Floatharr's endeavours

[Floatharr]

Thanks for the reply. Now that you mention it, it kind of looks like you said. I'll try to keep that in mind and go bigger.

I was at our family's summer house for a few days and this is what I managed to put together. The view with the houses is just across our sauna. I was sitting on the bench cooling off with a beer after a few minutes at a steaming 100 celsius and felt like drawing again.

edit: Woot, page 4. Two weeks to exactly a year since I got to page 3.

[miycko]

nice stuff you should post more often

[Floatharr]

Well, this is me, posting more often as requested.

Alien thingy portrait. 1,5 hours or something.

[Floatharr]

Didn't really feel like painting but I decided to do it anyway and just force myself to upload something. My wacom tablet has been glaring at me angrily. I think she wants more attention.

[Floatharr]

One more. Tried to go with the silhouette->lines->render tactic this time.

[Floatharr]

Keepin mah thread alive. Here's a few days worth of uninteresting scribbles.

[Floatharr]

A pirate parrot. At least I'm trying.

[Floatharr]

Some newer stuff I've done in photoshop. Got like 50 pages of sketchbook filled and still no scanner so I'll photograph those possibly at a later time.

[smuli]

Great stuff at the end of last page, car sketches show potential, colored figure has a pretty good pose, outfit design and colors and the horse looks very solid. This page kind of looks like you've just been drawing for the sake of drawing. Try to think up something to apply your skill at, join a project or participate in the community activities or something. Hope to see those pencil sketches soon.

[Floatharr]

Here's a few more paintings I've done in these past few days. Finally starting to get comfortable with colour and detail.

[Floatharr]

Still trying to get comfortable with my paint-fu. I'm trying to get comfortable with getting a relatively finished piece out every time I decide to paint/draw something which has been a bit of a problem for me. That way when I finally decide to use my skills for something I won't have to worry about not being able to finish a piece.

I realized only after painting the tripod alien that it looks exactly like Gonarch from the original Half-Life with some weeds on top and a blue light in the belly. I'm fairly satisfied with the latter one though. I felt like I put everything I've learned so far into it.

[Desktop Wade]

Greetings from reddit! (it's MrHankScorpio there).

I've scrolled through your whole sketchbook real quick and its a wonderful progression! Forgive me if I didn't read the text, I just looked at the images. That squid thingy you posted on reddit is really head and shoulders above everything else. You should do whatever you can to make more pieces of this quality.

I particularly like the depth of field both in the foreground and background. Most people will blur or keep the background less defined but I see it rarely done in the foreground. It has a nice way of implying relative scale and size.

The area you stand out in most to me is lighting; something I struggle with personally. You had another piece that stood out for the same reason; it was this fish with really big eyes (It was one page back I think). That one was obviously rougher than your most recent but it had a very good feel to it and I think that's a good way for you to work.

In any case, keep up the good work. I don't check CA much anymore so feel free to post it on reddit; I always like to see art that other people actually made.

[sanakris]

Wow man I think your really learning. You've grown with each page of your sb. I really like the starfish monster image. It looks really professional. It's great you are incorporating fade effects while while keeping an area of focus. There are nicely placed highlights and values. And also the texture displayed on the creature is nicely done and compliment your brushstrokes.
Keep up the hard work man. I hope to see some of the other stuff you haven't posted.

[Floatharr]

here's a some of the recent practice I've been doing with photoshop. The floating alien thing is the alien hive from Natural Selection 2 and the line art horned guy is influenced by some of the designs in Diablo 3.

[smuli]

Last two posts are looking much more "focused" than the stuff before them. I like the values in the horned alien and the squid thing and three-legged creature. Like Sanakris and Desktop Wade said, the squid or whatever shows a good grasp of many different things like lighting, edges, texture... Nice job! You never seem to draw a background for the topics you paint, it makes them look like items off a market catalogue. Just some simple rock or bushes would help with that but of course seeing more of their environment would be even better. Keep it up!

[Floatharr]

Thanks for the critique smuli. You're right about the backgrounds, should try to incorporate more of those into my paintings. I still however consider my work largely just practice and I like to focus on one thing at a time. I'll try to keep your advice in mind though and once I'm more comfortable with the main subjects I'll start adding secondary elements. A few environment paintings every now and then couldn't hurt either.

I've been sketching in photoshop lately so much that my arm's aching in the morning. Mostly studies and scribbles which are not really worth posting here. I did however do this worgen/wolf character. The one without background I did first in b/w and then colour overlay and it took 2-3 times longer than the one with a background which I did directly in colour.

Also here's a little recommended reading for all you concept art fans: http://conceptcraniopagus.deviantart...63/?moodonly=1

[Floatharr]

I've been drawing in Photoshop fairly continuously lately mostly from photos and existing concept art. Thanks for Blizzard for awesome concepts to learn from.

I also noticed that playing FPS games on my Wacom is great training for hand-eye coordination even when I'm not in the mood to draw. I recommend trying.

[Floatharr]

Some posemaniacs hand studies from today.

[Floatharr]

Some work on faces (plus overlord) and a new more finished painting. I think the concept for the helmet came from an ad for something medieval on Steam.

[smuli]

Nice colors on that helmet and good to see you're sketching everything. I guess it's good to keep the head sketches varied but try to do some bigger ones too, the more you sweat to make them accurate, the more you learn.

I like that wolf character experiment. The one with color overlays looks kind of more solid but gets pretty close to black on the shadows. The other one looks more natural. I like them both actually. Keep them coming!

[Floatharr]

So I was sketching as usual and it hit me: "I can PAINT that if I want to and it'll probably look cooler!" so I did. Second picture is some various sketches and the third pic is a WIP of an illustration of a friend's WoW character.

[Floatharr]

Here's the semi-finished painting of the WIP from the previous post. Might still tweak it some more.

[Floatharr]

A couple of new paints. The alien is an older sketch I decided to redo to see if I've learned anything. The bird with horns is me playing around with using reference.

[cdejong]

Wow that last painting is a big improvement. Keep working, you're very obviously improving at a nice rate.

[Floatharr]

Todays painting fun.

[Floatharr]

Tank study. Concentrating on finishing what I start as opposed to just posting rough sketches.

[Floatharr]

Here's some recent paintings. Decided to do some environments today with a brand new brush (just switched the round brush to a chalk brush). References for the environments were from flickr. Zombie characters from Left 4 Dead.

[Floatharr]

Tonight's painting spree. As an experiment, I had a few drinks while painting. I think it helped make experience more fluid, as predicted.

[smuli]

Real nice environment sketches! The colors look good and I like the subtle use of textured brush in the tree trunk. Keep up experimenting with those. The tank study has good values and I like the little house sketches too. Frankly, I don't think those game character studies are the topmost thing you should do. They have a base in animal and human anatomy and fashions etc and I think those are the things you should study to broaden your scope at concept art. Also try to do stuff that pushes your imagination. Just my 2 cents.

Nice to see more frequent updates! Keep it up!

[Floatharr]

Finally got around to painting some more. Face studies from http://www.flickr.com/photos/dannysantos/