so little time

For personal art! Swamped w freelance and contract work.

But there's ALWAYS time in meetings. My level of boredom can often be tracked by any particular OCD noodling that shows up in the sketches.

SUBSTRATA

A good break to the non-intentional posting fast. My Substrata contributions. I haven't had nearly as much time as I'd like to devote to this cool project.

You are suddenly trapped in an etherial hell dimension in which you are woefully under powered. You learn you must posses demons and use them to fight your way back home - through even nastier opponents. It's not a fun process and it doesn't put your demon in a good mood. So leveling up and making a transition from one to another shows you how they might hold a grudge.

Elder Nettle Guard.
An exploration in a different game universe.

His chief export is pain

The first guy just reminds me of him somehow.

Spent the morning cobbling a new AutoHotkey script that wouldn't interfere with my normal keyboard use - over on the keypad. Even tho the old one had a disable toggle on the numLock, I NEVER remembered to turn it off. And I can't go back to using photoshop without the thing. It's amazing.

I aimlessly doodled on this til I got back up to speed with the new muscle memory.

Toys. Make them. Faster.

Santa wasn't sure about promoting Vlax'gthor to Line Producer at the pole but it was hard to argue with the resulting massive increase in production.

Finally some time to play these past few days.

The Old Ones

His alarm was set for the 21st.

come gives us a kiss

Search party

No more Dr. NiceGuy

Cintiq 24 play

I had a chance to try a 24" cintiq for a few hours. I never liked painting on the "smaller" ones before (loved drawing on them!) as I felt I was always right on top of the piece...but I think I could get used to this...fast.
The color is better, the contrast is better. There's a lot to like.

Cthulhu cha choo

I was thinking about doing something more with a Cthulhuesque creature so I started playing with ideas tonight as a break.

Twilight Raid

WARMACHINE from Privateer Press

Going out for a run

And maybe a meal.

Class exercise

I

A few months back I took a creature sculpting class by Jordu Schell. These were my hasty idea sketches. Ended up developing the chunky guy on the bottom left.

here sheepy sheepy

Bud

When I was a kid, I knew an old-school airbrush retouch guy that looked just like this.

Pencil Kings

I recently did a set of how-to videos painting this guy on PencilKings.
Link to the preview page

boom...boom...boom...

clink...clink...

pan pastels

I had a chance to do a little life drawing (painting?) this past week. These are PanPastels on a smooth card-stock from a stationary store. They are applied with rubbery, foam applicators. It's really fun to use and I highly recommend a small monochromatic set of some sort. I think I have a white, a black and 3 grays, which is plenty - tho I want a warm set now, too so I can play with temperature! 

It's a lot like painting with dry media. Quick to setup and cleanup. Of note, these survived being beat around in a sketchbook without noticeable degradation.

 

 

down time at work

Self contained

Test posting from my iPad.

He's not a Vegetarian

Stumbled thru a bunch of apps on it til I finished in the most flexible and pleasant brush for my mark making style - ArtStudio. I really do have high hopes for ProCreate's next version as it's UI is just golden. I haven't tried LayersPro, but I think I've covered most of the other popular ones so far.

Oh, I forgot - I love drawing in SketchClub. It's got that crazy procedural "sketch" mode. I found it's painter only good for people who can use scatter brushes to their advantage. It's opacity dynamics aren't doing it for me.

Strange none use Painter's "sample stroke" or whatever it's called, that would sample, and later use your "more typical" stroke. You'd figure maybe it would be able to capture some dynamic info from that to help inform subsequent strokes.

Or perhaps better yet - like Toonboom's paradigm (dunno if they still do this) which never read pressure, but rather would procedurally redraw your last stroke, emulating a fading in and out over the length of the stroke. The dynamics of this was somehow editable to your liking. It was fast enough not to get in the way. I wonder if that would be irritating with a painting program.

I dun-gone went an did it

Got me an ipad. Pombero made me do it.

Very fun. So far, all the iphone apps have a better structured UI than their ipad/phone counterparts. I'll give them all more "dirt time" before reviewing them.

ProCreate over pencil (shot w camera)

 

 ProCreate

 Artstudio

 

 AD Sketchbook Mobile

more iPhone paints

I got a little rubber-tipped Targus stylus. It's 1000x better than my horrible 2 pogo foam tip. Those seemed to skip every 4th stroke or so.

I'm convinced. I really do enjoy painting on my phone. I can't see how the iPad wouldn't be that much more fun. I seem to loose a bit of perspective with my hand covering a good part of the screen (see different sized limbs below) but all in all I'm quite happy with the experience.

These 3 were all done with ArtStudio. That app is like a mini Photoshop.

I'm also excited to try ProCreate (Thank's for that, Tor). Looks like really nice piece of software that's really thinking about the user experience and is continuing to develop.

Edit: to be clear - the above is a comp of a 2 primed sheets of paper, a pencil sketch and a paint over those. The cool thing is I took them all with the phone's camera, and imported them directly into Art Studio.

iphone sketches

AD Sketchbook Mobile ...

Art Studio ...

For some time now, I've wrung my hands over whether or not to get an ipad for sketching. Like most of us, the central issue of pressure has been the showstopper. Do I wait and hope for apple to release ipad5? Or for apple to allow a 3rd party to do something about it?

I'll say that I even enjoy doodling on my stupid little phone! There is a fun, Zen simplicity of having to paint with no pressure. It keeps things loose for me and I count that as a win.

My picks thus far are Art Studio (love the main brush and smear) and Autodesk Sketchbook ( best. lines. ever. ). For me, these 2 have the best balance of brush feel (and falloff options) and UI. UI overall on sketch apps for iphone is terrible. I can only hope I can one day find an app where the tools and colors I want quick access too are onscreen all the time. I will sacrifice a wee bit of real estate! It's crazy-irritating to have to tap 4+ times to change a color, or a brush size. These devices are supposed to encourage MORE intuitive workflows than desktops, not less.

I plan to spend some time with Inspire next. I've tried Brushes and Colors but don't play well with them.

Anyone else doing this!? I find surprisingly little out there.

Vacation pics

Took a little watercolor pad, some ink and a few tubes of acrylics with me on vacation last week. Didn't have time for much but it was nice to play. Followed one up w a quickie zbrush exploration.

Art blocks

My piece for this auction:  http://artblocksghana.blogspot.com/ Check out all the art on there!!

 Acrylic on panel.

Animated gif of process.Click to view animation.