Beard Clippings

[Blunt Pencil]

Really great stuff you got going here. It's awesome that you take most of your stuff to finish. I wish I had that too. I do see some things that can be improved upon.

Firstly the chicken warrior piece, it has some issues regarding clothing. The cape of the chicken guy & the sleeve of the white wolf (is it? I'm sorry if it's something else) is not feeling right. Cloths wrinkle from tension points. The wrinkles in the mentioned clothings don't make much sense. Also take into account the quality of the clothing. A cotton shirt, a jeans trouser & a suit will all wrinkle in different way. Also the hand of the chicken guy is a little big. I'm not so sure b/c I don't know if you intend the face to be human sized or not. If it is human sized then the hands are bigger than they should be. The mood & atmospheric depth is really nice. I really like the idea of having goofy anthropomorphic characters but they're badass warriors, it's a fun contrast.

On your post #131, the 1st character design suffers from having a similar contrast background & having too many colors on them too. & the hands are a little bit bigger again & arms are too long. Great job on the pose & facial expression. Really bring out the character. Pay closer attention to legs they look a little wonky, relax one leg. The 2nd character design also suffers from wonky legs. Can't tell which one has the weight, & they're too straight. & hands are big too. Again great job on the posing & characters.

On your post #132, the 1st character design (the one in green dress) has the big hand problem going on again. Also lose contrast in the bg for more pop on the guy.

Post #134, the third image, has issue with clothing again. the cape & cloth on the waist doesn't seem believable. Specifically the cloth on the waist won't work that way in that situation.

The character design on post #137 has the big hand problem going on. I think the head size fine though.

Also looking at some of the latest post, your understanding of facial planes isn't sound. I suggest you do some more studies of the planes. Also put focus on keeping your colors clean. They're getting muddy sometimes.

As for fixing the clothing issue, I suggest some life studies, really easy to set up & do one. Also do some from photos. take a lot superhero drawings by the likes of Adam Hughes, Marko Djurdjevic, Bryan Hitch, Leinel Yu etc for stuff like flowing capes.
Resolving the hand issue is a simple matter of being aware of it, & if in confusion hold you hand in a similar position near your face.

I'm afraid that I might be a little late to say these things, but hopefully you can get something out of them. Again I msut say awesome stuff, keep going. DON"T STOP POSTING :)

[Patrick Gaumond]

Thanks man! Except for the hands those are all things I've actually been trying to resolve since they're my biggest weaknesses besides design. Thanks for pointing out the hands, now that you mention it they do seem a bit big. In some of them like the chicken piece it was a bit intentional, in others the logic was that they were wearing big gauntlets so maybe it should be bigger. I guess it should be exaggerated more if thats the case? And in others I guess i just fucked up! Lol! And yea, fabric....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbd4t-ua...rjimmyhush

I've been getting a bit of rsi in my ring finger on my left hand of all places, because that's where I have brush size +/-, so since saturday I've been letting it cool down and went back to traditional media and have been doing gesture and anatomy work for a while. Feels good taking a break from imaginative work and really focusing on studying! It's been getting better pretty steadily so hopefully by the weekend I can resume my regular working schedule

[Jaik]

Wow man, you have been doing so much work! Good job, loving all of it, especially the one with the guy jumping on the other guys head. Its so dynamic!

Great work man, really good stuff.

[Patrick Gaumond]

thanks jake! I'm loving your environments lately by the way!

Some studies




Sketches and practice

[Patrick Gaumond]

Some studies













also fixed this guy, then recropped the last sketch and finished it up

[Patrick Gaumond]

Been a while since I posted here!

Last two months I took some moocs on coding and working in Unity, so a lot of my time has been taken up by that. Learned a ton but I still managed to draw just about everyday. The coding class just finished yesterday so i will be going back to the old schedule plus learning some 3D in blender and continuing with the Unity class, which is self paced, but most of my time will be back to drawing and painting. More recently my dad has been in bad shape and is in ICU so the last week or so I haven't done too much of anything. Trying to stay busy anyways

Here's the stuff I've done since. Mixture of studies, applications and personal work. 

Seems I still struggle with faces, and now I'm sure part of the problem is trying to start straight with painting. All the straight painted ones from imagination are lacking a lot in structure but when I start with lines they look better and I can try out different shapes and features easier

[Bookend]

Looking pretty amazing! Keep up the great work.

