm I am wayy too tired to go on most days. So I guess I have to weigh that up.. because I still procrastinate until around 11 so its not like I get more sleep -___-


Heres the anatomy. I really want to finish the arm before the end of January, so I still have extensors left to do then I am good. I wanted to get as much of the body done as possible before life drawing started back up on the 6th of Feb.







And warm up gestures, I decided mid week to just focus on arms (much better for applying what I was learning) So here is a page


I started doing the 30min daily still lifes. These are actually quite fun.


Sketcharoos



And now this is the Itachi fan art I am working on, I included the most distilled page of thumbs, and the colour comps. Just to show process I guess? I dont know.. See how it goes. Experimenting with different pipelines.






Also, first time trying this Fibonacci spiral thing.. Am I using it right? I read up a bit on it and it seemed to make sense but yeah..



And finally here is the oil painting I did for the girlfriends birthday. Its of the town her family grew up in in Croatia, Lumbarda or something.. P.s. Oil painting is hard >_> most of the time is spent on things you done see (mixing colours) but it's interesting to see that you can improve in one medium even if you pretty much work exclusively in another (oil painting vs. digital)