What ImSkeptical learnt this week (Sketchbook)

[JakeB]

Nice studies dude. That BW one of the tennis player (bottom right) especially. Oh man. The brushwork is fantastic. Keep it coming.

[JonHop]

I always enjoy browsing through your updates, great brush work going on with a variety of studies and experimenting with different use of colour. Also Happy birthday! :)

[ImSkeptical]

Brawk - Thanks!

smrrfette - Thanks for the birthday wishes :D, d/w I creep so many artists on the facebooks xD. And yeah it was the cdw sydney workshop at design centre enmore. Were you there? or going there now? Also i checked out your sketchbook, amazing work and work ethic, keep it up! You can already see improvement.

JakeB -Thanks as always bro

JonHop - Thanks again!

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So yeah, been like a month since I updated :(. First it was EVO (the world series of poker equivalent for fighting games), then working over the weekend, then i borrowed demon souls from a friend so i had to finish that after work/weekend for another week, then I was just lazy...

So I gathered the random stuff I did over the month. Looking at it its a bit sad, not so long ago I was doing this much and more in a week. Guess this is the price of working full time. Hopefully I'll be able to get to go to the Bali workshop though, which I guess is the advantage of having money now.

Will see if i can try streaming in the mornings a bit more now though. People don't seem to like twitchtv though, maybe you have to sign up to chat. Shame cause its way better streaming/recording the vods. Here's the stuff.






Studies/imagination sketching




Doin a bunch of random thumbnails. Probably gonna do these till i collect a few worth making into tighter sketches, give me something to work towards. Maybe try and get 30 good ones and do a tight color sketch a day for a month like Miles.

That's all, hopefully i get back into the rhythm of things and be back next week. Waking up at 5am is hard but its gotta get done.

[ImSkeptical]

Well its been 2 years since starting art. Its been a strange year for me, mostly picking up an in house art related job (yay!) that was the main reason I let this sketchbook slide.

That job is over now though, i have mixed feelings about the ~6/7 months I spent working, but all in all it was a good experience, learned a lot, made some great friends. I didn't however, learn or practice as much art as I would've liked, which was probably my main issue with the job. We did a bunch of strange creative stuff, worked on pitches and idea generation, which was awesome; worked on a bunch of advertisement storyboards, which was cool; and I had to work on managing a website, which was god awful terrible. But now that's over so I'm kicking back into high gear, schedule all ready to go (I'm going to use https://habitrpg.com/ if anyone is interested).

In terms of an artistic retrospective, I gathered some stuff I did over the year to just have a look through. I really like using this sketchbook as a way to reflect progress each week, but it doesn't really work so well for an entire year, it felt weird to repost images a few pages back, so in the end I mostly gathered stuff I hadn't been bothered to upload to the sketchbook, and just posted on Facebook. Seeing it all together though, as I suspected while working, my laziness that built up each day of working 9 to 6 (not including 1 hr back n forth travel :( (let me have my excuses)) has hampered the progress I hoped to achieve.

Here's the photo I took last year of all the papers I managed to draw on in my first year of art



Whereas this year,



So impotent :(. And from the huge art dump below, although there is a little bit of improvement, it doesn't really have that dramatic impact you hope for at the end of a year.

At any rate, I'm optimistic about this year. Having saved up some cash, I plan the next 3 months to be super extreme hyperbolic time chamber art grind, before I start job hunting. And this time it's going to be real job hunting, at least 1 hr a week and 1 day a week of purely business related stuff. That kind of stuff is just as important if I wanna get into the whole freelance stuff.

So that's probably all that I can think is worth saying, as always ask any question you like through any means (skype, facebook, forum, stream, emailz)! I like talking :p . Here's an epic art dump.






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First half of the year

























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Tail end of the year






























































Thanks for taking a look! Looking forward to a brand new way more productive year.

[Janos]

hey love your digital paintings keep it up !

when you portrait somebody maybe try to look more for the relationships of nose to eye to ear etc. in your construction phase. thats help to reconstruct the person better

this is pretty cool video for messuring http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzDGO0LssEM

keep it up !

[Jaik]

Good to see you back bud.
Would be interested to hear how your stay at the company went, some positives and negatives of doing it so early in your drawing career.

Cant wait to see what you continue to do :)

[ImSkeptical]

Janos - Thanks man, yeah I think construction and drawing in general is my weakest area! I'll be working on that a lot this week. Also thanks for the link, I forgot Stan has been producing heaps of videos!

Jaik - Good to be back. I can't really think of any more positives or negatives about working, I get the feeling I may have been slightly better off than the other route of doing really low end card work. It also feels really good to have some money lying around now, can buy all kinds of art tutorials and resources. To be honest, it probably wasn't the most efficient choice in getting really good at art, but I think I've made it clear before that I think efficiency is very easily overrated and it is very easy to miss other ways of thinking about a problem if you focus on that facet too much.

