Coloring practice

Bryce Dallas Howard

Reference Photo

 Total time: ~3 Hours?

Media: Photoshop / Intuos Tablet

So far I've made it 11 days in a row with the painting practice. I'm pretty amused at the differences between this one and the John Wayne I did on the first day. I'm thinking that I really need to focus on coloring hair and picking out dynamic reference photos... hopefully with teeth showing. 

Coloring practice

Lena Heady
Reference Photo

 Total time: ~3 Hours

Media: Photoshop / Intuos Tablet

... I'm not terribly happy with this one. I might go back and tweak it some later if I have some spare time to do so. 

Coloring practice

Reference Photo

 Total time: ~4? Hours... I lost track of time since it's the weekend.

Media: Photoshop / Intuos Tablet

Well, I love Leverage and since Parker (Beth Riesgraf) is one of my favorite characters she seemed like an excellent choice for my painting practice today. The blue really helped to make this a little more interesting... it was a little flat and weird before I added it. 

Coloring practice

Reference Photo

 Total time: ~2 Hours

Media: Photoshop / Intuos Tablet

I figured I would start out my week of coloring females with Claudia Black because I'm a massive Claudia Black fangirl Farscape fan... not to mention it goes along with my Dragon Age love since she does the voice acting for Morrigan. How great is that? At any rate, I'll probably revisit her once I've managed to polish my skills more because she has some seriously amazing features. 

Coloring practice

Total time: ~2 Hours

Media: Photoshop / Intuos Tablet

Reference Photo

Keith David / Wikipedia

Coloring practice

I think I went quite a bit over my little 'time limit' but I'm not worried about it. I might try to switch it up and do a week of females after tomorrow's piece. I'm honestly quite amused about how different my stuff looks from the beginning of the week to the end of the week. 

Total time: ~4 Hours

Media: Photoshop / Intuos Tablet

Reference Photo

Coloring practice

I hit my two hour limit before I got to the hair so I might have to revisit this one later to add the majestic MacGyver mullet. On a side note, I really need to work on my hair skills... I am really lacking in that department so I need to pick some photo references that'll force me to work on it. 

Total time: ~2 Hours

Media: Photoshop / Intuos Tablet

Reference Image

Coloring practice

Well, 4 days so far. Today I decided to use Taylor Knox as my reference. He's a professional surfer who also served as the face model for Francis in Left 4 Dead.

Total time: ~2 Hours

Media: Photoshop / Intuos Tablet

Reference Image

Bbonus art that I did while eating my cinnamon toast crunch today:

Total time: .5 Hour

Media: Photoshop / Intuos Tablet

Coloring practice

Well, so far that's three days in a row taking time to do a ~2 hour speed painting for practice. I'm a little hesitant to start calling it a 'project' as such as it seems like each time I attempt to do a daily thing in some sort of announced capacity I end up having something horribly distracting come up that throws me off after about 2-3 weeks. But... at any rate, so far so good with this. On the plus side I am having a lot of fun so that does help keep my momentum going. I keep wanting to go back and work on this one more but I'm trying my best to keep my hands off of it for now.

 Total time: ~2 Hours

Media: Photoshop / Intuos Tablet

Reference Image

Coloring practice

Total time: 1.5 Hours

Media: Photoshop / Intuos Tablet

Reference Image

I'm thinking I might try to keep this ~2 hour portrait thing up for a while to see what sort of results I end up with. I feel like I am learning a little something new with each piece so it's a lot of fun. 

Coloring practice

I've been doing a lot of the "start a drawing/painting and then trash it part way through" thing the past couple of weeks so there hasn't been much to post...
I'm trying to work on my coloring and observational skills so I'm just recreating reference photos using blocks of color without a base sketch (which is going to result in wonky results but it's at least forcing me to look closely at my subject.) This evening I decided to limit myself to two hours of coloring time and chose a photo of John Wayne for a reference. I might make a trend of this two hour color job thing as it's quite fun.

Reference Image

Secret Swooper Gift

I've only managed to finish one drawing this week and that is for the Secret Swooper event on the Livejournal Community Swooping Is Bad. I did also manage to get quite a bit done on the Morrigan art nouveau style companion piece but it's not finished just yet. Hopefully I can get it up before I head off to see my family for the holidays :)

Sketchbook

I've been having one of those "everything I touch turns to suck" periods with drawing lately hence the lack of updates over the holiday weekend. I'm re-watching all of Buffy the Vampire Slayer recently so I figured Amber Benson was as good a subject as any. I didn't do a preliminary sketch or  anything so I'm sure there's some wonky bits even though I had a reference photo.

Music To My Ears

I've been posting WIP versions of this piece on my LJ but, for some reason, the idea of posting it here didn't cross my mind until just now. This is for the bi-weekly theme at DA:O Challenge but since I started it after work this Wednesday I didn't get it completed in time

WIP #1: This is generally how I start all of my sketches in photoshop. I use different colors to help differentiate between parts as a way to keep my sloppy line work from being overly confusing. At this point I hadn't really decided on the outfit so I was teetering between the Chantry robes (which I honestly don't like because they're pink and she's a redhead and ugh) and the outfit from the Sacred Ashes trailer... I ended up going with the robes because they had more flow to them and it just worked better with the Mucha-ish thing I was going for.

WIP #2: At this point I had managed to get most of it drawn in and some base colors added. I had intended to add Andraste's Grace to the botton side panels but I just couldn't find a useful reference for it and had to abandon that idea. ... I also forgot to re-draw Schmooples. Oops. 

WIP #3: This was my stopping point before going to bed last night. Sans some random shading and detail work there hasn't been much change from this point. 

Finished Version: 

Full Size: 1250 x 2074
All told, I'm quite pleased with the finished version. I can't exactly explain why it just seemed right for Leliana to be barefoot even though all she does is talk about shoes in game. I'm tempted to do more 'Mucha' style drawings with other DA:O characters but I'm not sure if I'll follow through with that. 

Sketchbook

More doodling and coloring from today. I'm actually pretty happy with the Alistair on the right hand side so I might pull the line art out and do something more polished with it to post later on. I'd probably shrink the dumbo ears a little though ;)