Busy Week!

Sorry this is almost late been rather ill today and not been able to get up to much!

I've been really busy this week with university work, level designs and 3D work so i've been bogged down in that not managed to get all that much digital drawing done unfortunately but i have been working traditionally on doing many many loomis studies, mainly on portraiture. Trying to get back on track with doing portraits, trying to improve myself in an area, which originally was my best!

Still trying to improve my ability to "see", so i did a glass study, apparently these are quite difficult to do. But came out quite good! little bit of a problem at the base it seems but other than that i'm happy! Also, did a quick study of a photograph that i took of a place called Skippool near my hometown

Putting those Loomis studies to the test, been trying to pull off portraits again, but realistic ones. Very very difficult to get it right, some went well some didn't. Did lots of quick sketchs to practice getting the likeness of the person first, some i took further into both b&w or even colour, which was interesting to do because i applied what i'd previously learnt about subsurface scattering to it. :) It's always nice when stuff comes together like that.

That's all for this week unfortunately, hopefully i'll have much more next week! Stay tuned :)

-Matt

Environment, Environment, Hippo...

Done an absolute tone of environments this week, I've been working on starting to include more man made structures within them and working on my perspective, which in the long run will help with the man made more angular stuff, which is what most of these studies are, either angular (rocks) or environments with buildings in just to try and practice this aspect that i'm definitely lacking in.

As you can also see i'm trying to bring up my linework along with my perspective stuff. which is what the above studies were mainly for. 

  

I did a couple in black and white for the value studies too, because i've not done anything like that for awhile but i really think my colours have been massively enhanced solely in the last month, which is awesome. But understanding light is the hardest part of art. Why objects have reflections and how materials interact with light and where it's coming from to create the impression of form. I did a speed paint of a hippo for a competition over on deviantart, 80minute paint.

Did something very different that i normally wouldn't of done. In class we were put into teams and had to come up with a game concept and we were given different jobs and i was assigned UI design. Although the written work was a bore the actual design was kinda fun to do.

I thought i would put this picture up too because not only do i do digital work I've been doing a ton of anatomy and general sketching stuff along side all of this. The image above is all the completed sketchbooks since August 2012 year (since i started drawing for real). My teachers had a little chuckle when i said i bought 15 sketchbooks but i'm flying through them! Enjoying it too, i'm looking at grabbing some oil paints and I've been playing with ink and watercolour recently, it's all good fun.

That's it for this week, i'm off to my second life drawing class now! So i'll be back next Tuesday to show my progress! Make sure you check back then!

Masters, Anatomy and Practice Practice practice!

I have done an absolute ton this week, i've probably been drawing about 8 hours a day minimum, feel like i'm really improving with my work. So firstly some Master Studies that i've been doing for learning reasons the portrait for a study of how the old masters went around the process of sub surface scattering, which is a very interesting topic within itself. The other master study was for composition and palette reasons, the technique would be difficult for me to successfully pull off at the moment!

I've been doing both Bridgman studies and Loomis books at the same time and i've gone through a whole sketchbook just on practicing arms and torsos and the muscles and bones to go with them, these are some of my studies after those practices, all from photo reference. I really feel like i'm getting better at seeing the forms and bringing them out to give them a 3D effect, almost popping out of the page.

Whilst i've been doing loomis, i have also being doing portraits. Many many portraits, i've completed possibly about 20 for people over on Reddit. As there's a subreddit that people ask for portraits and i've enjoyed doing them along with my studies, here's some of the best of them.

I tried something a little different with this one, i'm trying to get more confident with my lines, and kinda enjoy this sort of style.

This photostudy is among the few that i've done this week along with my normal insect and animal studies.

 First attempt at a concept, completely from mind! Kinda happy with it, the composition is nice leading you around it and the like but i'm gonna try and knock at least one of these out a day try and get my brain wurr-ing and thinking about my own creations.

Hope you enjoyed this update! Check back next Tuesday for my next update! :)

-Matt 

Animals and Unseen things!

I'm gonna be producing a hell of a lot of work in the coming weeks, i'm in uni only 2 days a week which leaves me with a lot of free time. I'm gonna knock out study after study! Promise, next updates will be big :) Or well i'll limit them because i don't like spamming my blog with simple studies for example i've done about 75 1 & 2 minute gesture studies and 25 2 min animal sketchs but they don't all need to be on here!

Here's 5 real studies! Top ones were about 3 hours total for all 4, and the tiger took me around 2 hours not counting the 4 hours before spent doing a colour one that looked awful but i was determined! So i scrapped it and had another go for the value in black and white.

Tweaked my owl a lot over past few weeks adding on probably another 3 hours on top of the original 3 hours. I sent this off to Blitz for their open day so fingers crossed! :)

That's it for this week! Check back next Tuesday for another update.

Colour & Figures

Need to get back into my studies and everything been a little bit lazy the past week or so! I've done sketching and stuff but nothing really productive. Yesterday i knocked out these 5 colour animal studies took about 30-45 minutes each, quite happy with them but still many errors but i'm happy with where my colours are going now they look decent enough!

This is where i'm leaning towards now, i want to be able to do decent character designs! So gonna get a whole ton of anatomy studies down, i think i'm starting a life drawing class mid January so that will be interesting to see how much i progress with the help of that! We will see :)

Thanks for staying tuned sorry for the late update laziness took over! Gonna get back on this before i start uni again on the 7th :)