[Punk-A-Cat]

I'm in love with that dragon, wow.. awesome!
Your faces, the painted ones, I feel like I wanna say go look at the skull structure around the eye, I am no expert at all, but I just feel there isn't quite enough eye socket and nose back into the face space? I could be utterly off track however, I'm just a newb :D

[Rana_E]

I pretty much looked at your entire sketchbook and read your discipline article. The work you've done on both is quite inspiring. You've definitely leveled up! Quite a huge bit. Keep posting and updating, I hope to see more from you soon. I also followed you on Deviant Art :3

[maggie]

Hey Patrick! I haven't visited your sketchbook in a while but now I see so much improvement in your last post! That's awesome and also so inspiring :) I'm looking forward to seeing more updates here ^^

[BlueBear]

sweet studies ,i really like that chariot piece , with the dragons one i think the saturation is a bit too high , but keep it up!

[Rhasdra]

Your storytelling skills are amazing!

I love the dragon sketches! And great studies, keep this up!

[Mechanizoid]

Hey Patrick, good to see you still practicing and improving your skills! Sorry to hear that your dad's in the ICU, though, hope he feels better soon.

Looking forward to your next updates, I dare not ask for more frequent updates 'cause I'm so slooooow myself. But I'm planning to finally start a new SB here at Crimson Daggers! :)

[Patrick Gaumond]

Hello good Daggers! It has been ages but I have finally set aside the time to pop back in after being lured back in from a comment left by Koala man on my Deviant art from a while ago :)  A lot has changed since my last visit, but I'll try to get everything in. I have also taken a gander through the recent sketchbook updates and it's really inspiring not only to see people keep improving, but seeing the persistent participation in this community! I was a bit surprised to see the community still up and running.

TLDR; Life circumstances got in the way and I took a job outside of art for the last 2 years while studying as much as i could muster outside of work. Just about every digital work I've done in that period will be below. I have included some traditional stuff here too but theres a lot omitted as well, if theres any interest I can try to shoot them and upload them here.

Long version below; ( I'm mostly posting here to collect my thoughts, though feel free to read it)

The last time i posted 2 years ago, my dad had been in the ICU for a heart attack he suffered. It was a very close call, but he pulled through in the end and is doing well today, though he's been off work since. Around the same time, one of my cats that I had been raising from a kitten got ill and i unfortunately mustered a large vet bill suddenly that I couldn't pay, and couldn't keep relying on my family to help pay for things. 

To try to pay for it, I sent out my work to every studio that I felt I could work for, replied to ads on reddit and deviantart for small indie jobs, and also applied for a bunch of jobs in my area both art wise and regular entry type jobs (think bagging groceries, stocking shelves, etc). I unfortunately wasn't able to get any of the art gigs i applied for, or was given vague promises of pay in the future after kickstarters... the usual deal. I couldn't accept these in the circumstances i was in at the time.

I also didn't get much luck with about 9/10 of the regular positions i applied for, except for 2! I got an interview at a health food mart which went well, but I never received a call back.. I also applied for a position in a video game QA outsourcing firm. I was reluctant to ever work there, as reviews of QA posts in general, and specifically for the ones where I live made me skeptical to say the least. Despite that, i needed the cash as we all do at some point, so i applied regardless and actually, much to my surprise, got an over-email exam to get in. It went well enough that I got called in for a paid training session soon after.

I honestly didn't know what to expect from it, as it was my first regular job, and in an unconvential career path, but to my surprise it was actually a very rewarding and informative experience. There were some inner demons that I had to learn to deal with, in terms of properly working with other human beings. By that, I mean that it was the first time that i was really working in a team with other people where there wasn't an "adult" presence, so to speak... it sounds childish perhaps, especially to some of you with more life experience maybe, but my experience up to that point always involved an authority figure in the form of a teacher, and it was fairly difficult for a student for example to actually get punished for something in a long term way. Suddenly in the professional world, most things don't fly anymore; employers offer much less wiggle room for small behaviours that may have previously been ignored, and your own career is now at stake, so any and all issues i had had to be resolved. (re reading this, it sounds like I may be a terribly human being or something, but I'm trying to say more that there were certain professional behaviours I lacked more than anything)

On top of this, I was fortunate enough to be placed on a long term project (projects typically last 2 weeks to 3 months, this one was around 10) with a lead who was willing to help me develop my skills in order to move up in QA. I got the opportunity to co-lead some of the testers. This was only an opportunity, not a promotion proper. But I have to say, at first it was pretty challenging. It was easy to get stressed out doing all that all of a sudden, but i'm glad I took the opportunity nonetheless as a learning experience.

