chubbycat's sketchbook!

[chubbycat]

With October upon us, it's time to reflect on my progress over September and make some new goals!

The crossed out goals have been achieved for the month of September
--SEPTEMBER--
- Learn something new each day
- Create a speed paint (or sketch) from imagination each day. I need to stop relying so heavily on references
- Finish Andrew Loomis' Figure Drawing book, along with Michael Hampton Figure Drawing
- Create proper illustrations; fully rendered and going through and getting comfortable with the pipeline.
- Create my very first pieces of concept art (this will probably not occur until around mid to end Sept)
- Excerise at least three times a week
- Become more active on art forums
- Post to instagram more frequently
- Cut down my hours at my part-time job, stop taking additional shifts, and make art my 8-6 job everyday I possibly can

All in all, not bad. I didn't achieve all of my goals, but I did manage to hit a few key points. I'm posting my work more online, which I am proud of because it's always a hard thing to do. I'm doing 'daily' speedpaints and although they aren't from imagination, I'm learning a lot about colour.


Here are my most recent speedpaints. Still struggling with time vs eyeing up colours but this is something I'll get better with over time.



Now, for my goals for October!! A new month awaits and I'm ready to push myself even harder

--OCTOBER--

- Continue with my daily speedpaints. As of the 1st, I have completed 15 out of the 129 imagines on the site.

- Get back into traditional drawings. Create an image a day purely out of imagination and no references. 

- Participate in inktober. I'm not going to create something every day, but I'd like to at least make a few imagines.

- Continue my portrait study series - create one portrait a week

- Create one rendered Master Study a week

- Start focusing more on anatomy again

- Draw full body images because hey, we all have a bad habit of drawing people from the waist up

- Conquer my fear of drawing male faces.

- Keep making illustrations

- Make a piece of concept art for my portfolio

- Keep being active on instagram

- Become MORE active on art forums and facebook groups

So there we have it, quite a lot of goals but they will be manageable as long as I manage the little free time I have wisely.  

[chubbycat]

20-30min colour studies from this week

[chubbycat]

Still here.

I've been on a mini-hiatus from art forums, however, I've actually been working harder than ever on my art. Concept art is something I want to pursue as a career, so recently I've decided to bite the bullet and actually produce some concepts. To ease myself into it, I have decided to work on a couple of weapon designs before going into characters. For this I went with a viking theme and modeled the designs in relation to four different characters I have planned. They are just the quick thumbnails concepts I have selected and I plan to bring them into being fully rendered images for my portfolio.

[chubbycat]

Working on another portrait study. Feels good to be back drawing faces. Couldn't resist drawing the queen ;) Will be painting this soon.

Any C&C on this would be greatly appreciated. It was a struggle with the perspective 

[neopatogen]

Looks great! It would be easier to crit if you attached the reference for this study.

[chubbycat]

Thanks neopatogen.

Here's the ref I used for her. Since posting this, I've altered the size of her nostrils and made them smaller.

[chubbycat]

Finished Lagertha. Onto refining my value understanding now.

[chubbycat]

Been hiding away and working on values this past week. I applied what I learnt to a mini portrait series but not overly convinced on the values.. need to study more. It was also my first time painting faces without relying on line art to guide me (you can probably tell by the quality of the faces haha). Even though the results aren't amazing, I'm beginning to feel more comfortable straying away from line art and not relying on it so much.


REF:

[Artloader]

Very nice work on those faces without line work dude! I've been trying to switch from line to values too but still find myself reverting to lines when the going get's tough!

Keep going mate :).

[chubbycat]

Thank you so much @Artloader :) I know what you mean.. I do the same too when I've hit a tricky spot haha. Thanks man, good luck for your studies too! Let's crush this

[chubbycat]

Working on character concept thumbnails. Would like to take one of these to a fully rendered concept illustration. 

[chubbycat]

More character thumbnails. This time male viking themed n__n

Tackling my struggles of drawing men  

[NoodleInBox]

Those thumbnails look sick :O such a cool idea! The feet of the last guy on the right look a bit like he is floating. Well its still great anyways *.*

[Vandall]

Thumbnails look great can't wait to see more perhaps try to start some of them with gesture figures to add or preserve some dynamic/fluid feeling to the poses

[chubbycat]

Thanks guys! :D I'm glad you both are liking the concepts

@NoodleInBox: I completely agree with the feet floating comment. The leg part of the pose was painted from imagination, so the feet are something I ended up overlooking, oops :S As someone who has the utterly bad habit of drawing characters from the waist up, I find feet to be very intimidating haha.

@Vandall: Yea, a lot of them ended up being quite rigid in the end, sadly. I'm not use to drawing 'neutral' poses, so that didn't help much. I'm thinking I want to pose the end design entirely differently.. maybe with his axe resting on his shoulder. I'll definitely push the gesture when I start drawing the character properly :)

Again, thanks for the feedback guys, it helps so much

For anyone curious, out of my female designs I'll be taking the top middle one further. Out of my viking male, it'll either be top right or bottom middle.. still undecided haha

[chubbycat]

Current progress of my female character concept

In other exciting news, I have finally made a twitter! You can follow me for more art (and life) updates n_____n @Amanda__Howes

[chubbycat]

Testing out colour compositions 

[chubbycat]

Working on my viking design. Still not 100% sold on how he looks.. crit very welcome on this piece!

[AngeliquevdMee]

I really like what you do for studies, i guess what i could say as a tip for the last guy is make sure the tattoo's and clothes follow the curves of the body. Right now they are just slapped on, like if you look at the arm the round tat should have a bit of a curve to it. The fabric above his belt is also not following that curve. Another thing if you want to be really good at linework i suggest you try out to work with different lineweights, it's a nice skill to obtain in my opinion and it is more appealing to the eye :)

[chubbycat]

Thanks AngeliquevdMee! I agree with the tattoos needing to follow the contour of the body a bit more. I'll make sure I fix up the issues! I intend to discard the lineart layer once I get into painting mode but you're definitely right, lineweights make an image pop so much and they are something I would love to practice once I have more time.

Once again, thanks for the crit :)