graphite & wacom from march08 to feb10

[luness]

Hey guys!

Here you'll find almost 2yrs of sketches and colored stuff I've done with love, for pleasure and joy, but also to learn, to push myself further, to reach my artistic and professional goals.

Cheers!

L.

[Hethabyr]

Wonderful stuff, Luness... very striking and distinctive style. Beautiful line, lots of imagination, and liberal sprinklings of exoticism. Can't fault any of these pieces. I like what you're doing with your peripheral areas, too. Hard to figure how you're doing it, but I like it a whole lot.

Five stars for you. They'll show up eventually.

Keep up the excellent work : )

[Suira]

Very good stuff, I love all of your creatures, it's a proof of huge imagination and good technique, 5 stars, I'll be cheking ya

[Windmaker]

Woooooow... ! This is soo amazing!
Wonderful drawings! Both design and execution are great!
Post more! Also- post often!
Thank you for the inspiration!

[fantasyartist]

Great designs! Do you happen to be from Venezuela? Because I remember seeing the portfolio of Luness on photobucket if my memory doesn't fail me. Now post more!

[InstantIndian]

Very nice work. They are quite whimsical. You create a believable and detailed form without a lot of shading. Keep it coming.

[Coinpurse]

awesome work buddy...
keeping an eye on you

[JellevdVegt]

nice portfolio and nice caracters man, great pencil skills. one thing i just noticed is that the caracters in that last post dont have any value brake-ups. that could add an extra dimension to your drawings. but realllllly killer shit. keep up!

[Cam Sykes]

5 Stars from me. The ideas your conveying are solid backed up by the expert pencil work. The description of form really stands out and it's something I really admire. The concepts in these works are really interesting and all the pics seem to really hold together as parts of a whole. I am keen to see more tricks you have up your sleeve. These are definately of a professional standard and I wish you luck in landing an up-scale job.

[Keenox]

really really nice,man! great imagination and concepts. some of them are pretty disturbing, like mutants.... i also like your style. looks very spatial. wanna see more!

[Rudeone]

So deliciously weird...I love it!!!

[RandAlThor]

Excellent rendering and conceptual pieces. They appear very clean as if they are exactly the way you saw them in your head, without any later changes or rash decisions. Keep sharing ;-)

[TOOLED!]

this stuff looks like it would be great in a creepy kids book, lots of imagination and care went into these guys great job man.

[skorpi]

Great start. This creatures are really interesting

[Lakka]

I really like these mon! Great stuff and can't wait to see more! Good luck with your portfolio

Something that I'd love to see is (dont take this as a crit) a ibit more varioton with the lighting, as in higher contrast in some or just everything a bit darker, or should I call it changing the mood? I guess I shouldn't of said that since it's more like a personal preference but meh

But as I said, abnormally cool stuff, great rendering, and it's nice to see the actual animalparts put in these guys.

Be sure of this though, I'll be stalking you. ()

[DanielAlves]

Yours sketchs is very nice....i like yours draws and ideias.....is inpirations to me!



Congratulations!!

[zweiDee]

damn, you a rly funky fresh pencil freak! *5 bling blings*

[Colepoopface]

Awesome designs, cant wait to see more.

Cheers

[Delmar]

inspiring stuff you've got there....lovely imagination and style.....would love to see some human characters too.

*****

[luness]

Woooow guys, you have no idea how much your words mean to me. They do a lot, mostly because it's been a self-taught process, not copying styles but trying to get the basics and start from there to get my own style of sketching, rendering, and so on; and living in a country where there is not such industries like videogames and animation, I haven't had a chance to learn from a team, put my skills on practice, etc., so it's all very inspiring and encouraging to keep working hard and follow my dreams, you know?

Thanks again everybody for your time and words. I'll save some time as well to check your threads and say hi. Peace.

Hethabyr – thank you!!! the background is an scanned old paper, then I just resized it, flipped it, or rotated it according to the drawing. I put the sketch on a different layer and then change the layer from Normal to Multiply and that's it. The thing is that I cleaned up all the original background so then they would be ready for coloring in Photoshop (for the coloring process, at the first stage, I use the drawings' silhouettes and selection tool to stay inside the lineart while adding the base colors), but then I had the idea to post them right here as sketches, but the bg was all gone and they looked like stickers or something, so I decided to use the old paper as new bg. I actually like the way they turned out.

Suira – thank you so much for your kind words and for your stars!!

Windmaker – haha, thank you! I'll post more. I think the weekends will be the best days to post anything, since it can be kinda crazy at home during the week and I barely have a chance to sit in front of my computer.

Fantasyartist – thank you!! yes, you got me, I'm from Venezuela and my old portfolio is up there at Photobucket. Good memory!

InstantIndian – thank you for the words! I used to draw without any shading or just with a bit of it, as you will see on the attached piece. I saw a clip of Marko Djurdjevic's Character Ideation DVD and it inspired me to give shading a try. Marko is one of my favourite artists ever. Check his threads and webpage. Jawdropping stuff.

Coinpurse – thanks a lot!! Feel free to check my sketchbook from time to time. Crits and comments will always be welcomed.

Teh Gosu – thanks for your tips Gosu. I'm aware of that, actually. The thing is that I tried it once, on my sketchbook, with some fantasy fish designs, and those pages turned so messy after a while. I can't find any spray to fix the lead or pencil to the paper, and if I do eventually, I'm sure it will cost me a lot (art supplies are stupidly expensive around here) so I decided to keep the shading and value process to a mid level, with enough information for the coloring process. I like my sketchbook to look kinda clean, it's a personal thing...or maybe I'm scared of the beautiful mess of a sketchbook full of ink, pencil, color, marker, etc., haha. I'm taking baby steps, so who knows? Maybe one day I'll get those value brake-ups without any worries, but in the meantime, I'll save that for the digital coloring part.

