Caffeine Stream's Sketchbook

[Caffeine_stream]

Hey There,
I'm David a 21 year old chemical engineering student at sheffield uni in the uk who wishes he was studying art!
I spend a lot of time doodling in class but my work ethos towards my art isn't great, i go from doing a bunch of paintings and drawings over the course of a week to suddenly not doing anything for a month. So my aim with the sketchbook is to get myself produce drawings and paintings on a more regular basis and thus hopefully improve my ability.
Have to say I'm rather intimidated by the quality of work on this site i have been a member for 2 or 3 years but never really posted much so this is a big leap for me.

Anyway enough talking. Here are two recent oil paintings. I have not done any oil painting in about two years so i started with some still life subjects you will probably get too see a few more over the next few weeks till i become comfortable with oils again.
You should soon be inundated with sketches and such I just need to find my mini sketch book.

If anyone has any tips on how to upload paintings so they don't look crap please tell me as the scanner is rather brutal and the paintings loose something from them.

I don't know if A still life bread can be influenced by anyone but i was influenced by emily g and w whittaker (spelt wrong I'm sure) and their bread which was amazing.

[Oakseed]

Ha, you should most definatly be studying art. I really like your paintings,but your bread to me looks kinda blurry. Is that from the scan? Your apples are very cool by the way. Nice deep colours ^^

and........you're at sheffield uni????!!!! oh my geez. That's just down the road from me, lol. I'm doing an access course at chesterfield college. Hoping to get into Games Design at Sheff Uni : )

[Caffeine_stream]

Thx, yeh the bread is not blurry in real life its just the scan. hopefully ill be able to do some more drawings and paintings and such in the next week or two as I have an exam!!!
I didn't know shef uni had a games design course! sounds fun tho.

[Oakseed]

Thanks for stopping by my sketchbook : ) I'm looking forward to seeing more of your stuff to be specific it's Sheff Hallam Uni that has the Games Design course. I'm in for a long stretch >.< Good luck to you ^^

[Caffeine_stream]

Sounds cool, you are definitely at the right place with concept art there are a few people here who have worked on game design for some quite big games and there stuff is amazing, I’m sure you could pick up a lot of stuff from them.

Thought I’d just put another note about the paintings above, both were painted using a limited pallet. The grapes and apples were painted first and I did not have any linseed oil so the painting is not as smooth as I would like. The next paintings I work on will be on canvas as these ones are on glorified textured printer paper as I'm cheap.

Still can't find my little moleskin sketchbook. Anyone have any suggestions of weird places you have put your moleskin.

[Caffeine_stream]

Ok my damn moleskin is still AWOL so I'm gonna post some slightly older stuff but then after this stuff i will only be posting new things.
The cat and the Trino (half rhino half triceratops) are copy's from Brian Bolland, a comic book artist doing his interpretation of "the nightmare" the bull and the clouds are me just having some fun with the style.

[torstan]

Yep, I know what you mean by being intimidated by the site. I'm sticking to commenting on the newer sketchbooks rather than chipping in on the 20 page monsters on here

I have to say I've never had a shot at oils other than a few doodles of a rose. Those look pretty good to me.

The pen and pencil sketches are interesting though I feel they lack a solid decision on where the light is coming from. The pen flower seems to lack a directed light source and the bull seems to be lit from all sorts of directions - from the right for the face, from the left for its legs. The pencil rose is better (I guess this was from reference?).

Hope that's useful criticism!

[Caffeine_stream]

Thanks for the crits, yeh the bull was just from my imagination so i just had fun with it. I should get some new work up next week after my exam as the inks are over a year old. I more wanted to show what sort of art im interested in. As my tastes tend towards classical painting and anything that has a large interplay between light and dark. So artists like Caravaggio, da vinci, Van gogh's early drawings and other such stuff.

[kidult]

Nice stuff keep em coming! Like seeing more traditional work

[Radost]

Good job for a chem mayor, looking at the yellow in the bread really puls me in. Then again, many scientist were part-time, but good artist. Understanding breeds creativety too, let it be said & roar.
But ehm, PosT MoRe, where are those doodles you mentioned?

[Caffeine_stream]

Woot I finished the exam, so now i can post more often!!
Ok I think i sent my little sketchbook back to my gf house by mistake so I wont be posting any of them. Thus i shall now only be posting new stuff.
I started another oil painting of my wonderful gf. I have just done the under painting in burnt seinna(as shown in the picture below). I have since started the main skin tone but the flesh tone i mixed up was crap so I'm gonna wait for what i have done to dry and then continue in a few days.
I should be posting again tomorrow or the next day with a Charcol drawing of an old man I'm gonna start this evening.
On a side note i'm wondering if i will be able to get the finish i'm looking for on the canvas i'm using. I think i probably should have sanded it. We shall see how it goes.

