Moleskine fun & DIY easel

Two spreads from my moleskine large and pocket sketchbooks. It's great to have a pocket sketchbook with you everywhere, you never get bored in waiting rooms, public transportations when you can just draw.

In late December I took some time to build a Do-It-Yourself studio easel. Thanks to these instructions I was able to customise one for my painting needs and limited working space. The canvas platform height can be adjusted with handy wing nuts. The oak-esque wood stain finish makes the easel a pretty nice-looking furniture too. The materials didn't cost very much either, plus it was fun to do some wood work for a change, not to mention I couldn't afford one of those expensive Mabef easels in times like these. Expect large paintings in near future.

Sketchbooking II

Been sketching a lot lately, to gain more confidence.

Season's greetings

Latest offering here; Christmas card illustration from moleskine pocket sketchbook to final acrylic painting. I went through few different ideas but ended up going for more traditional style. I feel it is some of my better works so far, although I think the girl looked more enchanting in the original sketch. The more stylized the approach the more difficult to execute it. I painted the face twice because the first take ended up being too pink. It was challenging to first dry brush white higlights on terra verte green and then light wash the actual skin colours on top. The last sketchbook page is extra stuff for ya, merry Christmas!

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Sketchbooking

Piratey (work in progress)

"Ay, I'll get me revenge, even if it took me 600 years, ay."

As a kid I used to really dig Monkey Island 1 & 2 and read books such as Treasure Island. There's something special about the genre of pirate fiction, the adventure, the Caribbean atmosphere... Few months ago I also read the Christophe Blain's Isaac the pirate 1-5, a quality pirate comic series.

Concept design (updated)

Science fiction oriented video game character concept design. Preparing portfolio for gaming companies. A drawing done on my A4 sketchbook, scanned. Masked it and planned lighting in grayscale mode.

Edit: added colored version. Looking at it critically, it could be more symmetrical, and the hand position or the pose is not as convincing as it could be but the picture is still a bit progression on my path from mediocre to great.

Bought a roll of packaging paper to practice large scale portrait drawing skills.

Pointillism

A pointillist (or impressiost) style painting completed in an oil color course. Haven't done this style since senior secondary, and this is a lot more restrained piece than more current works... Below is an oil pastel sketch done on A5 paper, it might be actually a bit better than the painting itself.

Times are uncertain and it has been quiet on the commission front. Portfolios were sent to few illustration agencies who were either full-packed or felt that the style of the works were not quite suitable for their customers. Too unusual, rough or dark for mainstream perhaps? The search goes on. There has been thoughts on whether to concentrate more on comics or instead striving for fine art, particularly sculpting.

Coffee and ink

Coffee stain and ink testing.

Refreshing

Experimenting with acrylics and charcoal again. Browsing through some old photos, I found one in which flashlight had captured a person turning face, eventually showing reflections from two sideprofiles.


It's refreshing to try character design this way: first modeling the shapes with acrylic and then drawing on top.

There, see ya!

Character design

Character design gallery. One of the many of different styles. Used as ideas for a possible animation pre-production. Someone commented that otherwise it's ok but the lady with a child is somehow irritating, wonder why...

It has been a while since I used this approach of constructing an image from basic shapes such as circles etc. Study of a photograph by Mucha.

Another one but with an indian ink brush line art on blue pencil sketch - my favorite technique ever.

Pic from sketchbook

The most recent page from the A4 sketchbook. Rough charcoal study and a marker drawing mixed.

Update for the sake of update

I currently have a day job of a kind, loosely related to web-design. Things have been quiet for the last two months, though I've been drawing a lot and producing some promotional work for a band as well as some pre-production for an animation or two, but I can't reveal more details yet.