Eventually, the managers at the company were looking for members for their "Hit Squad", which is their term for testers sent over to Dev studios to work in house for a time, as contractors. The clients were specifically looking for more technically minded QA, who had some experience working in game engines like Unity or Unreal. Thankfully, the summer before, right before my Dad and cats had their health scares, I had been taking some programming courses from MIT open courseware on Ed-X, and was also dabbling in Unity tutorials and learning about game engines and game design. I never really thought anything of it, as I was just learning this stuff as a hobby, but it ended up paying off, and they chose me to join a senior tester to head over to a newly formed studio where I live.

That studio was EA Motive, which has been working on the singleplayer campaign portion of the upcoming battlefront 2. To keep a long story short, the studio was brand new and was beginning to need QA support, but all the candidates that they were looking at were not yet available at the time they needed them. So we had the odious task of essentially setting up the project from a QA perspective. 

I can't even begin to describe how much i learned from my senior on that project, and how much i learned from the other QA that joined afterwards. Suffice it to say though, that I ultimately applied for a position at  Motive proper (not as an outsourcer) and was given a 1 year contract with them, which just ended about 2 weeks ago. Since the managers were made aware of my interest in concept art, I ended up doing mostly art QA in which i acted as a support for the art teams in VFX, lighting and character modelling/rigging. I was also lucky enough to have a brief mentorship stint with a couple of the concept art folks there, who were kind enough to give me a ton of feedback on my work and even do some paintovers live in front of me o.o

So why the blackout in my posting? Well, earlier in that same summer with all the health scares, i also for some reason decided that it would be a good idea to get into lots of arguments on the internet. Often about trivial game related things, but also sometimes about the great taboo of politics/religion, and often with people whom i considered my friends. I eventually realized it was contributing massively to my stress and anxiety levels, and that I should stop going on the internet, and stop getting salty when discussing potentially controversial subjects. This may sound strange, but after i had experienced what it was like to nearly lose someone, i became a bit of a health nut myself to try to minimize the risks of unexpectedly passing away and causing pain to my family and friends, so i decided to totally blackout internet at the same time to reduce stress levels. I went as far as to enable plugins that completely disable youtube comments, and even changed my facebook password to some absolute nonsense to avoid being able to easily get back on it (easy enough to request a lost password, but the gesture was symbolic more than anything). (also,Somewhat ironically, the tipping point for all this came about after an argument on youtube about the first battlefront game from dice...) 

This was probably the most beneficial thing I've ever done for my own sanity. Yes, i lost some possibly valuable feedback from my peers, and i also lost some of the peer pressure associated with posting online and constantly seeing other artists work, but removing all the noise around that helped me gain so, so much clarity on my self and my own work.

Art wise, since i now i had an income for the first time in my life, i decided to a) pay off all debts, b) be as financially independent as possible (pay for my own things) but still support my family financially(my dad was the main breadwinner in the family, and with him off work the rest of my family needed the financial support) and c) invest a lot into my art education. 

For around 3 months or so i attended Watts Online. i didn't get very far into it, only reaching the head part of the course, but the information and focus on repetition was super valuable. I also enrolled in some courses from Proko and from Aaron blaise, both of whom i had enjoyed their free content previously, but their paid content was a nice addition. And i also bought a ton of art books to look through. I didn't do much studying from these, but i stumbled across some art works that have been very formative and have helped me find myself a bit more stylistically (Previously I had been struggling to settle on what i actually wanted to do. It's still a mystery, but I feel like i have a better direction than before). I also invested in upgrading from a laptop to an actual desktop. If you're still working on an electric potato like i was at the time, please, do yourself a favor and invest in a a new machine! I'm still amazed to this day how much artistic clarity I've gained while working simply to not having to fight against my tools, and have a steady, reliable workstation to use.

The last major thing art wise I have been doing is focusing almost exclusively on imaginative work and on linework, either as a basis for a painting or as a drawing on it's own(almost to a fault). I felt like i got stuck in a rut with the study-apply format of art learning, and it was high time i put my accumulated knowledge to the test. So, a good chunk (though not all) of the stuff I'll post below is strictly from imagination, particularly as they move forward into more recent things. One big drawback i noticed from this is that I feel like I've lost a lot of my patience and ability to render, and going back to study from life or photos is less consistent than it was before. Even with that caveat though, I feel that forcing myself to be able to work largely from memory has been beneficial, particularly at that point in my art journey.