Just an Edit!! Gah! that photo looks grainy and crap

[FightingSeraph]

Greetings from Slidell, Louisiana, and that's some great stuff you have there.

[P]

Nice, paintings are great.
Thanks for leaving a trace in my SB.
Keep loading.
Cheers.

[pandahund]

Great paintings and sketches there. I love the bread
In the second painting however there seems to be a lot of pure black, which i got told is a rather bad thing.
Maybe use your own mixed red/blue/green "black". It's more vivid i think. Looking forward to see more of you

[Caffeine_stream]

Thanks for your message. I agree the background is too dark but I don't currently have a black at all so i use payne's grey but yep way too dark

[Caffeine_stream]

well true to my word I finished a charcoal drawing and tbh i'm not really happy with it at all. i Used a stick of charcoal for the whole thing and i just didn't feel like i could get the detail i wanted. Im sure if i spent a day or so on it i could clean it up, make it more presentable and work more on the detail. However i think rather than spend tomorrow doing that I might start an oil painting and do some figurative sketches. Love this smily

[EBrown]

Never be intimidated by the professional work of others, Caffeine. Keep in mind, they've been around alot longer than us newer members and have been honing their skills. I really like to sit down and look at the first entries in some of the monster sketchbooks and then look at the last page. You get to see how they've progressed, and it gives you hope that (with some hard work) you can teach yourself to really turn up the heat with your work.

I like your work so far.

[Caffeine_stream]

Thx. I do the same and have been very impressed with the obvious progress people make. My goal is to turn the sb into a monster one and post something up every day or two as thats the only way to really improve. Thats where this site really helps as it gives you extra motivation to do it!

[MM Howard]

Your still lifes are so awesome. I could never paint anything like that (maybe one day I will). Great work!

Love,
Dirty Crack Hoe lover

[Caffeine_stream]

Woot! ok I am posting 2 days in a row!! Ill have to try and keep this up.
First up i'm attempting to do some 30 sec pose-maniacs every day!!! Now i must say i'm terrible at these! Im ok at gestures when i can take my time but i fail at grasping the key to a pose quickly.
If anyone doesn't know what pose-maniacs are just type it into google and find out!! (in short its a flash based web app that pops up a pose for you to draw every 30 sec.

Now i'm not gonna post these things up every day, cuz that would bore everyone! but I shall do them every day and post them up when i feel i am making progress. This first set will be so i can look back give myself a pat on the back about how much i have improved, Hopefully.

Today i also started a self portrait oil painting, You can see the under painting below, that should be dry by tomorrow and ill post another update on its progress.

Don't worry i have not forgot about my previous oil painting, I just made such a hash of the initial flesh tone that i am having to wait for it to dry or at least become tacky, so i can paint over it.

As always comments and crits welcome

EDIT The pose maniacs were too ugly to look at in my sb lol so i removed them. but dont worry ill keep doing them every day. To make up for removing them Ill draw some real pose studies tomorrow. Woot!!!

[lilou]

wow your oilpaintigs really impress me cos this is something I still have no experiences in....
but I can comment on your drawings since I (at least think) can help you out with these... so looking at them I realised that they are sort of incomplete even vor sketches... the posestidies are great but you need to define them more, give the viewer more information aboout the form of the body in each pose. When doing such studies its not only about the pose you know, but also about the changes in the struckture of the body, how the muscles look in ech pose, how the perspective and foreshortening affect the look of different ares of the body... and so on...
and while doing these its never too early to work on line quality... and try to achive a strong but not messy linework... so thatz one can see that you are confident in what you're doing... this will make your drawings more belivable... of course this comes with time and practice only

however, I hope it helps you abit and nevermind if it doesn't work in the first trials...you see, I'm still trying to improve these things myself

bye
diana

[Caffeine_stream]

Thanks for the reply Diana, Yeh all that stuff you said is what i am hoping to do with the pose-maniacs. Tho Im not sure you read the blurb above those sketches as each one is done on a 30 seconds timer. Line quality is something i never know what to do about as i have rather shaky hands, so completing a line in one swoop is near impossible when quick sketching, Tho im able to master it more or less when taking my time.
anyway Im about to continue painting today but i just thought i would leave a rose for everyone.

[EBrown]

Hahha I thought you painted that rose...

I was gonna be like WOW! Caffeine turned it up a notch!

[Caffeine_stream]

hehe well i might throw a rose into my next still life just to see if i can't make you say that for real!

[Caffeine_stream]

Hey All
Im continuing with the portrait and im at the stage of defining the details and about to start meshing the colors together but any comments or critique I would be greatly thankful for!
I think I will continue to work on it a bit more tonight but tomorrow I may take a break and go back to some drawing!
Painting people is much harder than I expected