[smrr]

Absolutely killer update Skeptical, holy crap!!
It took me ages to look at each piece and take 'em in!

Your personal pieces are fantastic and the amount of hard work you've pumped out is astounding!

Epic stuff, you're definitely on your way!
Keep it up man, looking forward to the next update :D

[atrenr]

Skeptical is back! WOOO! Glad to see you here again, dude. It's great the job turned out to be a good experience! Great update and can't wait for more of them

[Adam Lina]

Daaaamn, you gots skillzzzzz. "Kobrax, Dillon Kobrax" - Dillion Kobrax... lmao!

[rioriorio]

crazy update, so much improvement in a year...
looking forward for the next big update.

[JakeB]

Looks like a solid improvement to me :), your recent work looks much more 'natural' if that makes sense. Everything's a bit more unified, the last piece in the art dump especially came out really well. The job sounds like an interesting experience as well, seems like a lot of people have trouble balancing efficiency with money and work etc, definitely seems like it was worthwhile though (maybe minus the website stuff - I've done a bit of that, boring as shiiiiiit lol)

Love seeing your updates man, keep pushing, looking forward to more soon :).

[Kaffer]

Awesome stuff man, respect for your self-discipline.. Way to go!!

[ImSkeptical]

smrrfette - Thanks! You're getting way better too, love your new pencil stuff.

atrenr - Great to be back, thanks man!

Hypnagogic_Haze - Thanks!

rioriorio - Thank you!

JakeB - Thanks dude!

Kaffer - Thanks man!

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So this week a surprise! I don't know how to format one in a format post, so ill keep the suspense short.

First some art stuff, bit less than I planned because ended up actually going into work for a couple days to do some stuff. Also i resolution, i need to do imagination work with pen or pencil. In digital I realized I don't visualize anything, I just do a rough estimate then push it around till i find it looking correct. So need to train my visualization cause its so damn weak, its probably why I'm so slow.









Okay here is the surprise...

I made a game! I participated in the Global Game Jam ( http://globalgamejam.org/ )with a highschool friend and his friend, and for 48 hours we made a game. Was a crazy experience, totally drained by the end of it. I only got about 5 hours of sleep over the whole time, but it was totally awesome.

So middle of the week we had a google hangout and did a little pre jam session of about 4 hrs to get a loose idea how we would approach making a game, and how long it would take. So we did a quick exercise remaking the game Samurai Gunn ( http://maxistentialism.com/samuraigunn/ ). So I developed a style I thought might fit making a game that needed to be finished and presentable quickly. I picked pirates because I thought they fit the idea of swords and guns that Samurai Gunn has.




We didn't manage to produce anything playable, but I know I at least got a handle how i would be designing, animating and painting.

So on game day, we got the theme, which was

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."

We had a bunch of ideas, but in the end we decided on doing a smashbrothers type brawler. Basically you would play as this spirit that can jump between animals, and depending on the animal you are, you would have different predators and prey. In the end though, we only managed to do 3 animals, a cat, snake and bird. Turns out I was wrong about the style too, still takes ages to get anything done :(





Here's a video of us playing the game.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnzpzIAedEc

So that's that! Now I have a game to my name, no matter how unfinished it is compared to where we wanted, its totally playable. Hopefully we will host somewhere if anyone is interested in playing it. Will defiantly try to be doing more game design and game work like animation in the future, it was crazy fun. Met some great people too, so many great games to try out at the end of it.

Next week will probably be less exciting, but there we go. Actually going to learn some programming on the side to just to be able to have such a useful skill for games, I started a while ago, but it was only like a couple hours a week. Gonna try to do a couple hours a day, see where it takes me. As always thanks for looking.

[Doolio]

Your "memory" is as good as your "study", I'm jelly:D

One small thing, it kinda haunts me:) The witch sketch, her thumb is on the wrong side:D

[JakeB]

Posted in here less than 24 hrs ago, but the game looks too awesome to ignore. You got so much done in 48 hours. The style works really well, it's a cool idea, you made it playable. Inspiring stuff man.

As a sidenote, loving your really brushy studies. You're managing to get a lot of movement in them, looks great :)

[ImSkeptical]

Doolio - Yeah lol, two right hands :(. Momentary lapse of concentration and there you go, dumb mistakes.

Jake B - Thanks man, still working on developing that better design sence in mark making. I think you're really good at that, at least compared to me. You got all these graphic design sensibilities coming through in your recent stuff that looks killer.