CamSyko – wow, thanks for your comments. They encourage me to keep drawing, keep trying, and improve my skills. I'll pray for those late 4 words of the last sentence to become true one day. Thanks a lot.

Keenox – haha, thanks. They could be even more disturbing, though. Check the web for Wayne Barlowe's Inferno pieces, and you will see disturbing stuff. What a great imagination he has.

Rudeone – thanks a lot! I remember while reading the descriptions of these demons I was like “what the heck? It's so weird!” but it's been challenging and fun to do. The final designs can be so different every time. You can take every description or sentence and put it on paper exactly as they come, or twist them a bit, add something or ignore a lot of the original description. It's been a great designing exercise.

RandAlThor – thank you so much for your comments. If they look clean it's because I use a lot of kneadable eraser to get rid of the first gesture lines, haha, but yeah, I didn't want to use thumbnails or spend hrs designing each creature or character this time, so I put on paper the first idea I got in my mind, with few minutes to read the descriptions, choose the photo references, do the gesture lines, saving all the energy for the rendering and shading.

TOOLED! - haha. The last character of this pack is actually based on Lamashtu, which “was a female demon, monster, malevolent goddess or demigoddess that menaced women during childbirth and, if possible, kidnapped children while they were breastfeeding...” so I guess she should be included in a book for kids...perhaps a book for spoiled kids
Anyways, thanks for your comments!

Skorpi – thank you! The definition of each character caught my attention right away. They are so odd looking.

Lakka – no no no. All the crits, suggestions and comments are more than welcomed, so I appreciate every single word, ok? As I said to Teh Gosu, I prefer to keep my paper sketchbook sort of clean, with just enough shading information that would guide me through the coloring process, done with Photoshop. I tried using the Dodge and Burn tools the other day to darken and lighten some areas of my scanned pencil sketches and I didn't like the result when looking closer. It was a mix of techniques that didn't go that well together. The lead pencil texture (including gradients) with some extremely smooth patches done digitally. But yeah, I'm conscious that cast shadows and lights bring some 3D quality to a drawing, they help it to pop up on the paper, so thanks again for your note.

DanielAlves – hey Daniel. Thanks for your words! I'm very glad you like them. By the way, your name seems very latin to me, so feel free to write me in Spanish whenever you want, although I recommend to keep posting comments in English. My English is also “autodidacta” or self-taught, and I can tell you that only practice and dedication will help you to improve your language skills. Espero que hayas entendido todo lo que escribi, jaja. Saludos.

ZweiDee – hahaha, thanks for your 5 bling blings!! and yeah, pencil rocks!!

Colepoopface – thank you so much. You will see more. I want to get better and improve my skills, so count on me for the postings!

Delmar – thank you! About the human characters, I don't have recent work on human characters, but you can check some at my online portfolio address (here, http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v486/luness/). This particular design package I'm working on will have creatures, characters (human, animal looking, etc), rotations, props, some vehicles, some environments, etc., but I'm trying to be organized with the development, so I'm working first with the creatures and weird looking characters, then I'll work on humans, and so on. Stop by any time, I'll do my best to keep my sketchbook thread updated.



So thanks so much again for your comments and suggestions, guys!!!
To explain myself better about leaving the cast shadows and darker shading for coloring, I'm posting this design from my old portfolio. It's not the best example but you can see that the shades, cast shadows and lights were added on the colored piece. Enjoy my dark magic fantasy slave/avenger.

See you next weekend!

[Smoke]

I cannot begin to express how awesome this work is.

Keep. Drawing.

[Lotet]

great work! those pencil pics are edited in the computer right? anyway, reaaly neat stuff! keep it up

[luness]

Smokey186 - thank you so much
Lotet - thank you! all the rendering is done with pencil but is edited on PS for presentation purposes, like the background and a bit of levels adjustment (the original paper bg is darker than this) after saving for web (which changed the original brownish color to blueish/gray/smoke sort of color they have now). I'm not thinking to use this kind of bg for every drawing posted here, it would be used just for this set, to give the idea that these drawings are part of an old sketchbook about demons and such things.

Anyways, this is a small set of characters I worked on during last week. There are still some characters left from that list I made, and then I'll move on to a different set, part of the same personal project.
The one called Sthenosh would be the third sister of that group known as Gorgons (Euryalecus and Medusaam, which are just Euryale and Medusa based characters).
Hope you like them.

[Smarty]

some really nice original work. I especially like your snake like designs and the mounts. Something you don't see much of lately.

Im interested to see some more colour work

[InFlame]

Hey luness,

you surely have the skills to draw and I think these works are worth it to put them in a portfolio. But you also should add other drawings, which also have other directions. Nude-/Lifedrawings for example, or various animal drawings, portrait drawings (More from life, you know!? )...You should show that you are flexible in your way of drawing.

However, the creature designs shown here are very good! I am totally impressed! I am looking forward to see more! ***** Five little stars from me! *****

Rebecca

[hmanafi]

wow man,you inspire me to work hard.
i want to do something like you,teaching art and 3d modeling to myself,making a portfolio,sending to video game companies,and ... .oh,i know it's not important that what i want to do,but I'm thirsty for a comment and advice from a person like you,so if it's possible take a look at my sb.
thanks man for your sketchbook.post every time that you can.

[Ketka]

wow! Awesome sketchbook!

[Mihail]

Man, you rock!

[RandAlThor]

sweet update dude, give us more, i cant get enough of this ;-)

[Howie]

Wow! incredible stuff... All of these creatures/ characters have really nice silhouettes and your rendering is top notch.