If you read all that, I hope maybe some nugget of info in there was helpful or interesting ( I hope i don't sound too self centered with that huge wall of text, but I feel like those of you who were around and helping out when i was still here deserve an explanation whether you want it or not!) And hopefully, theres been some improvement in here somewhere.

So enough talk! Here's some art :) As nearly chronological as I could get it but i probably mixed up somethings since these were uploaded one at a time practically :C
(PS: Any recommendations for image uploading programs? I need something that uploads in bulk and allows for message-board resizing so it looks nice on the board )















































































































































This one below is actually from late 2016.

[Adzerak]

Welcome back!
Been inactive myself for not all too different reasons and that makes it all the more inspiring to see an old veteran return and just dump a huge load of nice art. Really like the mix of personal work and studies, illustrations and concept art. Sweet! No real critical analysis at the moment heh, looking forward for more updates!

[Patrick Gaumond]

Thanks mate! It's not easy juggling this with lots of other responsibilities, but totally doable. It helps to have small reasonable goals like "I will commit to 10-15 hours per week ontop of my other responsibilites".

Here's some more things from the last 2 weeks or so. I have a ton of other sketches that i've been working on for a project i have going, but I'm not ready to share those just yet!

[Patrick Gaumond]

Hullo all!

Some new things from the last week or so

Head studies





Two fanarts I was working on. This one right here I also painted but so far it looks like crap so we'll stick with the lines for now haha!

I also created a quick sculpt in Zbrush and plopped in here to try out a different workflow, not sure if that will work out nicely just yet. Also have no clue how to properly display a sculpture yet so it probably doesn't look super nice here

(as a side note, it makes me a bit sad that I've probably spent about 1% of my total art time in zbrush but I can get results that are 10 times better than any of my 2d drawings and in about 1/10th of the time too :S)









There's a subreddit called "reddit gets drawn" where people post pictures of themselves or family/friends and ask to be drawn by the community, here are 3 that I've done so far. (The two cat portraits are the same one)







Some medieval clothing studies for a project I'm working on





A ton of design explorations for said project. I created a simple web of character relationships from which to base some character designs on. It's pretty challenging trying to convey the character type by design alone, don't think I'm there yet but we'll see once the finalized ones are done. There are also 3-4 minor characters that I havent explored yet but I will get to those this week and start resolving these ones here too

[Patrick Gaumond]

Hey again±

Today I have some studies, some attempts at clean lines and flat colours, and I totally reworked the background for that girl standing in the forest and added some other characters to give it some more implied story. i think this version is more successful in many ways than the last but still not done with it yet!

Would anyone have any advice for making flat colours more attractive (keep in mind for these ones below, the application is a bit rough as I was exploring them one layer rather than making clean groups)? The lines will come with practice and approach, I'm sure, but i'm a bit stumped on how to make flat colours look good. I see some artists make these very nice combinations and the artwork almost feels done just with those colours. If anyone has any knowledge ™ to share I'd appreciate it :)

Also, someone brought up clint clearley in one of their sketchbooks a few weeks ago (can't remember who, but whoever that is, thanks!). I purchased one of his making of MTG videos and man is it nice seeing a tutorial/video that actually explains things and gives meaningufl practical content. Maybe i'm just not lucky, but it seems most of the tutorials or other art videos I watch or purchase are not very good :[

Also started watching Cynthia Sheppard's youtube channel and thats got a nice laid back feel to it too. I think more than anything, with both of these people, it's nice just listening to artists be people and to dispel that image we (or at least i) sometimes make of them as these art virtuosos that never fail or have doubts.

Experimenting with colours and different ways of implying shapes of clothing and things







Sloppy and not very accurate. I could have done this one better I think.



The rework of the image from one of the previous posts, plus a gif below comparing them (excuse the quality of the gif! Not sure how to get those looking nice honestly lol)







Rapier handles can get f u c k e d

[BadWoolf]

I'm watching Cynthia Sheppard's channel too at the moment! Really enjoying it. I want to start with oil paints after Christmas, so it was great timing for me that I found her videos painting with oils.

I like the additions on that piece you did the gif for - with the additional figures it's a very satisfying composition! My only question is, have you checked out the center of balance on the main figure? I tried to do her stance just now and I can't make my body go that way without falling over. Is it because she's leaning on the stick? Anyway, I'm finding it difficult to read where her body weight is. Not sure if you're looking for crits, but something to consider if you like :)

Keep up the great work!

[BadWoolf]

Love your costume/character iterations btw. Forgot to mention that.