[Heliux]

Ah man. This sketchbook is a treasure trove of good advice and links! I appreciate how methodical you are. I feel like time drawing and not thinking is wasted time...and I've wasted a lot of time. --Inspires me to really pump it up a notch and consider what I'm doing! X)
Congrats on your job! -can't wait to see more opportunities slide your way for the hard work! XD

[meat]

Before I crawl back into my mouse hole from shock of all these work, just wanna ask:

1. What are you doing your gestures from?
2. How long did those tennis, full color, painted studies took you each?
3. Love that epic rainbow bridge!
4. How do you draw so much in a week! Or how do you stop yourself from spending too much time on one study? An alarm clock? A wrist watch?

[ImSkeptical]

Heliux - Thanks man, always cool to hear! Looking forward to see what you get done, make sure to share :D

meat - 1. I mostly do the gestures from http://www.quickposes.com/ and http://artists.pixelovely.com/practice-t...e-drawing/ , but just this week I'm starting to realise that they have some limitations, and i personally need to branch out. They aren't the best for extreme angles and the poses can be pretty generic. I've been trying to do these fighting poses from imagination last few weeks, and I finally realised this week I could solve my problems by looking for more specific reference. But for learning muscle memory of manipulating generalized forms and shapes of the body, a decent generalized mental library of poses, foreshortening, construction... there's heaps of stuff to learn from doing a bunch of gesture studies from those 2 sites. Really got into them again after Alex Negrea reintroduced them to me at the Bali workshop, I think a big problem I had with them before, and that other people seem to have too, is not being specific enough, or being way to rough. 1 minute is really enough time to do something that looks pretty damn complete.

2. I'm pretty sure I did those when Miles Johnston was doing those daily streams, motivating me to start studying in the morning before work. So it was probably 1 to 2 hrs for each. Note I wasn't trying to match colors, I was choosing them formulaiclly, so that might have made it even faster.

3. Thanks!

4. Well, its mainly because I'm not working and my parents seem fine with me hanging around doing my own thing for almost every hour of the day (at least when it became obvious I was serious about it). Also all my friends, who are great friends, are videogame nerds so we just hang out on mumble (voip chatroom) so I don't feel too lonely. I also go out once a week to play streetfighter and boardgames with them, so my social life is pretty set, minus a girlfriend :(

When I was working, I did almost nothing. And you might think I drew at work, but it was a strange job, and I did draw quite a bit, but most days I would be doing all this weird stuff, usually very creative, but not drawing or painting.

So yeah, if you have no work, you aren't too depressed, and you have a bunch of time to dedicate to art, I guess some tricks are

- Yes, use a timer, but if you planned to do a long study then just do a really long study, make that shit look right. I also believe in taking midday naps if you're tired. Plan what you want to work on the next day. Do stuff when you wake up before you eat breakfast and check Facebook (like 30 minutes).

- Balance how much intense learning/study/full concentration you do in a day with more casual stuff you can listen to podcasts and such; I believe you can only do so much of the hard stuff in a day, and spread out over the day, not in a big chunk, use a timer to check you aren't just wussing out though, concentrate for at least 30 minute blocks.

- One of the biggest time wasters is things that can interrupt you not by your choice, so if you have notifications for Facebook and email, or a parent or manager that comes in at random times to check what your doing; try think if you can find solutions for these.

- Think about things you spend time on and consider if you can cut it down or modify your approach, but get the same result. At minimum be very very conscious about how much time its taking; examples are like looking for reference, uploading stuff, how/when you check on Facebook, if you get hungry do you forage or have a planned food, do you have a playlist or do you search for your music, etc.

There are plenty of other efficiency tips, there's a pretty big community out there focused around entrepreneurs and blogs. Tim Ferris who did '4 hr work week' I think is a pretty safe source to start exploring from if you're interested. But like I've said before efficiency can be easily given too much weight. Make sure what your doing is important, and has a good chance of working before you go crazy with efficiency. Those problems are usually way harder and way more important, and you sometimes have to be really inefficient to find solutions for them.



Hmm, got a bit carried away with answering those questions, hope I helped xD.
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So this week was pretty slow. Recovering from the 48 hr jam, seeing friends off going overseas, weddings... bunch of random things. So I mostly did traditional stuff when I could. This was especially because I think its a better place to train memory and imagination stuff, because you can erase and undo and try again till it looks right; you have to actually visualize :p. And yeah, as I mentioned above, in trying to do these fighting poses from imagination, realizing I'm terrible as ever at no ref, so here's to a week of working on improving my drawing.















Super awesome sweet angled photo shots of traditional work to cover up mistakes :p. It was mostly because trying to photo without distortion is pretty damn annoying. Anyway, thanks for reading/looking. Hopefully some more flashy paintings next week!