a few sketches

In an effort to post something a little more positive...





While I'm generally happy with the artwork I've been producing over the past year, one thing I feel could use a lot of improvement is the sense of space in my drawings; my pictures tend to be very character focused, and the environment around them suffers from my lack of confidence in drawing scenery, which tends to limit the range of pictorial composition that I choose to work with. The two images above are a start at trying to remedy that by getting some practice. These were done in ArtRage using something approximating the non-photo blue pencil I sometimes sketch with IRL. I used several photos as reference but didn't directly copy any of them. I think they turned out decently, but they took a really long time to do...hopefully I'll get faster as I do more of them and get more comfortable with this kind of subject.

That much detail really does get kind of tedious, so after awhile, I found myself doodling this, based on the audiobook I was listening to:


...and I ended up using it to experiment with 'inking' using the oil brush in ArtRage. The lines aren't as fluid as I would have liked, but the next attempt should be more successful, now that I know the canvas can be turned while working so you can 'pull' all the strokes like you would on paper :P